The director refused. Some days, he and Kaminski filmed as many as 55 setups, often with a handheld camera. And Neeson lost his favorite scene: a game of 21 between him and Goeth for Goeth’s maid, Helen Hirsch, that is only implied in the final cut. “Good night, Jew,” a middle-aged German businessman said to Kingsley’s friend. “By the time we were done, we had 195 pages,” says Zaillian, who originally penned the savage liquidation of the Jews in the Krakow ghetto — some of the film’s most brutal scenes — at only two pages. ”He didn’t think he was ready,” explains the film’s screenwriter, Steven Zaillian (Awakenings, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Horowitz’s story became the basis of a scene in which a family presses its diamonds into bread and then eats them during the liquidation of the ghetto. MCA president Sidney Sheinberg brought the novel to Spielberg’s attention. “He’s not speaking for himself, he’s speaking for all of us, what we might do someday.”, These days, Spielberg is spending time with his wife and their five kids (one each from their first marriages, two together, and one adopted), overseeing the production of three Amblin films as unlike Schindler’s List as possible — The Flintstones, The Little Rascals, and Casper, the Friendly Ghost — and weighing what to direct next. (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993). “He thought I had lost my mind,” recalls Spielberg. “It was a catch-what-you-can style of filming, which is just as hard to do as to plan out every shot.”, If the crowning achievement of Schindler’s List is its authenticity, credit may belong to the Schindler Jews who offered their own experiences to the filmmakers. Going back to making conventionally commercial pictures may prove difficult — while Schindler’s may have been liberating for Spielberg, it did require him to change. ”Schindler’s was on my guilty conscience,” says Spielberg. Still others, including Keneally, have been put off by the apocryphal climactic scene in which Schindler breaks down before making his getaway at the end of the war, crying for the Jews he could have saved if he had tried harder. Standing outside his Amblin Entertainment office at Universal Studios in jeans and sneakers, his salt-and-pepper beard matching long hair unfettered by his usual baseball cap, he greets Marvin Levy, Amblin’s marketing consultant, who offers glad tidings. A clash with the World Jewish Congress over Spielberg’s request to film inside Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn’t resolved until Spielberg proposed an ingenious compromise: A train would be backed into the camp and then be shot emerging into a mirror replica of Auschwitz’s interior that had been built just outside the actual camp. Back on the film, Spielberg read the script Scorsese had commissioned from Zaillian. The project was dropped and lay dormant for years before Spielberg decided to take it on. Other Auschwitz scenes played out against similarly haunting visions of hell. While Spielberg had tested Irish actor Liam Neeson at the start of the casting process and had spurned interest from Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson, it wasn’t until December 1992 that he firmed up his choice. As casting began, Spielberg first focused on the character of Itzhak Stern, a composite of several of the men who ran Schindler’s enamelware company while the boss pursued women and good relations with the Nazis. : 60; Hook: 125). It shows the lie that Oskar has been living.” Spielberg, however, dismisses the scene as “too Hollywood. “He’s the unsung hero.” The role went to Ben Kingsley, the Oscar winner for 1982’s Gandhi and the biggest name in a non- American, nonstar lineup. Constantly, every week, somebody would lose it.”. The scene is so important I’m going to throw it away.”, “He wanted it to not be perfect,” says Zaillian. 30 essential albums from the last 30 years. It is a tight shot, in color, of two candle flames. “A lot of it I just got from witnesses who came back: ‘Oh, this didn’t happen over here, this happened over there!'”. The National Society of Film Critics has just given Schindler’s Best Picture and Spielberg his first Best Director honor this year; other groups had chosen Campion. And Page pointed out the actual bluff from which Schindler, on horseback, watched the SS officers attack the ghetto. Kingsley lost his temper, screaming at the man until crew members hustled the offender off the premises. “I was relieved to find that survivors seemed to like it,” says Keneally. He kept putting it off.”, Spielberg wasn’t the only one who doubted his abilities. “The studio, of course, wanted me to spell everything out,” says Spielberg. “But really, I felt very strongly that the sequence had to be almost unwatchable.”, While some critics have faulted Schindler’s List for telling its tale from the Germans’ point of view, Spielberg knew how he wanted to present the story. Since the idea for the sequence came to Spielberg midway through filming, his production team scrambled to import the survivors. “He wouldn’t back down from truth or violence. I knew by the fourth setup that the scene was too entertaining and it would be cut. They represent “just a glint of color,” says Spielberg, “and a glimmer of hope.”, From the EW archives: How Steven Spielberg brought. To give the audience one last dose of realism, Spielberg decided to fly 128 surviving Schindlerjuden to Jerusalem to appear in the film’s final sequence, in which, following Jewish tradition, they place stones on Schindler’s grave. You just had to be prepared in not being prepared.” In fact, many of the film’s most important shots were mapped out at the last minute. South African actress Embeth Davidtz was handed the role of Helen Hirsch, the reluctant recipient of both Goeth’s and Schindler’s odd affections. After seeing Neeson on Broadway in Anna Christie, Spielberg went backstage with his wife, Kate Capshaw, and her mother. this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines. In one horrific scene, 300 naked actresses in shorn wigs crowded into an Auschwitz shower and were told to stare up at the menacing nozzles. “I didn’t tell the story from the survivors’ point of view,” says Zaillian, “but from Schindler’s. Finally, MCA’s Sheinberg gave Schindler’s List the green light on one condition: Spielberg had to film Jurassic Park first. An order is an order. As Ralph studies the cards, I’m looking at him with loathing. He gave the project to two other directors, Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese, before tackling it himself. Israeli actress Miri Fabian held a young girl close. (E.T. The cold could snap bones. And during their stay in Krakow, the filmmakers were welcomed with anti-Semitic symbols scrawled on local billboards. Only at the end do the images of candle fire regain their warm luster. Page, who accompanied the cast and crew, recalled masquerading as a recruit when he realized that the Germans were shooting every Jew they caught hiding during the Krakow ghetto annihilation: “I told them I had been ordered to clear the road. “He knew that once I had directed Schindler’s I wouldn’t be able to do Jurassic Park,” says Spielberg. ”There wasn’t even an attempt to alleviate the sadness. At 115 pages, it was strong but “too contained” and without enough Jewish faces, says Spielberg. Overcome by the performance, Spielberg’s mother-in-law met Neeson, who put a comforting arm around her. The tension was unbearable. Schindler’s List, with its 126 speaking parts and 30,000 extras, came in at 71 days — about the same as Jurassic Park — and $23 million, about a third of Jurassic‘s cost. He didn’t feel sorry for them. “I thought it would be a rich bookend, to start the film with a normal Shabbes service before the juggernaut against the Jews begins.” When the color fades out in the film’s opening moments, it gives way to a movie in which black-and-white tendrils of smoke convey unspeakable horror as they curl from the ovens into the stark sky. Everything that reminded me of another movie I cut out of Schindler’s List because I made a career of reverberating my past in my films, if not flagrantly, then subtly. But the minute I gave it to Marty, I missed it. On cue, Spielberg can rattle off the number of shooting days for all of his films. Screenwriter Zaillian, a novice director who had just completed his first film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, recalls the process with amazement. He did it because it was the right thing to do.”, Spielberg kept asking Zaillian to add more material and treated him to a field trip to Poland for inspiration. “Nobody complained about how we were suffering from the cold,” says cinematographer Kaminski, 34, who hadn’t returned to Poland since he left 12 years ago, “because our suffering was so little compared with what the actual prisoners were subjected to.”. ”Great! ”Give it to me,” he told Spielberg. “I got into a lot of arguments with people saying we need that big Hollywood catharsis where Schindler falls to his knees and says, ‘Yes, I know what I’m doing-now I must do it!’ and goes full steam ahead. “But I’ve never seen him look so happy.”. Australian director Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation) implored him not to do it, warning him that his big-studio gloss would be the film’s downfall. This article originally appeared in the January 21, 1994 issue of EW. Spielberg cast Israelis, many of them children of survivors, for the key Jewish speaking roles and used local Catholic Poles for the remaining Jewish faces. “Stern whispered in Schindler’s ear,” says Spielberg. “I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to go all the way into The Diary of Anne Frank, where we’re telling a detailed portraiture of a family in hiding. “My intuition led me to conventional choices, so I used a lot of mind over instinct.”, At least one instinct paid off: The first scene in Schindler’s List came to Spielberg toward the end of filming, when he was shooting a Sabbath prayer sequence at Brinnlitz. One member of the company recalls ”guard dogs going mad everywhere, huge burly guards with whips, chaos, blinding snow, a red haze coming from the chimney stacks.” And this was just the beginning. She had trouble breathing, then began hyperventilating, and was barely able to finish filming the sequence.

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