Despite the critical drubbing of his character-driven film The Color Purple and the box-office failure of Empire of the Sun, the director decided to put aside his bag of special effects tricks and elaborate camera shots to make the story of Oskar Schindler.
“I didn’t want a style similar to anything I’d done before. First of all I threw half my toolbox away. I canceled the crane. I tore out the dolly track. I simply tried to pull the events closer to the audience by reducing the artifice. Most of my films have been the stuff of imagination. For the first time, I felt free to abandon ‘form’ to tell the story of a life.”
To increase the sense of immediacy, he also employed something he had never used before, a hand-held camera.
To make Schindler’s List, Spielberg had to suppress a talent and proclivity that had made him the most successful film director in history:
“My problem is I have too much of a command of visual language. I know how to put a Cecil B. DeMille image on screen. I can do a Michael Curtiz [Casablanca]. If my mojo’s working I can put one tenth of a David Lean image on screen. But I’ve never really been able to put my image on screen, with the exception of E.T. perhaps. And certainly not until Schindler was I really able to not reference other filmmakers. I’m always referencing everybody. I didn’t do any of that on this movie.”
Schindler’s List was a dicey proposition, even with Spielberg behind it. And even though Sheinberg had been urging him to make the film for ten years, the studio hedged its bets by keeping the budget relatively low. Before Spielberg showed interest in the subject, the Holocaust was considered too harrowing and uncommercial for any studio to risk making. Even Spielberg was only able to squeeze a relatively paltry $23 million out of Universal, making Schindler’s List his cheapest film since 1974’s The Sugarland Express.
When the production was announced, more than one entertainment journalist cynically speculated that Spielberg had embarked on such an uncommercial project so he could at long last win an Oscar. Spielberg dismissed such cynicism out of hand. “There’s nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring Schindler’s List to the screen. I don’t give any credibility to other people’s cynicism,” he said.
The actual shooting of Schindler’s in Poland just outside the concentration camp at Auschwitz was hellish for many reasons. Not just the subject matter, which was emotionally enervating enough, but the logistics and the demands of the workaholic director’s schedule also made it a bone-wearying time.
While he was shooting scenes of depravity in Poland, on the weekends he flew to Paris to edit Jurassic Park. While Nazis were rampaging in a re-created concentration camp on the weekdays, weekends he had to contend with only slightly less destructive reptiles. Soon, the editing of the dinosaur epic spilled over into the weekday. The film had to be ready for a big summer rollout.
Spielberg received the footage of Jurassic Park via a satellite transmission which was beamed into a parabolic dish in the front yard of his rented house in Cracow, Poland. After putting in a twelve-hour day amid the horrors of the Holocaust, he would return home to Capshaw and the kids, who had accompanied him to Poland. Always a hands-on father, even in the middle of this back-breaking schedule, Spielberg religiously took time out to have dinner and read bedtime stories before putting the kids to bed. Then it was back to the movieola to edit the fanciful tale of creatures millions of years old brought back to life through the magic of DNA splicing—and a lot of special effects.
The filming of Schindler’s List was an emotional nightmare, a roller-coaster of ecstasy and grief. With all the verisimilitude that Hollywood is able to create with expert craftsmanship and cosmetics, Spielberg was personally reliving the Holocaust, or as his relatives long ago called it, “The Great Murder.”
When he first came to Auschwitz, he was surprised by his reaction to the setting of mass murder. Instead of crying, which he expected would be his reaction, “I was deeply pissed off. I felt so helpless that there was nothing I could do about it. And yet I thought, ‘well, there is something I can do about it. I can make Schindler’s List. It’s not going to bring anybody back alive, but it maybe will remind people that another Holocaust is a possibility.’ ”
The film crew was not welcomed with open arms. While the Polish government was delighted to have a big American film company bringing in hard currency, the director of the museum inside the former camp blocked Spielberg’s access to the site.
Jerzy Wroblewski, the director of the state museum at Auschwitz, didn’t object to the subject matter, even though it portrayed a Nazi in a heroic light. It was the nonideological disruption that any film crew causes. Wroblewski made international headlines when he said, “We were against it from the start. Thousands of extras bring devastation and destruction.”
Wroblewski had already dealt with several other Holocaustthemed productions, including the miniseries The Winds of War and the feature film Sophie’s Choice.
“We have experience of previous films,” Wroblewski said. “Extras drink on location and urinate in the barracks. I know the scenario. This film could be shot at any small railway station.”
To avoid further controversy, Spielberg simply—or maybe not so simply—re-created a portion of Auschwitz just outside the gates of the real camp.
Schindler’s List was an obvious attempt to rediscover his religious roots, but it was also his horrified comment on what was happening today. In particular, the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia angered him, and he saw it as the Holocaust redux. “It was a combination of things: my interest in the Holocaust, and my horror at the symptoms of the Shoah again happening in Bosnia. And again happening with Saddam Hussein’s attempt to eradicate the Kurdish race. We were racing over these moments in world history that were exactly like what happened in ’43. Schindler’s List is about human suffering. About the Jews, yes, but it’s also about AIDS, the Armenians, the Bosnians. It’s part of all of us.”
It took three days to shoot one of the more horrific scenes in the film. Stripped nude, extras were required to jog in a circle for the scene in which the Nazis decided which concentration camp inmates were fit enough to work and which were to be consigned to the gas chambers.
After the first day of shooting the scene, Spielberg tried to come up with excuses not to come back to the set the following day.
“I don’t look at ugly things very often,” he said later. “I’m a real strong avoider. Most of my movies aren’t real life. There were moments in The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun that had real life in them, but they’re not start to finish real life. And this time (on the Schindler set), I knew I had to look. Then when I started looking, I couldn’t stop.”
The consummate professional, he of course turned up on day two, but he was unable to look through the camera while the scene was being shot. Even the technician whose job it was to keep the camera in focus didn’t look through the lens.
Spielberg had dealt with carnivorous dinosaurs and omnivorous sharks, but those monsters were nothing compared to the real-life monsters who populated the Holocaust. After a while, studying the historical nightmare under the microscope of a camera began to take its toll on his emotional health.
“Every day shooting Schindler’s List was like waking up and going to hell. Twice in the production I called Robin Williams just to say, ‘Robin, I haven’t laughed in seven weeks. Help me here.’ And Robin would do twenty minutes on the telephone.”
Amazingly, despite this emotional pain, Spielberg felt strangely refreshed by his suffering. “This has been the best experience I’ve had making a movie. I feel more connected with the material than I’ve ever felt before.”
Perhaps this connectedness allowed him to give up a certain kind of control. For certain crowd scenes in Schindler’s List, he would simply tell hundreds of extras to mill about in the street and improvise their actions. Then he would send the stars into the middle of this morass and shoot them improvising lines and behavior. This from a man who used to in the wo
rds of Teri Garr treat his actors like “puppets.”
Spielberg may have told his extras to, in effect, do their own thing because of a creepy realization he had in the middle of giving these bit players more explicit directions. Because he did not speak the language of these extras, who were mostly recruited from nearby Polish towns, he at first directed them with gestures. Suddenly, he felt like the notorious Dr. Mengele, who similarly directed arriving inmates at Auschwitz to the right or left, one way meaning life, the other immediate gassing. Spielberg said of the awful realization, “I felt like a Nazi.”
The actors did not have the luxury of goofing around between takes. On other sets with less serious subject matters, practical jokes and fraternity-level pranks are perpetuated by the most serious actors. Filming right outside the actual location of the death of three million Jews, none of the cast or crew felt like indulging in panty raids or whoopee cushions.
Ben Kingsley, who played Schindler’s alter ego and camp inmate Itzhak Stern, said simply, “The ghosts were on the set every day in their millions.” Spielberg underlined the mood: “There was no break in the tension. Nobody felt there was any room for levity. I didn’t expect so much sadness every day.”
Not all scenes were so emotionally draining. Schindler’s List is at its heart a story of optimism, fueled by the belief that even the most unlikely of people can rise to the occasion. One scene particularly lightened the director’s emotional burden. Toward the end of the film, Schindlerjuden extract gold from their teeth to make a ring for their benefactor. The real survivors were so grateful, in fact, that they supported Schindler financially after the war until his death in 1974. They used the clever formula of “one day’s pay per year” to keep afloat Schindler, who engaged in one business disaster after another, including raising nutria (a minklike animal) to make apparel.
Grateful Holocaust survivors gave Spielberg a replica of the ring they had made for Schindler. Inscribed on the inside was, “You save one life, you save the world.” Spielberg made copies of the ring and gave them to Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman at Universal.
Schindler’s List was not Spielberg’s first collision with Nazism, but in the first and third installment of the Indiana Jones saga, the Nazis were cardboard villains. With Schindler’s List, the realism of atrocities became too much, and the director found himself feeling hostility toward the German actors whenever they got into Nazi uniforms.
He recalled his hostility finally evaporating when the Germans “all showed up for a seder and put on yarmulkes, read from the Haggadas, the seder text, and the Israeli actors moved right next to them and began explaining it to them. Race and culture were just left behind.”
In counterpoint to that scene of reconciliation, there was an ugly incident off the set in a hotel bar in the city. A German businessman approached one of the actors, an Israeli, who was having a drink with Ben Kingsley, who co-starred in the film as Schindler’s assistant and conscience. The executive asked the Israeli if he were a Jew, and when the actor said he was, the executive drew his finger across his neck and pulled an imaginary noose above his head, saying, “Hitler should have finished the job.” The Israeli actor had to stop Kingsley from slugging the man.
Before Schindler’s List was released to universal acclaim and the lion’s share of Oscars, Spielberg worried about the reaction to a film that made a hero out of a Nazi.
He predicted inaccurately, “It will probably get the same resentment Das Boot got when it came out. People said, ‘How can you root for these Nazis?’ Well, they weren’t Nazis, they were just sailors.
“If anybody holds a press conference condemning the project, we’ll hold a press conference of our own and trot out some of the survivors who were saved by Schindler or their children.” In fact, Spielberg preempted the need for a press conference by featuring the survivors in the color epilogue to the film.
Oskar Schindler, who died in 1974, had asked in his will to be buried in Jerusalem. The epilogue takes place at his grave in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in the Israeli capital. In the epilogue, 128 Schindlerjuden, Jews whom the Nazi saved from extermination, were flown in from around the world to pay homage at his gravesite. Schindler’s wife Emilie also attended the memorial ceremony.
Richard and Lola Krumholtz were two Schindlerjuden who were invited by Spielberg to appear in the film’s epilogue. During a break in shooting, the husband and wife, who now reside in Los Angeles, described two instances in which Schindler was directly responsible for saving their lives. During the day the Krumholtzes had worked twelve-hour shifts in Schindler’s enamelware factory for most of the war. At night, they returned to their cramped apartment in the Cracow ghetto. One day Schindler showed up on the factory floor and told the Krumholtzes that under no circumstances were they to return to their apartment. He offered no explanation, but they heeded his advice and slept overnight on the factory floor. The following day they found out the reason for Schindler’s strange order. During the night, all their neighbors had been rounded up and put on cattle cars bound for the death camps.
On another occasion, Schindler took their identity papers and imprinted an official looking stamp on them. The Krumholtzes believe the bogus stamp saved them from deportation. Before the Academy Awards ceremony, Lola told the Los Angeles Times that Schindler’s List deserved the Oscar for best picture. Her husband went his wife one better.
“This picture should be nominated in the documentary category,” Richard Krumholtz said. “That’s how real it seemed to me.”
Such realism was Spielberg’s goal. “A film like this could be studied through a microscope, and it’s going to be scrutinized by everybody from Talmudic scholars to Ted Koppel. The film has to be accurate,” he said. “It cannot in the least come across as entertainment. And it’s very hard when you’re making a movie not to violate one or all of those self-imposed rules. That’s why the film has been in development since the early ’80s.”
The wait was worth it.
The New Yorker hailed it as the “finest fiction film ever made about the century’s greatest evil.”
The New Republic’s acerbic Stanley Kauffman, who makes Pauline Kael look like Glinda the Good Witch, admitted he had seen the film several times. The first time “I had thought it superbly made, but [the second time it] seemed even more astonishingly made.”
Almost as an antidote to this ecstasy, the New Republic three weeks later called in its Washington correspondent, Leon Wieseltier, to take a contrary view. Wieseltier must have seen a different film than the rest of us did because he condemned Schindler’s List for being “glib.” Glib! He also nitpicked that the Jews in the Cracow ghetto spoke Hebrew with Israeli accents. (Does Mr. Wieseltier really know what a Polish Jew, circa 1943, sounded like?)
New York magazine’s David Denby said after a screening, “I didn’t think I could be affected this way anymore.”
A handful of editorial pages complained that Spielberg had used all his trademark talents to make Schindler’s List entertaining, in effect turning the Holocaust into one big roller-coaster of thrills and chills (and three million deaths). But the Washington Post’s Julie Salamon felt the film finally showed the real talent underneath the master entertainer: “Schindler’s List only emphasizes what has always been Mr. Spielberg’s real genius: His poetic visual imagination, his intelligence and the sense of humanity that so profoundly informed his earlier films.”
After a private screening of the film, Sid Sheinberg wept and said, “It was a landmark. It will be remembered when Jurassic Park is long forgotten.” Spielberg couldn’t bear to watch the film with his mother, who sobbed throughout a screening.
Schindler’s List ended up grossing $96 million. Not a large sum by Spielberg and Jurassic Park standards, but it was an amazing figure considering the basic uncommerciality of the subject matter.
Spielberg didn’t take a dime for making Schindler’s List (except for the Director’s Guild minimum which is mandated by union rules).
His friendship with the late chairman of Time-Warner, Steve Ross, had given him a new outlook on wealth and what you could do with it beside spend or save it.
“After I met Steve, I went from being a miser to a philanthropist because I knew him, because that’s what he showed me to do. I was just never spending my money. I gave nothing to causes that were important to me. And when I met Steve, I just observed the pleasure that he drew from his own private philanthropy. And it was total pleasure. And it was private, anonymous giving. So most everything I do is anonymous. It’s one of the things Steve Ross opened my heart to,” he said fondly.
He broke his rule of anonymity when he set up two very public foundations with his take of the proceeds from Schindler’s List. Part of his profits from Schindler’s List went to a foundation named in honor of Oskar Schindler, the Righteous Persons Foundation, which will be devoted to the study of gentiles who helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Spielberg stole Margery Tabankin away from the Barbra Streisand Foundation to serve as his foundation’s executive director.
The other was also a new organization. On September 30, 1994, Spielberg announced the founding of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to keep alive the memory of the six million Jews and others who died in the Holocaust. (Shoah is the Hebrew name for the Holocaust.) The foundation will record the memories of camp survivors.
Its daunting task: to record 50,000 first-hand accounts of the Holocaust. There wasn’t a minute to lose. Survivors are a vanishing breed, and Spielberg, the archivist, wanted to preserve their experiences before it was too late.
“The majority of Holocaust survivors are in their seventies and eighties,” Spielberg said when he announced the creation of the foundation. “The window for capturing their testimonies is closing fast. This archive will preserve history as told by the people who lived it and lived through it. It is essential that we see their faces, hear their voices and understand that the horrendous events of the Holocaust happened to people and were committed by people. Racial, ethnic and cultural intolerance, sadly, are current events. This project stands as a monument to remembering the past, and to always examining our present.”
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