Random Behind-The-Scenes Stories From 'Schindler's List' (13 items)

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  (#13) Liam Neeson Complained That Spielberg Treated Him Like A ‘Puppet’ On-Set

  Liam Neeson initially had difficulty with Spielberg's directing style, feeling that it was too controlling. The issue first came up when Spielberg directed him in the early nightclub scene, where we meet Schindler smoking a cigarette and watching several German officers at another table. Neeson recounted the problem in the 2017 documentary Spielberg:

  I was a smoker at the time. Steven was not a smoker. But in the closeups, he started to tell me how to smoke. [...] "Take a drag, let the smoke curl up your face. Do it again. Okay, now take your hand away very, very slowly." So he was basically telling me how to breathe.

  Afterward, Neeson complained to costar Ben Kingsley that "[i]f every scene's going to be like that, I'm a f***ing puppet. [...] I don't want to be a puppet; I'm 41 years of age." Kingsley replied that "a great conductor needs a good soloist" and advised Neeson to lean into Spielberg's direction. Things went more smoothly after that.
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  (#9) Robin Williams

  • Actor

  Schindler's List was already going to be a difficult shoot, between the frigid locations in Poland, the lean budget, and the tight schedule. But the subject matter compounded this difficulty. Spielberg found the work emotionally draining, not only because of the intense and violent nature of the scenes, but because the process was forcing him to come to terms with his own Jewish heritage. He was intensely aware that, had he been in this location 50 years earlier, he would have suffered in the same way as the film's characters.

  "Now I go to Poland and I get hit in the face with my personal life," he recalled. "My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. And Jewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time. I never cry on sets making films... Every single day was like waking up and going to hell, really. There were no jokes on the set. No funny outtakes to show at the wrap party."

  Each day's shooting left Spielberg exhausted emotionally as well as physically. To help keep his spirits up, his friend Robin Williams (who had recently starred in the Spielberg-directed Hook) scheduled a weekly phone call with the director. Spielberg said:

  Robin knew what I was going through, and once a week, Robin would call me on schedule and he would do 15 minutes of standup on the phone. I would laugh hysterically, because I had to release so much.

  "He would never say goodbye," Spielberg recalled. "[H]e would always just hang up on the biggest laugh he got from me. Mic drop."

  Spielberg also watched episodes of Seinfeld to lighten his mood on off-hours. Jerry Seinfeld found out about this, and worked a Schindler's List reference into the fifth-season episode "The Raincoats."
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  (#2) The Scene Where Goeth’s Gun Jams While He Tries To Shoot Levertov Really Happened

  Perhaps the most unbelievable scene in Schindler's List is the one in which Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) attempts to shoot Rabbi Rav Levertov (Ezra Dagan) after having deemed him unsuitable to continue making hinges in the factory because the pile of completed hinges was too small. He tries two different pistols, each of which misfires, and finally gives up in frustration.

  Anyone could be forgiven for supposing this scene was a screenwriter's concoction, but in fact, it actually happened. Levertov recounted the story to Yanus Turkov in 1957:

  Apparently not satisfied with the Rabbi’s daily production, [Goeth] took him by the collar and threw him to the small steps which led to the second room of the barracks. Then, he quite calmly took out a revolver from his pocket, put the barrel to the Rabbi’s head and pulled the trigger. The revolver got stuck and did not fire.

  He pulled the trigger again and again, and when the revolver still refused to fire, he put it back in his pocket and from a second pocket he took out a small revolver, with a pearl design, an automatic, put it to the Rabbi’s head and pulled the trigger. Again, this time, the revolver did not fire. To this scene all the workers from the barracks were onlookers, standing without breathing, in dreadful fright.

  In the actual event, Levertov's excuse about shoveling coal was a lie: he thought of it at the last minute to save his life after Goeth's guns had jammed and before the commandant could find one that worked.
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  (#12) Jurassic Park

  • Film (1993)

  The year 1993 was likely the pinnacle of Spielberg's long career; it saw the releases of both the box-office behemoth Jurassic Park and the Oscar-winning Schindler's List.

  Spielberg - who had attempted to make "serious" films before but had retreated to more commercial fare after the lukewarm reception of 1987's Empire of the Sun - decided to finally make Schindler's List after reading the most recent of many screenplay drafts by writer Steven Zaillian.

  Spielberg's longtime mentor, Universal Studios chief Sidney Sheinberg, agreed to greenlight the film, with one condition: Spielberg had to film Jurassic Park first. According to Spielberg, the reason for this was quite simple: "He knew that once I had directed Schindler I wouldn’t be able to do Jurassic Park."
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  (#5) Spielberg Took No Salary For Making The Movie

  At the time, making a black-and-white film about the Holocaust wasn't seen as a particularly commercial idea, so the budget for Schindler's List was a relatively lean $22 million. (By contrast, Spielberg's other picture for that year, Jurassic Park, was budgeted at $60 million.)

  Adding to the leanness of the Schindler budget was Spielberg's decision not to take a salary for directing the movie. He felt that payment for telling such a story would amount to "blood money":

  Let's call it what it is. I didn't take a single dollar from the profits I received from Schindler's List because I did consider it blood money. When I first decided to make Schindler's List I said, if this movie makes any profit, it can't go to me or my family, it has to go out into the world...
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  (#10) A Holocaust Survivor Repeatedly Urged Spielberg To Make The Movie, Promising Him ‘An Oscar For Oskar’

  The path to Schindler's List began with Holocaust survivor Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, who was #173 on the eponymous list. Determined to cajole anyone he could into telling Oskar Schindler's story to the wider world, Pfefferberg encountered writer Thomas Keneally in Beverly Hills in 1980 and pitched the idea to him. Pfefferberg provided Keneally with documents, and opened the way for him to interview other "Schindler Jews." The result was Keneally's 1982 novelization of Schindler's life, originally titled Schindler's Ark.

  Later, Pfefferberg was equally insistent that the story should be a movie. He urged Spielberg to make the film, promising "an Oscar for Oskar." The film spent almost a decade in development, going through multiple rewrites and bouncing among directors, but when Spielberg made it, he received two Academy Awards (one for Best Director and one for Best Picture), proving Pfefferberg right.

  Although Pfefferberg and Keneally began their work in the 80s, the living legacy of Schindler's actions has lasted much longer. In April 2022, Mimi Reinhardt, the secretary who actually compiled the eponymous list (the film has Ben Kingsley's character Itzhak Stern doing it), passed away aged 107.

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