It’s just weeks before the opening of his $56 million “Jurassic Park,” loaded with dinosaurs and special effects. With “Schindler’s List,” the true story of a German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust, Spielberg appears determined to prove that he can make a movie that will defy all expectations. He is shooting a three-hour, black-and-white drama based on Thomas Keneally’s best-selling novel about the industrialist, and he is consciously pushing for a cinema verite feel: nothing “slick or glitzy,” no fancy camera work.
In and around Cracow, Poland, Spielberg is making maximum use of original sites such as a narrow street in the city’s old Jewish quarter and the entrance to Schindler’s factory. When protests by Jewish organizations forced him to abandon plans to shoot a sequence inside Auschwitz, he built his set outside the camp gate. Spielberg insists on such immediacy because he views this as a singular project. “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.”
The connection is with the stories he has heard since childhood of relatives who died in the Holocaust, with the film allowing him to chronicle the horrors of that period. But by focusing on Oskar Schindler, he also explores more complex human behavior. “He was not a classic saint,” says Neeson, who plays the businessman. An aspiring Nazi war profiteer who enjoyed women and booze, Schindler was an unlikely savior. He employed Jews in an enamelware factory that he had taken over in Cracow, providing them with humane conditions, audaciously bribing and cajoling those eager to consign his workers to the death camps, even winning the release of some already sent to Auschwitz.
Spielberg claims that he has no illusions that the $23 million movie, which opens in December, will recoup its investment. Citing its length and his insistence on black and white to remain true to the spirit of documentaries and stills from the period, he laughs: “I’m stacking the deck against this one.” Universal studio officials unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to shoot in color and then make a black-and-white print, allowing possible reconsiderationand, particularly, the opportunity to sell it later to TV in color. His decision to shoot in black-and-white negative was to ensure “a point of no return.” Profits, he insists, are not anyone’s motives on this project: “Perhaps indecently, I’m making this film for myself, for the survivors, for my family–and for people who should understand the meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’.”
Spielberg and the international cast and crew have taken to one another. “You know that you’re with a man who is totally secure in his craft and who, in his heart of hearts, believes that a good actor can do anything,” says Ben Kingsley, who plays Schindler’s Jewish accountant. Despite initial worries that the local crew members might not be able to adjust to Spielberg’s notoriously demanding style and pace, shooting is expected to wind up ahead of schedule. “This is bringing up the technical level of Polish crews,” notes production designer Allan Starski. Costume designer Anna Biedrzycka-Sheppard, who has the unenviable task of outfitting not just the stars but 30,000 extras, agrees: “The biggest challenge is to keep up with him. He shoots with such speed and proficiency that everything must be perfect.”
The Polish setting is part of that perfection. “The ground is saturated with blood,” says Israeli actor Jonathan Sagall. “It’s like walking on tombstones.” While the cast treats most daily work with relative professional detachment, Israeli actress Adi Nitzan was taken aback when she visited the Majdanek concentration camp and saw photographs of prisoners who perished there. “It was me,” she says. “They looked just like me in the rushes.”
Those of “Schindler’s Jews” who have taken advantage of Spielberg’s open-door policy for them and visited the set have found themselves ill prepared to confront the authenticity of the re-creation of their wartime traumas. “I was so moved, so shaken,” says Bronislawa Karakulska, who watched herself portrayed as an 11-year-old offering a birthday cake to Schindler. He responded by kissing her on both cheeks, a reckless act in those times. A beautician who still lives in Cracow, Karakulska asserts: “This film will grab everyone who survived this period by the heart.”
However it does with the public, Spielberg has a changed outlook “I’m coming away from this experience saying, ‘Oh my God, all these years and look what I’ve been missing’,” says the director of four of the top-10 box-office champs, including “E.T.” and “Jaws.” “I may never go back to the bicycle across the moon for a couple of years.” By tackling Schindler’s extraordinary story with back-to-basics techniques, Spielberg may have discovered a new kind of director in himself.
