Steven Spielberg (85 page)

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of
Schindler’s
List
is how acutely Spielberg penetrates the twisted psyche of Goeth, even to the point of unearthing some deeply buried humanity. Rather than being content to portray Goeth as a one-dimensional monster, Spielberg even more disturbingly brings out the Nazi’s perverse mixture of attraction and sadism toward his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). Goeth cannot help feeling drawn to this beautiful woman, telling her he “would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would that be like, I wonder? I mean, what would be wrong with that? I realize that you’re not a person in the strictest
sense of the word.” His inability to cope with forbidden feelings of tenderness is what leads him to beat her as a “Jewish bitch.” Little in Spielberg’s previous work anticipated such an insight into the nature of fascism, although his intimate lifelong acquaintance with the nature of terror no doubt helped him understand the personality of a psychopathic sadist such as Goeth.

In Schindler’s risky double-dealing with Nazis on behalf of Jews, Spielberg could see a provocative parallel with his own need to assimilate into WASP society. He too learned to disguise his true feelings in order to manipulate and outwit those who otherwise would be hostile to him and his people. Spielberg played that game with a keen sense of showmanship, or, as Schindler calls it, “The Presentation.” A case in point was Spielberg’s relationship with the anti-Semitic bully he cast in one of his boyhood movies. As Spielberg told the
Jerusalem
Post,
the bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator…. Schindler consorted with the enemy and he got what he wanted. And I found that there was a real relationship.”

Spielberg’s decision to put his reputation as a filmmaker on the line to bear witness to the Holocaust took courage. He knew he was risking ridicule and, worse, personal attack for venturing so far from his public image, and he worried that his image might prejudice people’s reactions to the movie. His own courage must have seemed to him a distant echo of the courage Schindler displayed in putting his life and fortune at risk for the sake of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Still, there was enough similarity in those moral decisions to give Spielberg a shared sense of mission with his protagonist. Even though he felt “more akin to the Ben Kingsley character”—Schindler’s Jewish accountant and conscience, Itzhak Stern—Spielberg said, “I aspire to be Oskar Schindler.”

S
CHINDLER’S
List
contains two dedications. The first reads: “In memory of the more than six million Jews murdered.” The second, less noticed because it comes at the conclusion of the end-title sequence, reads: “For Steve Ross.”

While some found it incongruous for a film on the Holocaust to be dedicated to the late Time Warner chairman (who died shortly before it began filming), Spielberg saw Ross as an inspiration for the film’s characterization of Schindler. To help Irish actor Liam Neeson capture Schindler’s panache, Spielberg showed Neeson his home movies of the handsome, gregarious Ross, whose personality was a similarly intricate texture of roguish business practices interwoven with lavish generosity. “I always told Steve that if he was fifteen years younger, I’d cast him as Schindler,” Spielberg said. “… 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.” Inspired by the
“pleasure that [Ross] drew from his own private philanthropy,” Spielberg emulated his mentor: “I have my name on a couple of buildings, because in a way that’s a fund-raiser. But eighty percent of what I do is anonymous. And I get so much pleasure from that—it’s one of the things that Steve Ross opened my heart to.”

It was a sign of Spielberg’s highly sentimental view of Ross that he thought of him as akin to George Bailey, the altruistic building-and-loan officer played by James Stewart in Ross’s favorite film, Frank Capra’s
It’s
a
Wonder
ful
Life.
When Ross was dying of cancer, Spielberg made a short film based on the Capra classic, showing him the world as it would have been if he had never lived. “I dreamt this up when we were in Hawaii, filming
Jurassic
Park,
”
Spielberg said. “We had [Warner Bros, executives] Bob Daly and Terry Semel as hobos, looking for food in trashcans. Clint Eastwood, instead of being the legend, was a Stuntman, an extra. ([Producer] Joel Silver shoots him—and actually kills him.) Quincy [Jones] was Clarence, the angel. Chevy Chase was God. I was in a mental institution, totally enclosed in a straitjacket, just my fingers free. I was putting together in shaving foam the face of E.T. and not quite knowing what I was trying to express. I said, ‘He came to me … he came to me … he was a six-foot-three E.T.!’”

The unsentimentalized truth about Ross, according to biographer Connie Bruck, was that “his extraordinary generosity was funded to a great degree by the company; his loyalty, in many cases, endured as long as people were useful to him; and—driven by a compulsion to win—he tended to put his own interest ahead of others, in situations large and small. Not only did Ross not sacrifice himself for the good of others, as did his putative soulmate, George Bailey, but the precise converse was true.”

Spielberg’s hero-worship blinded him to the mogul’s less attractive qualities and even called his own judgment into question. What did it say about Spielberg that he chose such a dubious character as a role model? The most charitable way to look at it is that he emulated what he found good about Steve Ross and forgave the rest. In much the same way, Spielberg was able to see Oskar Schindler’s extraordinary generosity as redemptive of his many failings and vices. Indeed, it can be argued that only such a man could have succeeded in manipulating his fellow Nazis for such benign purposes. “We had to accept Schindler as he was,” explained one of the
Schindlerjuden,
Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Bejski. “Because if he wouldn’t be like he was, nobody else of the normal kind of thinking was ready to do what he has done.”

D
URIN
G
the hectic three months of production on
Schindler’s
List
in the winter and spring of 1993, Spielberg, in the words of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, “worked from his heart.” Keeping his preplanning to the minimum, often not knowing how he would film a scene until he arrived on that day’s location in Poland, Spielberg plunged into the experience with a
controlled emotional frenzy that helped give the film its startling sense of immediacy. All his gifts as an entertainer and technician were put in the service of giving the audience the feeling of being
inside
the
event.

Schindler’s
List
gains immeasurably from being shot largely on actual locations, including the streets of Kraków, Schindler’s factory and apartment building, the city’s SS headquarters and prison, and the gate and railroad tracks of Auschwitz (the World Jewish Congress, fearing “a Hollywood Holocaust,” refused to let Spielberg film inside the gate). Because of postwar changes at the site, the Plaszów camp had to be reconstructed by production designer Allan Starski in an open pit adjacent to the original location. The awareness that the events were being filmed at the places where they actually occurred intensified the solemn atmosphere of memorialization. When he first traveled to Poland to scout locations, Spielberg found that “to touch history, to put my hand on 600-year-old masonry, and to step back from it and look down at my feet and know that I was standing where, as a Jew, I couldn’t have stood fifty years ago, was a profound moment for me in my life.”

Spielberg’s guiding principle was to keep himself open to the raw, unmediated emotion that each scene, each setting, each group of characters provoked in him. It was not the first time he worked without the safety net of storyboards, but this time there was a greater emotional imperative. He wanted this story, in a sense, to tell itself. Approaching it with a profound humility, he functioned more like a “reporter” than like a director: “I can’t tell you the shots I did on
Schindler’s
List
or why I put the camera in a certain place. I re-created these events, and then I experienced them as any witness or victim would have. It wasn’t like a movie.” Spielberg’s decision to forego the conscious process of aesthetic stylization allowed him to tap freely into the mixture of individual and collective emotions that characterizes the subconscious. Accepting the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Picture Award in January 1994, Spielberg said, “After getting back from the location—from which none of us has recovered—I looked through production stills taken by David James. When I came across any still that showed the crew behind the camera, I had no recollection of those images. I knew we were making a movie and that there was a camera, but I had little recognition of the moviemaking experience.”

“We want people to see this film in fifteen years and not have a sense of when it was made,” Kaminski said. Spielberg hired the young Polish émigré cinematographer both because of his fluency in that country’s language and because of his experience in working at breakneck speed on low-budget features and TV movies, including
Class
of
’61,
Amblin’s 1993 TV movie pilot for an unsold series about the American Civil War. Kaminski approached
Schindler
“as if I had to photograph it fifty years ago, with no lights, no dolly, no tripod. How would I do it? Naturally, a lot of it would be handheld, and a lot of it would be set on the ground where the camera was not level…. It was simply more real to have certain imperfections in the camera
movement, or soft images. All those elements will add to the emotional side of the movie.”

Handheld cameras, used for about 40 percent of the film, give the crowd scenes a raw, documentary feeling, with quick, spontaneous panning shots and abrupt, jarring crowd movements viscerally imparting an omnipresent sensation of terror and disorientation. What Spielberg called the “passionate urgency” of the filming was dictated in part by the relatively modest budget, which allowed only seventy-two shooting days. “Most scenes we’re shooting in two or three takes, and we’re working real fast,” Spielberg told a visiting reporter. “I think that gives the movie a spontaneity, an edge, and it also serves the subject.” His decision to make the film in black-and-white (aside from a few moments of stylized poetic emphasis and the present-day epilogue) was a crucial factor in giving it a documentary feeling. Resisting Universal chairman Tom Pollock’s entreaties to shoot the film on color negative stock so a color version could be released for the home-video market, Spielberg felt black-and-white was essential because most documentary footage of the Holocaust is monochromatic and “because I don’t want, accidentally or subconsciously, to beautify events”; he may have been influenced in that decision by the criticism of his lushly romantic visual style in
The
Color
Purple.

Kaminski accurately described the complex visual texture of
Schindler’s
List
as “a mixture of German Expressionism and Italian Neorealism,” yet Spielberg spoke of his visual strategy in terms of denial. Stylistically, he “got rid of the crane, got rid of the Steadicam, got rid of the zoom lenses, got rid of everything that for me might be considered a safety net.”

The eloquent simplicity and directness of Spielberg’s visual storytelling in
Schindler’s
List
shows a consummate mastery of the filmmaking craft. Because the emotional effect is so overwhelming, one hardly notices the subtle use of moving camera and the terrifying lighting effects that help communicate the feelings of a group of Jewish women fearing they are about to be gassed in a shower room at Auschwitz. When a crowd of mothers runs hysterically after the trucks bearing their unsuspecting children to Auschwitz, the viewer does not consciously register that the camera is shooting from the point of view of the children racing away from their mothers’ outstretched arms. The liquidation of the ghetto, an astonishing sixteen-minute sequence of boldly contrasting lighting effects, shock cuts, and maze-like choreography of Nazis hunting down their victims, is perhaps the greatest directorial
tour
de force
of Spielberg’s career to date. But it unfolds with the dizzying immediacy of a living nightmare, all played against a small but crucially important focus: the anguished close-ups of Schindler, on horseback, watching helplessly from a nearby hillside. Schindler’s expressions provide the dramatic turning point of the story, demarcating his change from exploiter of “his” Jews to their protector.

Ben Kingsley has provided a vivid account of the filming of the ghetto liquidation: “Once they started to run in with the handheld cameras and
have the tracking cameras as well, the takes were very long and the shock built up in us. Horror after horror after horror—it went on so long before you heard the Klaxon for ‘Cut.’ Bodies, blood, the smell of explosives in the air, and people still running and being told to stop by an AD [assistant director]—but it was like an echo of the SS. Steven wanted to get the truth into the camera, and every time he did I saw he got a tremendous kick. It was as if he was saying, ‘Let them see
that.
Let them look at
that.
’
”

What Spielberg found himself feeling during the making of
Schindler’s
List
often left him surprised and shaken. One of his most difficult experiences was filming the sequence of the Health
Aktion,
in which aging Jews are forced to run naked in circles before Nazi doctors making a selection for Auschwitz. “It was hard on me to be there,” said the director. “I couldn’t look at it, I had to turn my eyes away, I couldn’t watch…. None of us looked. I said to the guy pulling the focus on a very difficult shot, ‘Do you think you got that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t looking.’”