Nazis! I hate those guys.
Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade
THROUGHOUT THE early weeks of 1992, it became increasingly obvious to everyone that Steve Ross was dying. He’d flown back from Paris in the autumn of 1991 to attend Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s wedding in the Hamptons, but in October, after closing a huge new deal with Toshiba, back pain forced him into bed. A prostate tumour for which he’d been intermittently treated in secret had spread to the spine. Doctors started intensive chemotherapy, but without much hope. Spielberg was distraught. Another father was deserting him, and he was again powerless. Appointing himself unofficial jester, he dedicated himself to lightening Ross’s last months. Schindler’s List went onto the back burner again, and he took refuge in the reassuring technical challenges of Jurassic Park.
Michael Crichton had delivered a script which satisfied neither himself nor Spielberg. The author admitted he was tired of the story. Since, however, he knew better than anyone how to balance its factual detail against the needs of narrative, they agreed on a first draft which special-effects technicians could use in visualising dinosaurs and settings. In October 1991, on the set of Hook, Kathleen Kennedy, who would be producing Jurassic Park, asked Dustin Hoffman’s scriptwriter Malta Scotch Marmo if she would be interested in rewriting Crichton’s screenplay. By March 1992, she’d delivered her version. It removed Crichton’s mouthpiece, the ‘chaotician’ Ian Malcolm, and transferred his anti-biotechnology dialogue to the palaeontologist Alan Grant, whom Scotch Marmo made a crusader against the commercialisation of science. By inserting scenes of plants overgrowing the park buildings and insinuating themselves into its mechanisms, she sought also to emphasise the book’s message that man was powerless to contain nature. Spielberg didn’t like this version either, and the project passed to David Koepp, who had been co-writing Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her, a fantasy about cosmetic surgery gone mad.
Koepp’s script for Jurassic Park, co-credited with Crichton, but written, Koepp insists, without his reading either Crichton’s or Scotch Marmo’s, became the one to be filmed. As usual, however, the real author was Spielberg. Like the sculptor who explained that, to turn a block of stone into a nymph, one merely cut away all the parts that didn’t look nymph-like, a process of reduction which he micro-managed had revealed the film within Crichton’s novel. British fantasy author Kim Newman itemised its elements, and their parallels in Spielberg’s other work:
The paring-down of a monster best-seller into a suspense machine (Jaws); the tackling of a popular-science childhood sense of wonder perennial with state-of-the-art effects that re-imagine 1950s B-science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind); the all-action jungle adventure littered with incredible perils and gruesome deaths (Raiders of the Lost Ark); and big-eyed creatures who range from beatifically benevolent to toothily murderous (Gremlins, E.T.).
Ironically, the man who so tersely rejected the politique des auteurs two decades before had become its most successful exemplar.
Spielberg spent most weekends during the spring of 1992 with Ross in the Hamptons, reading scripts in the garden while the entrepreneur ran his business by phone, playing the power game with his usual vigour. A supporter of Bill Clinton, Ross even politicised the neutral Spielberg, who had once described himself as ‘a Democrat with a Republican lining… liberal about a lot of things but… bullish about America’. Under Ross’s influence, he become an active Democrat and Clinton enthusiast. The following year, Clinton would stay with the Spielbergs on visits to Los Angeles, and Hillary would jog on the beach with Kate. The world premiere of Jurassic Park took place in Washington DC, a benefit for Hillary’s favourite charity, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the President contributed a laudatory quote to a ‘Special Spielberg Issue’ of the Hollywood Reporter published on 10 March 1994.
When chemotherapy left Ross particularly low, Spielberg raked his memory for amusing incidents from their shared yacht cruises and fishing trips. Ross never lost his sense of humour. Once, when Spielberg and Courtney visited him in the Southampton hospital, Ross mentioned a report of people being poisoned by Louisiana oysters, and wondered where his lunchtime shellfish had come from, Long Island or Louisiana. Spielberg and Courtney were horrified when a doctor burst in, announcing that sixty patients were down with oyster poisoning. They were taken in until Ross started laughing.
Ross’s impending death concentrated Spielberg’s mind on his own future, both artistic and financial. The Hollywood he’d known when he entered the business at the end of the sixties had changed out of all recognition. MGM no longer existed. Sony Columbia was lurching from disaster to disaster under the erratic management of Guber and Peters. Disney was in its usual state of confusion, in part because of frequent clashes between Michael Eisner and the ambitious Jeffrey Katzenberg. Tom Pollock had not proved an assertive head of Universal, where Wasserman and Sheinberg still called the shots. But for how much longer? There was already friction with Matsushita over policy.
It was in this period of distraction that Spielberg did his most productive thinking about Schindler’s List. He’d immersed himself in the period, watching documentaries about and reconstructions of the Holocaust until their texture was ingrained. In particular, he screened four times the entire ten hours of Shoah, released in 1985 by the French documentarist Claude Lanzmann, consisting mostly of testimony by survivors of Nazi pogroms. Documentaries, and in particular Shoah, inspired the look of Schindler’s List. It was a style both realist and romantic, pioneered by thirties still photographers like August Sander but adapted by Lanzmann, as well as by German director Edgar Reitz, who exploited it for Heimat, the epic fifteen-hour reconstruction of life in Germany from the end of World War I to the economic miracle of the seventies that reached the cinemas in 1984.
As for the tall, commanding Schindler, effortlessly attractive to women and able to charm even Nazi generals, Spielberg saw him as a moral ancestor of Steve Ross. If Ross were an actor, Spielberg told him, he would put him in the part. Once he’d cast Liam Neeson as Schindler, he screened home movies of Ross for the actor. The film would also be dedicated to Ross.
Since he had worked for Spielberg during the auditions for Empire of the Sun in 1987, Neeson had had a patchy career, including a largely unsuccessful and nerve-racking year in Hollywood which almost ruined his health. An actor who lived on his nerves, he contracted diverticulitis and had 40 per cent of his colon removed. However he bounced back in 1988 with Satisfaction opposite Julia Roberts, who became one of his many lovers. Barbra Streisand, Brooke Shields, pop singer Sinead O’Connor and Jennifer Grey followed her to his bed. ‘Women just go crazy over him.’ says his friend, director Neil Jordan, sourly. ‘He doesn’t do anything to warrant it – or deserve it.’
In 1990 Neeson starred in Sam Raimi’s horror film Darkman. He was seen by the actress Natasha Richardson, who was about to play Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie on Broadway and needed someone for her seaman lover Matt Burke. Neeson accepted the role, and plunged into an affair with Richardson. Their attraction blazed on stage. Critic John Lahr called Neeson ‘a sequoia of sex’ and said, ‘Not since Brando tossed meat up to Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire has flesh made such a spectacular entrance.’ Neeson and Richardson later married.
Spielberg took Kate and her mother to see Anna Christie. Afterwards, they went backstage. When Mrs Capshaw told Neeson how moved she’d been, and wept, the actor impulsively hugged her. Later, Kate said to Spielberg, ‘That’s exactly what Schindler would have done.’ With his bulk, his deep voice and his commanding profile, like pre-war German star Hans Albers, Neeson was also an archetypal thirties figure. Although Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Australian actor Jack Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis had shown interest in the part, Spielberg sent Neeson the script and shot a screen test before he left to start Jurassic Park in August 1992.
Universal’s first $56 million budget for Jurassic Park quickly ballooned to $65 million as special-effects engineers began bringing Crichton’s dinosaurs to life. One result of the three screenplays had been to slim down his prehistoric dramatis personae, which had included both a full-grown and an infant tyrannosaurus rex, a playful baby triceratops as well as its mother, some long-necked but cow-like brachiosaurs, taller than a tree, packs of procompsognathids, mild-mannered scavengers the size of small dogs, a stampeding herd of gallimimuses, and velociraptors, the most savage of dinosaurs, ranging from chicken-sized to a full-grown six feet.
As much in the interests of economy as art, the film dropped the babies, lost the procompsognathids, but built up the role of the velociraptors, literally fast grabbers’, which became Jurassic Park’s true villains. First identified from fossils in 1924, velociraptors hadn’t preoccupied palaeontologists much until a 1971 dig in Mongolia unearthed one which had died while tearing a protoceratops to pieces. Its six-inch-long razor-sharp claws indicated a born predator, but otherwise little was known about these animals and, of that, not much fitted the film. They probably hunted in packs, and might have communicated with soft hooting noises, like owls, two suppositions which the film turned into dramatically effective reality. On the debit side, however, they probably looked more like rats than lizards in real life. They also flourished fifty million years before the Jurassic era. In general, however, chronology went out the window on Jurassic Park, the creatures of which were dismissed by dinosaur expert Don Lessem as ‘a hodgepodge of animals that have more to do with the Cretaceous period (135 to 65 million years B.P.) than with… the Jurassic period’.
To put these creatures on screen, Jurassic Park pushed out the envelope of special effects. Spielberg, with reason, disliked computer-generated images which, even in Robert Zemeckis’s fantasy about cosmetic surgery, Death Becomes Her, where ILM used computer animation to melt holes in Meryl Streep and twist flesh like putty, were never 100 per cent lifelike. In particular, the T. rex, which had to attack, batter, tear open and overturn two four-wheel-drive vehicles, seemed to demand a full-sized twenty-foot creature.
Spielberg had seen such an animal at Universal’s new Florida theme park, where the King Kong ride, a favourite of the Los Angeles tour, had been reconstructed and improved by Robert Gurr of GurrDesign. T. rex designs were commissioned from Gurr, but memories of the ridiculous $1 million King Kong built for Dino de Laurentiis’s remake persuaded Spielberg to abandon the mechanical route and approach Stan Winston, whose realisation of H.R. Giger’s innovative designs for the monsters in James Cameron’s 1986 sf horror film Aliens surpassed those of Ridley Scott’s seminal 1979 original. Winston contracted to create all the film’s dinosaurs, including a full-sized T. rex, as electronically-controlled puppets. Model animator Phil Tippett would build smaller versions to be photographed in stop-motion animation, the traditional technique for dinosaur movies since the silent era. ILM were given the relatively minor task of creating vistas of the park with dinosaurs moving in the distance.
Actors had been in no hurry to play straight man to a T. rex. Richard Dreyfuss and Kurt Russell wanted too much money to play Grant. There were complaints again from some supporting players about Spielberg’s tightness in imposing the so-called ‘Pact Contract’ which absolved the production from paying full SAG rates. ‘There is no excuse,’ said one, ‘for a director like Spielberg to be paying actors with important roles $430 a week.’ But given a gold-plated certainty at the box office like this, few declined. The job was made even more attractive when Crichton’s ending, in which the island is fire-bombed, gave way to one in which the park and its animals remain intact for the inevitable sequel.
When William Hurt also turned down the role of Grant, it went to Sam Neill. Jeff Goldblum became Malcolm, Laura Dern was Ellie, and Briton Bob Peck played the white hunter Muldoon, a character who, like many in the film, became more ‘actor-friendly’ as the script evolved. Wayne Knight’s obese Nedry, computer nerd and junk-food junkie, and Martin Ferraro as the lawyer Gennaro, a parody of corporate man with poor skin, baggy suit and unsuitable shoes, are in the story mostly to be eaten. Gennaro has the film’s most humiliating end, perched, trembling, on a bush lavatory with pants round his ankles as the T. rex pauses for the laugh, then swoops to munch him like a hot dog.
John Hammond’s children were off the hook – off the Hook in the case of nine-year-old Joseph Mazello, who had been up for the role of Robin Williams’s son Jack in that film before being cast as Tim in Jurassic Park. Ariana Richards, shorn of the original’s irritating mannerism, was a resourceful and grown-up Alexis. Richard Attenborough agreed to play John Hammond. At Spielberg’s insistence, the crotchety, almost dwarfish curmudgeon of the book, greedy for profit and so indifferent to disaster that he’s ready to start work all over again in another location with frozen embryos squirreled away in a secret cache, had metamorphosed into a jolly Santa Claus whose toys have got out of hand.
Script revisions also softened and romanticised Grant and Ellie. Now a couple, they nervously circle the idea of marriage and, more important, children, towards whom Grant is negative. In a new opening scene of surprising hostility for a Spielberg film, the palaeontologist scares a (inevitably fat) smartass kid by demonstrating with a fossilised velociraptor’s claw the technique it would have used to gut him. In the course of saving Hammond’s grandchildren from the dinosaurs, however, he comes to enjoy fatherhood.
Jeff Goldblum played Malcolm, also humanised in the script, at his most saturnine and satyr-like. Once again, location shooting fulfilled Spielberg’s definition as the Rites of Spring when Dern and Goldblum became embroiled in a romance. As a consequence, Goldblum divorced Geena Davis and Dern her director husband Renny Harlin. Shortly afterwards Goldblum married Dem, and Davis married Harlin.
The pattern of Jurassic Park changed abruptly when, in mid-year, ILM decided to fight Spielberg’s decision to rely on mainly corporeal creatures. Using new software that had just come on the market, they took Winston’s designs for the gallimimus and the T. rex bone structure, laser-scanned them in three dimensions, fed them into their computers, and came up with fully animated skeletons. Replicating the gallimimuses into a herd, they shot them stampeding across an African background and sent the tape to Amblin.
Spielberg was astonished. This was a quantum leap beyond Death Becomes Her. The skeletons moved with absolute fidelity to life – something that always evaded stop-motion figures. He immediately cancelled his order for Tippett’s puppets and handed everything to ILM. Except where the actors needed to interact physically with a creature, as in Winston’s animatronic T. rex, a brachiosaur head, an ailing triceratops and the velociraptors, every dinosaur in Jurassic Park would be computer-generated.
After rejecting Costa Rica and Mexico as locations, Kathleen Kennedy decided to shoot the live-action sequences on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Spielberg admitted this was less an aesthetic decision than a function of his age. He wanted to eat food that didn’t give him dysentery, and to sleep each evening in a comfortable hotel. In late August, the 140-person crew rolled into the canyons of the island’s interior, trailing their heavy equipment, not only Dean Cundey’s cameras and lights but the generators to run them, and also the dinosaurs or part-dinosaurs they were to film.
These included the ailing full-sized triceratops. Winston’s technicians worked round the clock to finish the animal which, in addition to being constructed to look convincing while lying on its side, had to have practical working eyes and a mouth with tongue, and to breathe realistically. But the use to which Spielberg puts this prodigy of ingenuity is a telling demonstration of Michael Arlen’s suggestion that films were labouring under a ‘Tyranny of the Visual’.
The visitors encounter the sick animal with the park’s vet, Harding, and Dern decides, from its swollen tongue and dilated pupils, that it’s been eating African lilac, which is poisonous. However, the enormous droppings yield no seeds. The solution – which the book provides – is that, like the birds into which they evolved, dinosaurs swallowed stones and retained them in their gizzards to grind food. From time to time, they replaced the stones. The Triceratops had been ingesting lilac seeds with the stones, but disposing of the evidence when it emptied its gizzard. This, or the concept of gizzard stones, isn’t explained in the film, since Dern’s explanation was cut from the released version. Now, she simply wanders off, chewing over the problem, and the tour moves on to its encounter with T. rex. One can see the reasoning. Gizzard stones are too complicated for teenagers to grasp. Then why not cut the whole sequence, not just the pay-off? And waste an animatronic triceratops? You know what those things cost?
Hawaii reserved its revenge for Hollywood’s invasion until the last day of shooting. On 11 September Hurricane Iniki, the most severe of the century, raged across the islands with winds of 130 m.p.h. and gusts as high as 160 m.p.h. Twenty-foot waves crashed on the shore and the film crew took refuge in the ballroom of the Westin Kauai Hotel, specially armoured in concrete. Even as the storm ripped off its roof and water began to gush through the ceiling, Spielberg had time to think about movies. It was just like James Basevi’s Oscar-winning special effects for John Ford’s The Hurricane. Someone more philosophical might have reflected that, in real life as in the film, Nature would always triumph over the puny efforts of technology.
Even in Hawaii, Spielberg didn’t forget Steve Ross. He dreamed up a private movie, a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life which he filmed as soon as he got back.
We had Bob Daly and Terry Semel as hobos, looking for food in trashcans. Clint Eastwood, instead of being the legend, was a stunt man: 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.’
Ross died on 20 December. Courtney Ross insisted on a lavish ceremony in the Guild Hall in East Hampton, which was redecorated for the occasion. Even the paintings were taken down and replaced with a large de Kooning. A cameraman filmed everything: Courtney was a documentary producer. Spielberg and Kate led a contingent of celebrities that included Quincy Jones, Anouk Aimée, Nastassja Kinski, Paul Simon, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. Delivering one of the eulogies, Spielberg said, ‘For the last couple of days, I feel cold. I can’t keep warm. I feel like there’s a draught through my heart – and I know that Steve is up there, trying to figure out a way to plug up the holes.’ Rather than being buried in the new Jewish cemetery, Ross was interred in the Green River Cemetery, near the graves of Jackson Pollock and Elaine de Kooning.
A numbed Spielberg continued supervising the special effects of Jurassic Park, scheduled for release in June 1993. ILM’s computer brilliance hadn’t worked out quite as well as he hoped. Their dinosaurs moved with precision, but they looked like robots: they couldn’t ‘act’. Phil Tippett, the specialist in stop-action, was called back to make them look more natural – and received an Oscar for his work.
Steven Zaillian had meanwhile delivered a script of Schindler’s List which was the first to convey a comprehensible view of Schindler’s character. The reductive process that had worked in turning Peter Pan and Jurassic Park into films finally trimmed the intractable story to a manageable size. It had taken longer, but some pieces of rock were more nymph-like than others. Spielberg sent the script to Tom Stoppard, who confirmed his opinion. Zaillian was, said Stoppard, ‘the best screenwriter I had come across, almost ever’.
Zaillian’s version, influenced by Spielberg, owes much to Robert Bolt’s scripts for David Lean. Thomas Keneally, visiting Krakow for some of the filming, was reminded forcibly of Lawrence of Arabia. ‘[The film] had that authoritative feel, and even though it played with time and the literal facts, it was poetically accurate.’ The characters in Lawrence, as in Spielberg’s version of Keneally’s book, ‘don’t have linear motivations’. He went on: ‘All of them operate from a mixture of self-image, opportunism and altruism. There’s no one out there who can fully explain his or her motivation.’ The parallels with Hollywood films of the thirties were even clearer than those with Lawrence. Schindler emerges from the film as a figure of glamour and charisma, like Steve Ross, and, also like Ross, larger than life. In dramatic terms, he stands at the apex of a triangle, at the other corners of which are Amon Goeth, the camp commander whom he cajoled, seduced and hypnotised into colluding in his plan, and Itzhak Stern, the Jewish accountant he chooses to run his company.
A simple man who understands only business and survival, Stern parallels Lawrence’s mentor, master and cautious ally Feisal in Lawrence. Feisal is happy to use the fanatical stranger, but wary of him, and baffled by his motives. ‘With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion,’ he says of Lawrence’s obsession with caring for enemy wounded. ‘With me, it is merely good manners.’ Stern doesn’t know why Schindler is always trying to share a schnapps with him, or thank him. He will be more than content if he can live till morning. Initially he sees little difference between Schindler and Goeth, except that one is on his side, the other his enemy. But his uncomplaining efficiency is a silent rebuke to his employer, and it’s in trying to win the accountant’s friendship that Schindler refines his own compassion.
The character of Stern, in which Zaillian conflated a number of Jews who managed Schindler’s affairs, is one of the film’s many concessions to Hollywood formula. Spencer Tracy played a similar role as the priest friend of club-owner Clark Gable in W.S. Van Dyke’s 1936 San Francisco, a film which, structurally, Schindler’s List much resembles. It was only through formula, tradition and consensus – his gizzard stones – that Spielberg could digest any subject, though these worked better on some elements of the story than others. ‘Spielberg was very taken with Schindler’s ambiguities,’ says Keneally. ‘That was the specific thing he liked about the man, this contradiction – the scoundrel/saviour, the rogue/deliverer, the man who treated his wife badly but treated thousands of strangers well.’ But such a contradictory personality didn’t lend itself to stock characterisation, and, however interesting Spielberg found the contrasts in the book, he suppressed most of them in the film.
What both he and the audience most needed to have answered was what Spielberg called, after Charles Foster Kane’s muttered word at the sun of Citizen Kane, ‘the Rosebud question’. What turned Schindler overnight from pleasure-loving opportunist to selfless benefactor? Keneally, with his theological background, felt no pressing need for an explanation. Such things happened; one took them on faith. Privately, he seems to feel that Schindler was a little mad, and his change of heart irrational – or, if one preferred a mystical explanation, transcendental. Spielberg knew his audience needed a more solid explanation. ‘It wasn’t to be a hero, I don’t think,’ he said, ‘because he did have some modesty about him. That was part of his charm.’ It may, the film implies, have been his fascination with the concept of power. As Schindler explains to Goeth, the emperor who spares the life of a transgressor is exercising more power than when he kills him. Finally, however, the question is unanswerable, since Schindler never answered it himself.
The film doesn’t so much explain Rosebud as show Schindler at the precise moment of revelation. On the morning that the Krakow ghetto is destroyed and its inhabitants shipped to Goeth’s camp, Schindler is out riding with his mistress. From a bluff about the city, they see soldiers ruthlessly emptying the houses, shooting people who resist, herding the rest into trucks. A little girl weaves expressionlessly through this nightmare, ignored by everyone. In a visual conceit as movingly appropriate as it is banal, Spielberg highlights her by tinting her coat a dusty red. Unnoticed, she slips through a door. The sequence should have ended there, but we see her climbing the stairs and hiding under the bed. Later, a smear of red in a handcart piled with corpses shows her fate.
Schindler’s soul, we infer, has been so scalded by this image that he resolves to save the Jews under his protection. This is such a David Lean answer that Spielberg must have had as much to do with it as did Zaillian, who confirms that this scene, a major sticking point between them, was rewritten on the plane after a visit both made to Poland. The three or four pages of the ghetto sequence swelled to thirty, in which Spielberg documents the fate of everyone so far encountered in the story.
Lean’s signature is even more apparent in the way Spielberg shoots Schindler’s reaction. When, in a similar scene, Yuri Zhivago in Doctor Zhivago watches Czarist cavalry cutting down demonstrators, Lean put the camera on Omar Sharif’s face so that we sense his anguish. He did the same with Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia when, in order to save the expedition against Aqaba, he executes a man, and finds he enjoys killing. In both cases, there is something sexual in the revelation. Lean told Sharif to imagine, as he visualised the massacre, that he was fucking a woman but trying to hold back his orgasm. Schindler, too, on his horse, with his beautiful mistress, seems more excited than moved. Both he and Goeth are gripped by the pornography of violence. The Nazi casually murdering his prisoners, mostly unsuspecting women, with a rifle from his villa above the camp, is paralleled by Schindler standing at the top of the staircase to his factory and assessing the women who come to beg his protection. Unless they’re pretty, they don’t pass the doorman.
Ralph Fiennes, an English actor who’d caught Spielberg’s attention playing Lawrence of Arabia in the British TV film A Dangerous Man, was cast as Goeth, and, though not Jewish, Ben Kingsley, an Oscar-winner for Gandhi, made an ideal Stern. When the him was already well advanced, Spielberg felt some supporting characters lacked dimension, and added scenes for the labourers in Schindler’s factory, including the young Poldek Pfefferberg. Zaillian was directing his first film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and too busy to do more rewrites, especially those with which, like these, he wasn’t in sympathy, so Spielberg tried to bring in Stoppard again. Stoppard recalls:
Steven sent me this version, and I thought it was in danger of becoming a script less good than the one I had read, and it turned out that Zaillian and I were fighting the same fight. Steven wanted me to have a pass on it, but it was still Zaillian’s material. I was trying to take out stuff which had crept in which I didn’t think was helping. There were certain logical problems in the narrative. I simply wrote Steven a long letter pointing out what the problem was, and what they should do about it, and why they should leave certain things alone and certain changes shouldn’t have been made. Zaillian finished his film and came back on Schindler. And that was it, except for one day when they were in Krakow – there was just one scene where Steven called me from Poland and I did a tiny thing overnight which he needed. But whatever my involvement with Schindler over the years, it is completely and absolutely Zaillian’s script and nobody else’s.
Spielberg decreed that the film would be shot entirely in Poland, with a Polish cameraman, Janusz Kaminski, and a Polish line producer, Branko Lustig, himself an Auschwitz survivor who carried a tattooed number. To design the production he hired Allan Starski, a Pole who as well as working for Andrzej Wajda had earned his Hollywood credentials with Alan Pakula’s version of Sophie’s Choice. In a reverse of his normal practice, which gave him gross participation from the first dollar, Spielberg told Sheinberg, ‘I don’t want any money until you guys make all your costs back.’ Since he contemplated a film of more than three hours, with a largely unknown cast, and as surveys had shown that 60 per cent of American high school students, his primary audience, had never even heard of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, nobody had high hopes of profit anyway.
In February 1993, Steve Ross’s memorial service took place in Carnegie Hall. Soprano Beverly Sills was the mistress of ceremonies at the two-and-half-hour event. New York’s then mayor, David Dinkins, Hugh Carey, former governor of New York, and Caroline Lang, representing her father Jack, France’s Minister of Culture, all spoke, as did Spielberg.
Also in February, Jurassic Park was unveiled for the retail companies licensed to tie in their products with the film. Increasingly, the deals which linked a new film to soft drinks, fast foods, clothing or toys were almost as important as selling seats. Universal and Amblin skimmed between 6 and 10 per cent of the wholesale price of every item. In particular, McDonald’s were to launch a marketing effort of unprecedented proportions for Jurassic Park. In the Dinosaur Room at the Museum of Natural History in New York, the diplomatically-termed ‘Marketing Partners’ browsed on snacks, observed dispassionately by skeletons of the animals about to be seen in the flesh on screens across the country, then trooped into the museum’s giant-screen IMAX theatre to goggle in understandable awe at some preliminary footage.
The seventy-five-day shoot of Schindler’s List began on 1 March. The intention had been to start in Auschwitz, where Spielberg hoped to reconstruct the original crematoria, complete with chimneys, and use 1500 extras as prisoners. Despite signs warning visitors ‘You are entering a place of exceptional horror and tragedy. Please show your respect by behaving in a manner suitable to the dignity of their memory,’ both Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau had been thoroughly, though discreetly, commercialised, with restaurants, snack bars, exhibits and regular guided tours. Despite this, and notwithstanding the fact that six other fiction features, plus numerous documentaries, had been shot inside the wire, the World Jewish Congress, which administered the camp, protested to the Polish ambassador in the US about Spielberg’s project, claiming to fear a ‘Disney version’ of the Holocaust that would turn Auschwitz into ‘a Hollywood backlot’. In fact, the real problem was procedural and bureaucratic: Amblin had sought permission direct from the Polish government rather than going through the Congress, the museum authorities and other Jewish organisations. Spielberg could have shot almost anywhere else without anyone being the wiser, but Auschwitz had a talismanic significance to him that he wasn’t about to sacrifice. Since the closest the administrators would let him to the real Auschwitz was the front gate, he had Starski build a mirror image of the camp outside the wire, the gate their only shared element. ‘As far as I was concerned,’ Spielberg said truculently, ‘we were shooting at Auschwitz.’
In the film, Schindler bribes Goeth into releasing 1100 workers into his custody, and hires trains to ship them to Czechoslovakia. The men arrive safely, but the women are diverted to Auschwitz and, with typical despatch, stripped, shaved and herded into showers within an hour of arrival. Normally they would be gassed, but Schindler, in an edgy negotiating scene which underlines the fact that he is closer in temperament and sensibility to the Nazis than to the people he saves, bribes the commandant with diamonds to release them. (It actually took Schindler three weeks to get them out.)
These scenes were, for Spielberg, the most harrowing of the production. He wept as he looked through the viewfinder. ‘It was a horrible, hysterical couple of hours,’ he said of the shower sequence, ‘and it was the kind of thing that I guess I could have humanely said, “Cut, we’re all too emotionally involved to continue.” But I thought it was important that we get it over with. We spent three or four horrible hours in that place, it was terrible for everybody.’ To keep up his spirits meantime, he often rang Robin Williams, now a close friend, in Los Angeles. ‘He made me laugh a lot,’ Spielberg said. ‘It was a great over-the-counter prescription.’
The fact that Spielberg, in the midst of recording the horrors of genocide, could supervise the completion of Jurassic Park, confirms his status as the most protean of contemporary film-makers. Initially, he didn’t think it could be managed, and asked Richard Attenborough to take over shooting on Schindler’s List for two weeks while he finished editing the earlier film. When Attenborough wasn’t available, George Lucas handled day-to-day supervision of Jurassic Park, for which he receives a special credit at the end of the film.
Spielberg paid $1.5 million a week to a Warsaw TV station to reserve two satellite channels, one for image, the other for voice, and an additional $40,000 a week for permanent use of a satellite downlink machine through which his staff in Hollywood transmitted the Jurassic Park material. Every weekend and on one or two nights a week, he would download the dinosaur footage onto video, work on it with his editor Michael Kahn, then, at Kahn’s insistence, spend two more hours on Schindler, so he could go to sleep thinking of that film. When Park was edited, he spent three consecutive Sundays in Paris, where Kate, now pregnant with their second son, Sawyer, was staying with the combined Capshaw/Spielberg family, to supervise the sound. His work was rewarded when, on its opening in June, Jurassic Park was the hit of the summer. Universal opened the film on 2842 screens simultaneously. It set new records for the first weekend, obliterating its biggest rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero, and went on to gross $900 million worldwide.
However much he fought his impulses, Spielberg couldn’t help but make Schindler’s List an entertainment: no Jurassic Park, but no Shoah either. His worst characters, even Goeth at his most loathsome, have charm. Nor could Spielberg close his eyes to the persistence of the human spirit. Even in the midst of atrocity, human beings will amuse themselves, do business, fall in love. Krakow Jews improvise a trading exchange in the last place the Nazis will look, the pews of a Catholic church during mass. A wedding is even held in the camp, and a light bulb crushed instead of the traditional glass. These scenes, and another in which men and women huddled round a brazier in the ghetto find time for a few chilly jokes, were to draw accusations that he had ‘Spielbergised’ the Holocaust.
In shooting the film, he avoided as far as possible all cinema’s post-war developments in technique. ‘We were aiming for a naturalistic look,’ said his cameraman, Janusz Kaminski, ‘not using things like bright lights. I’m trying to imagine myself being here [in Krakow] fifty years ago with a small camera without lights. We’re favouring long lenses, doing a lot of hand-held shots. We want people to see this film in fifteen years and not have a sense of when it was made.’ Yet nothing can put back the clock of innovation. The sharpness of modern lenses and the range of tones which new film stocks could resolve dictated that, even at its grittiest, Schindler’s List should have a subliminal Hollywood sheen.
Spielberg also faced a moral and aesthetic choice when it came to shooting the ghetto. Krakow’s real wartime ghetto was in relatively uninteresting Podgorze. But his eye was caught by the picturesque Kazimierz area, on the other side of the Vistula River, in the centre of the Old Town. Jews and Christians had lived cordially together there for centuries, but it was more like his mental image of a ghetto than the real thing, so he moved his cameras there. Today it’s the high point of Schindler’s List bus tours.
The film’s set-piece, the attack on the ghetto, is a torrent of indelible images and thumbnail characterisations that only a film-maker of genius could have conceived and co-ordinated. As the Nazis surround the area and prepare for the raid, the families inside melt away under floors, above ceilings, inside beds, even into pianos. Some wad hoarded valuables into pieces of bread and swallow them. The Nazis, with typical thoroughness, hunt down almost everyone. A few are saved: some dive into the sewers, others find unexpected allies, like the boy collaborator in Nazi cap and armband who rescues the little girl from his school and her mother.
A true propagandist would show the Nazis as stock monsters, but Spielberg, here, as he was with Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, half in love with his villains, can’t help but be fascinated by the meticulousness with which they use a stethoscope to track down fugitives in the ceiling, or relish the surrealism of the moment where, as machine guns rip the walls of the tenements, a Nazi plays furiously but impeccably on an upright piano.
‘Bach?’ a soldier queries.
‘Mozart,’ says a colleague.
Goeth emerges as a more interesting character than Schindler, if only because his motives are more explicable. Instead of the stock Nazi beast Spielberg had visualised during early discussions of the project, Goeth is shown as a harassed bureaucrat who rationalises his brutality in the name of efficiency. Since he’s convinced himself that his prisoners have no more humanity than sheep, he culls the weak, removes the children and disposes of troublemakers as casually as any modern farmer. Spielberg dramatises the degree of difference between Goeth and Schindler by giving both an almost identical scene with Helen Hirsch, the prisoner Goeth chooses as his housekeeper, and who lives in the cellar of his house. Played with supreme craft by little-known Embeth Davidtz, Helen shares some of Stern’s breathless disbelief in continued survival. One has a sense that she knows every step may be her last. Her very subservience makes her attractive to Goeth, but he can’t bring himself either to rape her or deny his attraction: she is, after all, as he explains distractedly to her, ‘not a person in the strictest sense of the word’. In his scene with her, Schindler explains this, and reassures her that Goeth desires her too much to have her killed. Finally he saves her by winning her life from Goeth at cards.
Equally, we share Goeth’s fascination with the suave Schindler. His first envious question is, ‘Where did you get that suit? What is it? Silk?’ They are genuinely friends. Schindler even tries to excuse Goeth to Stern as just a crook in a uniform, corrupted by the war. Dispassionately, the accountant, often the only person in the film to see reality, describes how this allegedly small-time middle manager randomly shoots prisoners, and Schindler falls silent. A climactic scene, which Liam Neeson says was, for him, the most moving in the film, made their affinity explicit.
Amon Goeth comes back to the factory. He’s been stripped of his uniform and imprisoned for marketeering and he goes to see what he thinks is his only friend, only to find out that Schindler was the one who fingered him. Schindler was called before the tribunal and what he said was, ‘Goeth stole our country blind,’ and that was enough to condemn him right there. I found that very touching, in a weird way, thanks to the power of Ralph Fiennes’s performance. He gave a human face to this monster.
Spielberg shot the scene, but cut it out for the very reason Neeson gives: Goeth is already too sympathetic – an effect eradicated by his final appearance, perfunctorily hanged from a makeshift gallows. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he croaks as the guards kick to pieces the stool on which he stands.
Two sequences shot partly in colour frame the story. The first shows a family in an antique European interior lighting candles on Friday evening and reciting the prayers that precede the sabbath. In a series of dissolves, the candles burn down until only one is left. At the end, Spielberg brings surviving ‘Schindler Jews’, their relatives, and the actors who played them to their benefactor’s grave in an inhospitable cemetery near Jerusalem. As they file by, each places a stone on the slab. (The last figure to do so, seen from a distance, appears to be Spielberg himself.) However, as Spielberg makes clear with the dedication which follows almost immediately, preceding his own credit and that to the actors, the life really being celebrated in this film is not so much Schindler’s as that of Steve Ross.
With the editing mostly finished, Spielberg took time off for a European holiday. The Venice Film Festival offered him an Honorary Leone d’Or, and Spielberg attended the ceremony in September with a US contingent that included Harrison Ford, Robert de Niro, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tina Turner and Sydney Pollack. An Authors’ Symposium had been arranged by left-wing director Gillo Pontecorvo to discuss the accelerating invasion of European cinema by American films. Spielberg, on the occasion of receiving his Leone d’Or, re-presented Pontecorvo with the Leone the Italian had won for The Battle of Algiers in 1966. He’d sold it at auction years before to raise money to fight for authors’ rights, and Spielberg had bought it.
Spielberg and Scorsese in particular were outspoken in their sympathy for the plight of their European colleagues whose livelihood was being eaten away by massive American exports, but many in the audience were sceptical. Hollywood had shown little inclination to halt the flood of films that was wiping out national cinemas all over the world. Instead the studios complained about a quota that limited the number of imported films shown on French screens to a total of 50 per cent – ignoring the fact that the US imported only 2 per cent of movies shown on its screens. French director Bertrand Tavernier, one of the most vigorous campaigners against Hollywood domination, says, ‘What we would like is that the percentage of non-American cinema shown in the United States would represent, say, 3 per cent instead of 2 per cent. That’s our dream. When we met the people of the major companies and said, “Look, how can you accuse France of protectionism when foreign films don’t even represent 2 per cent of your market?”, we saw surprise in their eyes. You could see them thinking, “Two per cent? As much as that? How can we arrange things so that they have only 1 1/2 per cent?”’
Some Europeans remained hopeful until Spielberg and Scorsese issued a press statement on 4 October opposing efforts by the French to exclude films from the free trade provisions of the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs then being negotiated in Brussels. ‘Closing the borders would not guarantee a rise in creativity in the local countries,’ said Scorsese, ‘or even a rise in interest on the part of local audiences. National voices and diversities must be encouraged and protected, but not at the expense of other film-makers.’ A group of European film-makers including Pedro Almodovar, David Puttnam, Bernardo Bertolucci and Wim Wenders published an open letter in Daily Variety on 29 October attacking the statement as misinformed.
Schindler’s List opened in the US in the first week of December 1993. At 195 minutes, it was not every exhibitor’s dream film but, for once, in deference to the subject, most treated it with dignity and decorum, not to mention an unwonted lack of interest in profit. Many cinemas distributed a ‘Code of Conduct’ suggesting, among other things, that eating popcorn would not be appropriate during the film.
The overall tone of critical comment was reverent. Anxious not to give offence, the press leaned over backwards to welcome the film and praise Spielberg. Jewish critics were not so generous. Many agreed with the philosopher George Steiner that the only acceptable response to the Holocaust was silence. Some disliked it for the very things Spielberg had wanted to change in Zaillian’s script: the emphasis on Schindler, Goeth and Stern rather than less central figures. Jay Hoberman in the Village Voice saw the Jews as ‘relegated to supporting parts in their own cataclysm, hang[ing] around the Krakow ghetto… making Jewish jokes’. Schindler’s List, he charged, was ‘a feel-good entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the twentieth century’. Philip Gourevitch in the venerable Jewish paper Forward complained that ‘powerful spectacle continues to be more beguiling than human historical authenticity – and the power of the Nazis a bigger draw than the civilisation of the people they murdered’. Novelist Howard Jacobson wrote patronisingly that, ‘to do him justice, Spielberg cleans up more conscientiously than you’d think he’d know how,’ but Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, scorned the film in toto. While not going as far as Steiner, he felt that the very fact of turning the Holocaust into fiction discredited Spielberg’s project and everyone associated with it.
But the public was unaffected by the reviews. By March 1995, Schindler’s List had earned a gratifying $45.9 million in domestic rentals. The Oscars gave it an added impetus. Of its eleven nominations, it won in seven categories. Neeson and Fiennes missed out for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, nor were the costume design, make-up and sound successful. But it won awards for Art Direction, Editing, John Williams’s Original Score, Cinematography, Screenplay and, most important, both Best Film and Best Director. At last Spielberg, at the peak of his career, stood on the podium at the Shrine Auditorium with an Oscar in his hands.
How good is Schindler’s List as a film? With hindsight, one can see that Spielberg’s grounding in commercial Hollywood always made at least partial artistic failure inevitable. The film’s best moments are those of tension, humour and pathos in which Neeson, Fiennes and Kingsley flash with the son of sparks Spielberg wants to show us he can strike from good actors. But the very effectiveness of these scenes undercuts his attempts to show them or their historical situation in more depth. When, at the end of the film, the people Schindler has saved see him off into exile, the businessman’s sudden explosion of remorse about not having rescued more of them – by selling his car, for instance – rings as false as Clark Gable’s tearful prayer at the end of San Francisco. Hollywood heroes don’t whine. ‘You can make me the best man in the world,’ John Wayne once told a director, ‘or the worst, but never make me cheap.’
However much Spielberg tries to push his supporting cast into the foreground, they remain subsidiary to what is essentially a ‘buddy’ movie about two men from opposite sides of the ethical tracks, one of whom is forced finally to destroy the other. The film’s vision of the Holocaust is equally suspect because of Spielberg’s partiality for the Big Moment and the Flamboyant Gesture. As Pauline Kael said of Queimada!, made by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1968 and showing capitalism and Marxism at work during a slave revolt in the Caribbean, any attempt to portray history as film entertainment carries the seeds of its own destruction. ‘When you personify a deterministic view of history,’ Kael wrote, ‘and don’t stylise it but, rather, do it in natural settings, the leaders seem to be all that matter, so the method distorts the theory. It seems as if history were a melodrama made solely by heroes and adventurers.’ Danielle Heymann, critic of Le Monde, while conceding that Schindler’s List was ‘a work of genius, made with precision, and remarkably well filmed’, complained that ‘Spielberg leads us down false paths. We see smoke and it’s not a crematorium, it’s a train. We see the showers and they spout not gas but water. All the cadavers we see we don’t know and all the people we identify with are saved. And that’s not how history goes.’