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

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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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  (#11) The Weather Was Eerily Cooperative Throughout The Shoot

  Producer Gerald Molen believed there was a higher power at work, helping the Schindler's List production go smoothly. The cooperation of the weather was the chief reason he got this impression.

  Spielberg wanted key scenes to be filmed in the snow, but when the production began, there was none. Molen was about to have truckfuls of the stuff brought in from the mountains, but just before shooting began, a blizzard occurred.

  Later, when other scenes required the snow to be gone, the weather cooperated again; the snow melted just in time for filming of the scenes.

  "It seems that from the moment [Spielberg] decided to work on Schindler's List, I knew that something special would be happening," Molen said. "It was obvious to me that we were being divinely guided."
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  (#3) Liam Neeson

  • Actor

  One of Schindler's List's producers was Branko Lustig, a Croatian-American Holocaust survivor who had been an Auschwitz inmate as a boy. The week after he arrived there, Lustig witnessed the hanging of seven Jews. Before dying, they urged him to bear witness and to tell their story. Later, he saw Schindler's List as an opportunity to fulfill his pledge to the ones who did not survive the camps.

  When Liam Neeson complained about cold weather on location, Lustig showed him his arm tattoo, reminding the actor how much worse some people had had it. When the crew filmed exterior shots at the actual Auschwitz site, Neeson recalled:

  I'm looking at the real huts of Auschwitz - and Branko comes up to me and he points out one of the huts, and said, "See that hut there?" "Yeah." "That was the hut I was in." And it hit me. Big f***ing time. [...] So I did my little scene, and my knees were literally shaking, you know? And I kept saying the line wrong: "I need this child to polish the inside of shell metal cases." It should have been "metal shell cases."

  When Schindler's List won best picture in 1994, Lustig accepted an Oscar statuette with Spielberg and co-producer Gerald Molen. "My [tattoo] number was 83317," Lustig said. "I'm a Holocaust survivor. It's a long way from Auschwitz to this stage."
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  (#7) Steven Spielberg

  • Producer/Director

  One of the film's most haunting scenes involves the little girl in a red coat, whom Schindler sees wandering around while the Krakow ghetto is being liquidated. Although the girl functions narratively as a trigger for Schindler to find his conscience and begin protecting other Jews, Spielberg noted that to him, the girl represents the way the Holocaust was happening in full view of the world, yet little was done to stop it. (Granted, there was a war on, but historians continue to debate the extent to which the Allies could have done more militarily to disrupt the functioning of the death camps.)

  The girl was played by Oliwia Dabrowska, who was 3 years old at the time. Spielberg made her promise not to watch Schindler's List until she turned 18. But Dabrowska did not keep this promise, instead watching the movie for the first time at 11. She later admitted this was a mistake: it was more than she could handle at that age, and she found it difficult to process emotionally.

  "I was ashamed of being in the movie and really angry with my mother and father when they told anyone about my part,” she said years later. “I kept it secret for a long, long time, though at high school people got to know on the internet."

  Watching the film at 18, Dabrowska said she realized “Spielberg was right: I had to grow up into the film.”
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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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  (#1) Ralph Fiennes

  • Actor

  Ralph Fiennes, who played Płaszów camp commandant Amon Goeth, described in an interview what he'd learned about Goeth during his research for the role, and afterward:

  I remember there being accounts by survivors who talked about their terror when they saw him. He terrified the people of Płaszów. Many accounts of him were just full of the physical fear that people felt when they saw him.

  Fiennes saw this firsthand when Mila Pfefferberg, a survivor who had known the real Goeth, came to the Schindler's List set. Seeing Fiennes in full costume, adopting the mannerisms of the character he was playing, Pfefferberg actually shook with fear.

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