Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin

In fact, I unfairly developed a very, very strong ‘attitude’—in quotes—about the German actors playing the Nazis. These were just really good actors I had cast who wanted to talk to me about
E.T.
and
Close Encounters
and
Raiders of the Lost Ark
— they were fans—and I was giving them an attitude: ‘I can’t talk about that now; I’m too into this.’ Whereas I would happily talk to the Israeli actors about anything they wanted to talk to me about.
    â€œAnd then one day we had Passover at the Hotel Forum and we invited the whole cast and crew to come. The Israeli actors all came in and sat around me with the Haggadahs, and then all the German actors playing the Germans came in. And the Israeli actors took the German actors and shared their Haggadahs with them; they took them through the entire seder. I sat at the head of the table and I just cried like a baby. Nobody understood what was wrong with me—people kept coming over to me saying, ‘Are you okay?’ I was wrecked by that. And I apologized to a lot of the actors the next day when we began shooting again. I said, ‘If you felt a distance or a coldness from me, it’s the uniform. I’m having a real tough, tough time with the uniform you’re wearing.’ And I think everything changed for the better after that. The fact that the German actors took it upon themselves to come to a seder and sit with the Israeli actors and learn about the holiday was an epiphany for me.”
    Spielberg was given
Schindler’s List,
the book by Thomas Keneally, in 1982 by then-president of Universal, Sidney Sheinberg, who’d found and bought the book for the studio. Spielberg waited a decade to make the film. “I put it off because I knew I wasn’t ready to tackle that subject,” he says. “I needed to know I was ready before assuming a maturity on film that I knew I didn’t possess at that time, in the early eighties. I think making
The Color Purple
[1985] and making
Empire of the Sun
[1987] were the two stepping-stones that led to my feeling ready to direct
Schindler’s List.
And without those two pictures, I probably would have had to find two more films of more mature, adult subject matter before I could have felt qualified—not just as a Jew but as a filmmaker—to tackle that subject and to acquit that film powerfully.”
    When it came time to start the project, he was still uneasy. “I was more frightened of bringing shame to a segment of the survivor population already devastated by what occurred. My big, big fear was that somehow the film would be too sweet and saccharine, too sentimental, and I could somehow trivialize the impact on film that the Holocaust had on the real people in real life. I didn’t ever think a survivor would see the movie and say, ‘That’s exactly the way it was.’ I was hoping they would see the movie and say, ‘It was something like that, but worse beyond your imagination and beyond my communication.’ So that would have been a great compliment. And indeed many, many survivors who saw the movie felt the film honored their experiences; but of course no book, no film, no television mini-series, no poetry or music can ever replicate the experience that the Holocaust survivors had firsthand. That’s impossible. It will never be communicated in its savage intensity by any of the creative arts. I knew that going in, but I just didn’t want to soft-pedal it. I didn’t want to water it down. And I didn’t care if it got an X rating. I would have been very happy to show the picture in the few movie houses that would dare to exhibit it.”
    He says he almost intentionally sabotaged its commercial viability. “Obviously I did a lot of self-destructive things: I shot it in black and white; the movie is three hours and fifteen minutes long; it’s about the Holocaust; there’s full-frontal nudity;