Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 28, 1994 TAG: 9401280052
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TOM TUGEND THE JERUSALEM POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He is the most successful filmmaker in the history of motion pictures. Four of the films he directed are among the all-time top 10 hits, with "Jurassic Park" as the highest-grossing film ever made and "E.T." in second place.
His latest film, "Schindler's List," showing in Roanoke at Tanglewood Mall, was seen by many as a radical change for Spielberg - and a calculated risk. It has opened to almost universal critical acclaim, large audiences and talk that it will win an Oscar as picture of the year.
Based on the book by Thomas Keneally, it tells the real-life story of Oskar Schindler, a veteran Nazi Party member, who came to Poland to make his fortune shortly after the German conquest of that country in 1939.
He employed 1,100 Jews in his enamelware factory and at some point the hard-drinking, womanizing, black-market dealing German Catholic decided to use his fortune and risk his neck to save every one of his "Schindlerjuden" from certain death in the nearby Auschwitz extermination camp. He succeeded and is buried as a Righteous Gentile in Jerusalem.
The movie, filmed in black and white and without big-name actors, has the feel of a documentary and includes some of the most graphic Holocaust scenes ever shown in a Hollywood film.
During an hourlong interview at his Amblin studio in Los Angeles, Spielberg talked about his reasons, as a filmmaker and as a Jew, for making "Schindler's List," and about his life.
TOM TUGEND: What drew you to "Schindler's List," to want to make a movie of it?
STEVEN SPIELBERG: There were many factors. I had a familiarity as a secondhand witness to the Holocaust from my family, who kept the memories of those years alive. It was something I grew up with.
I can recollect a lot of stories, mainly from my grandparents, who had come from Austria and Russia. They suffered heavy losses on both sides, many relatives, cousins, aunts, who were all in Eastern Europe, never came out alive.
When I first read the book, what grabbed me was that it was so accurate as to names and street designations and events from month to month. It had no entertainment value whatsoever. It was simply a document of facts.
Q: What underlies Schindler's transformation from a regular Nazi Party member out to make his fortune to a savior of Jews? I had trouble with this in the book and in the movie. What is your interpretation?
A: I think it is something that cannot ever be defined. When I was making the movie, I was always trying to discover through the survivors who knew him, who saw him, who were saved by him, why he did this.
Most of the survivors said, "We don't know why he did this. We only know that he did." And I felt that it was less important to really define it, that it should remain personal, perhaps it should remain a mystery.
Q: In all your research, did Schindler talk about his transformation?
A: Yes, he did, but you see, that doesn't count. Schindler did a lot of talking about what he did, but that was after he began to believe his own publicity.
I found it very interesting that when he was interviewed on German television shortly before he died in 1974, he seemed to know exactly why he did it. He always said, "Well, because I always knew the Jews were mistreated, it was a horrible thing that the Germans were doing, so I had to do something."
Well, I'm not sure he really felt like that during the war. It was a lot easier for him to define his own actions after he had taken them.
I also felt that it would have been too melodramatic of me to have invented a reason for him.
It would have been too easy for the sort of couch-potato tastes of American audiences, who demand easy answers to complicated questions. I felt it would have been a disservice to Schindler's deeds to have manufactured something just because I couldn't find it in real life.
Q: I was puzzled, when the Jewish workers are liberated in 1945, you use the song "Jerusalem of Gold," which wasn't written until 1967, as your theme music. Did you intend some symbolic statement or were you preparing us for the final scene at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem?
A: There is no thematic or even symbolic meaning to that except it was the most familiar piece of Jewish music (to me) . . . I had a dozen themes I could have used, but that was the one that I remember my grandfather and my mother playing on the piano.
I heard it over and over again and just had to use it. It was a personal choice . . . something always sung in my house.
Q: I understand that at some point, when you were proposing "Schindler's List," a studio executive suggested that you just make a donation to some Holocaust museum and save the distributor a lot of grief?
A: Yes, this was one of the key motivators for me. When I heard that, I felt that this statement was a message. It was sort of a very, very quiet message to be passed on to me, which kind of capped my resolve to make the movie immediately.
Q: What do you hope will be the impact of the movie?
A: I hope that people will say, "Yes, I've heard of the Holocaust, but I never knew anything about the Holocaust and now, maybe, I know more than I wanted to.
I feel I need to tell my children and some day show my children, not only this movie but other films and documentaries about it and I need to be active in remembering. Not just on Jewish holidays and not just on the anniversaries of the Shoah, but as a constant action of simply remembering."
I am not saying that to devote your life to the Holocaust is a definition of being Jewish. I don't believe that. I think every human being owes a moral debt to the past.
Events that are happening as we sit right now, in Bosnia and with the Kurds, just the heinousness of what could take place in the future, should be given some serious time and attention.
And I just felt that sooner rather than later, a movie like this should come out and at least stir the pot.
Q: Was the experience of making "Schindler's List," a kind of re-immersion into Judaism for you?
A: I think it was more of a reaction to my previous re-immersion into Judaism, through the birth of my first child in 1985 and having to make a decision about how I wanted to raise him.
When I began to read books to him, I had to make a choice. Do I read books about Santa Claus or do I read books about Moses, Abraham and Isaac?
I made a very strong choice to raise him Jewish with my first wife Amy Irving, who is half-Jewish.
Then, when I married Kate Capshaw, she converted. Her conversion was a beautiful experience for both of us because I studied along with her.
Q: What kind of Jew would you consider yourself?
A: I have always been private in my practice of Judaism. I don't keep kosher but I observe the holidays. I don't want to find a clever sort of moniker for what it is because I haven't really defined it. I have a very strong, personal belief in Judaism.
Because it wasn't something to write home about when I was a child. In the affluent areas, Gentile areas, where my parents brought us up, there was no place to practice being a Jew. Except privately, at home or shul.
So I would characterize myself as being a private individual with a strong faith in God and in my children's belief in Judaism.
By the same token, I don't keep kosher. I don't speak Hebrew. I used to when I was going to Hebrew School, now I've forgotten it all.
Q: What was your experience with anti-Semitism?
A: The first time I ever experienced anti-Semitism was when I was 16 years old and my family moved from Scottsdale, Ariz., which I loved, to Saratoga in northern California, around San Jose. That was in 1966. I did my last year of high school in Saratoga.
Q: What happened in that school?
A: I was physically abused. I was in study hall, which is a very quiet period, with about 100 kids sitting at school desks. I would have pennies tossed at me, which made a lot of noise when they hit. This would happen to me almost every day.
At one point it became so bad that I stopped going to physical education class because most of the abuse happened during this time.
I am not feeling sorry for myself when I say this, it was just an experience I wasn't prepared for.
I lived within a 20-minute walk of my home and all the kids would walk home to their neighborhoods. But I was the only high-school kid whose mother had to pick him up from school every day so that I would have the protection of the car.
Q: I've read that there was one school bully that you sort of seduced by offering him a part in a film you were making, and that soon afterward he became your friend?
A: No, he never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred in a way, by doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator.
In my own scenario, I used him as an actor in one of my little 8mm amateur movies. I mean, Schindler consorted with the enemy and got what he wanted. I found that this was a real relationship.
Q: The old movie moguls, the Mayers and Goldwyns and Warners, struggled between being Americans or Jews. They were insecure and overcompensated by trying to prove that they were 150 percent Americans. You're of course from a different generation, but does this conflict ever come up?
A: This is a great question you've asked, because it occurred to me when I was trying to find movies to inspire me to make "Schindler's List," and I couldn't find any. It occurred to me that the predominant number of studio heads in the golden era of Hollywood were all Jews. But they did not produce movies of the Jewish race, religion, culture or tradition.
I also understand that they struggled between the Jewish and American standards of culture and race and chose being American with fierce determination. All I can say is that it's reflected in the choices of movies that they didn't make.
It was kind of stunning that I was only able to find documentaries that chronicled the Holocaust. Documentaries were my only source of inspiration. Because Hollywood flees from subjects like this. They always have and always will.
It's only because of who I am that I got this film off the ground. No one else could have gotten any studio to say yes to this project.
I don't ever boast about my own accomplishments, but this time I said, well, thank God that I was able to become some kind of a 900-pound gorilla, so I could have the ability to get this project off the ground.
by CNB