The classic 1993 movie Billy Wilder pleaded to direct: “That was a sad story”
There are many movies out there that were almost directed by someone completely different. I mean, we could’ve had a David Lynch-directed Return of the Jedi, while his panned version of Dune almost had Ridley Scott at the helm.
One of the strangest ‘what ifs’, however, came in 1993, when a certain Old Hollywood legend expressed interest in directing a movie that would instead end up in the hands of Steven Spielberg. You see, the director gave himself to two projects that year, the special effects-laden Jurassic Park, and the crushing Holocaust drama Schindler’s List. But it was the latter, a film far-removed from the world of comedy, that actually attracted the attention of none other than Billy Wilder.
Of course, Wilder didn’t just direct comedies, but when you think of the filmmaker, it’s his incredible knack for making humorous classics like Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and The Seven Year Itch that come to mind. Of course, he explored darker comedic territory with Sunset Boulevard, while Stalag 17 and Witness for the Prosecution took on more serious subject matter, but the idea of Wilder directing Schindler’s List certainly feels far removed from something like a romantic comedy such as Sabrina.
But Wilder had extremely personal ties to the Holocaust, having lost his mother, grandmother, and stepfather at the hands of the Nazis. Born into a Polish-Jewish family in 1906, he had moved to Berlin in the 1920s to become a writer, but as the political climate increasingly became uneasy, he found himself in Paris, and then, Hollywood, so it’s safe to say that he had a lot of firsthand experience with anti-Semitism and the effects of war.
Thus, he was drawn to the production of Schindler’s List, which tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a man who saved predominantly Polish-Jewish refugees, and so he decided to ask Spielberg himself if there was any way that he could direct the movie, hoping that he could make his first film in over a decade. Comedy didn’t seem to be working for Wilder as the landscape had significantly changed since his glory days, and he wondered if a drama about the Holocaust could be the thing he needed to fulfil his artistic desires.
“Billy would say, ‘I just cannot get a film off the ground anymore. Whatever worked for me for 30 years is not working any more. The humour is different. I read these scripts, make some notes, give ideas, and my ideas are ideas that would’ve been brilliant in the 1940s and ’50s, but nobody’s accepting them today’,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter.
Even though Spielberg had been trying to get other directors to take on Schindler’s List for a start, too intimidated by the subject matter, he’d eventually got on board with it. When Wilder asked to direct it, he was just too late.
“That was a sad story,” the director explained, “He came over to Amblin and up to my office, and he said, ‘I just read a book and found out you own it, Schindler’s List. This is my experience before I came to America. I lost everyone over there. I need to tell this story, and I hear you own the rights. Will you let me direct this, and you can produce it with me?’”
It was then that Spielberg had to break the devastating news to the iconic director: “I said, ‘Billy, I’m leaving for Krakow in three weeks’,” he told him, explaining that the film had already been cast, with the crew set to begin shoot at the end of February, “Billy couldn’t speak, and then I couldn’t speak, and I just reached my hand out, and Billy took my hand.”
