How Adam Sandler cheered up the set of ‘Schindler’s List’: “It would help them laugh”
Actors and movies don’t come more disparate than Adam Sandler and Schindler’s List, which didn’t prevent the actor and comedian from having a surprisingly profound and much-needed impact on a production that physically, mentally, and emotionally drained its cast and crew.
For the last three and a half decades, Sandler has traded mainly in stupidity. From his Saturday Night Live days through to his breakout run in the mid-to-late-1990s that made him one of Hollywood’s hottest comedic commodities, the funnyman has rarely deviated from the formula that got him there.
He usually plays screaming man-children, idiots, or arrogant arseholes in films where a cabal of close friends typically surrounds him. Of course, there have been an increasing number of exceptions to the rule in recent years, which has been a most welcome development because the evidence is there to prove that Sandler is a fantastic actor when he drops the schtick and focuses on drama.
At the complete opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning masterpiece is a touching, haunting, and emotionally evocative depiction of a rare ray of light during one of history’s darkest moments. It was a monumental undertaking, even for one of Hollywood’s finest directors, and his closeness to the material frequently left him a wreck at the end of the day.
To combat the crushing weight on his shoulders from trying to do the story justice, Spielberg needed some levity to offset the rigours of pouring his heart and soul into Schindler’s List. In an unexpected development, he found it through ‘Red-Hooded Sweatshirt’, a song that’s literally just Sandler strumming a guitar and singing about a jumper.
It was a popular song, but its creator couldn’t have imagined that he’d get a phone call out of the blue from Spielberg, who wanted him to know how much it helped him. “Somebody gave him my number and he left a nice message,” Sandler told Howard Stern. “He was shooting Schindler’s List. He left a message saying the shoot was very difficult, and he said somebody brought that song I had.”
“They watched that, and it would help them laugh,” he explained. Needless to say, laughs were hardly in abundance when Spielberg was making his powerful World War II-set drama either in front of the cameras or behind them, but the filmmaker couldn’t have been more thankful when someone introduced him to the simple wonders of Sandler crooning about an item of clothing.
The seven-time Oscar-winning classic was a labour of love for everyone involved, and dealing with such weighty material on a daily basis could have worn everyone down, especially Spielberg, since he was at the helm. Fortunately, someone thought he’d get a kick out of Sandler’s ‘Red-Hooded Sweatshirt’, and he did, to such an extent that he felt compelled to reach out and thank him for his inadvertent assist.
The timing was pretty much perfect, too, with Schindler’s List beginning principal photography on March 1st, 1993. Meanwhile, Sandler had performed the song for the first time on SNL on February 13th.
