How Billy Wilder almost directed ‘Schindler’s List’
The harrowing events of World War Two should be considered a lesson for every single member of planet Earth; after all, as George Santayana wisely wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Films have been excellent in communicating such events to the widest possible audience, with classics such as Elem Klimov’s Come and See, Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge and Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg teaching generations about the horrors of war.
Spielberg’s film has since become one of the most definitive texts that best explain the evil of the holocaust, with the difficult production steadily becoming a passion project for the filmmaker. Starring Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsley, the ‘Best Picture’ winner told the story of Oskar Schindler, the real-life industrialist who saved the lives of over 1,200 Jews during WWII.
It’s for this reason that Spielberg holds the celebrated movie in such high regard, once stating, “I think Schindler’s List is the best film I’ve ever made,” before adding: “I’m really happy that I’m able to say that I admit that I’ve made a picture that’s better than anything else I think I’ve ever made. It was a great honour that the film stimulated conversation everywhere in the world about the holocaust and also allowed me to create the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation”.
Despite the film being the defining moment of Spielberg’s career, he almost didn’t take the movie on at all, with the fate of the project, at one point, being in the hands of none other than Martin Scorsese. Yet, Scorsese didn’t fancy taking on the film after the controversy that was his own The Last Temptation of Christ, so Spielberg swapped Cape Fear for the eventual ‘Best Picture’-winning drama.
Scorsese wasn’t the only filmmaker interested in adapting the book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, however, with Spielberg revealing that the master director Billy Wilder had also tried to prise the project from his hands.
“That was a sad story,” Spielberg admitted in an interview with Hollywood Reporter, “He called me at the office and said, ‘I need to see you, it’s very important.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll come over to your house.’ He said, ‘No, I need to come to you, because I’m going to ask you for something.’ So 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’”.
Feeling bad he couldn’t offer the project to his life-long friend, he explained: “I didn’t know what to say except to tell him the truth. I said, ‘Billy, I’m leaving for Krakow in three weeks. The whole film’s been cast. All the crew’s been hired. I start shooting 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”.
