Watch James Cameron and Steven Spielberg discuss ‘Schindler’s List’
Steven Spielberg’s epic picture Schindler’s List remains one of the director’s finest works, a project which explores the true story of a German industrialist who saved over 1000 Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
Based on Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark, Spielberg’s film is a moving piece of cinema that highlights the harrowing atrocities that occurred during World War II, despite the director’s initial hesitancy to go forward with such an intense project.
The production of Schindler’s List, which Spielberg was working on at the same time as the wildly different Jurassic Park, emotionally and physically exhausted the filmmaker. Spielberg’s decision to persevere with the movie resulted in one of his most successful efforts, and the film won seven Academy Awards amongst a plethora of other accolades and grossed $322 million worldwide against a $22 million budget.
In 2011, a two-hour talk between Spielberg, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams saw the directors discuss the brilliance of Schindler’s List. Cameron described the film as “incredibly powerful”, before bringing up the iconic and “moving” motif of the little girl in the red coat.
Describing the motif as “blindingly brilliant”, Cameron argued that something as powerful as a girl in a red coat is “only so simple and obvious in retrospect”. The Titanic director questioned Spielberg’s intentions behind the motif, to which he replied: “She was always the girl in the red coat. Schindler in the book, talks about noticing a girl who, in the purge of the Jewish town ghetto in Krakow was unmolested and left alone, and somehow her coat called so much attention to herself and yet everyone else, other children her age, were being rounded up, some killed, some put on the transports, and yet she escaped – didn’t escape the Holocaust – but she escaped that moment.”
He added: “That was a metaphor for so many countries that knew that the Holocaust was occurring but weren’t doing anything about it. This country knew. Great Britain knew. Russia knew”.
The director also expressed that these countries could’ve done something to stop the vile acts from taking place, such as bomb the crematoria to slow the Nazis down, but they didn’t. “It was so obvious what was happening yet we didn’t act, and in a sense, the girl in the red coat represented that context for me.”
The image of the red coat, which Schindler sees in a pile of dead bodies later on in the film, marks a moment of change for the industrialist, played by Liam Neeson, who is compelled by this image to help save as many people as he can.
Cameron also asked Spielberg whether he had to hold back his “natural instinct” to do complicated or fancy shots as that might “somehow commercialise or cheapen the subject matter.” The Schindler’s List director agreed, claiming that he decided to avoid “crane work” and “sweeping shots of the crane going down low to the street or up over a wall” so that the film would “look as close to a documentary” as possible.
