Steven Spielberg names “the best film I’ve ever made”
Modern cinema wouldn’t look quite the same without Steven Spielberg, the influential filmmaker behind the likes of such giant cinematic classics as Jurassic Park, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jaws. Rubbing shoulders with some of the best directors of all time, including Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa and Alfred Hitchcock, Spielberg’s cinematic legacy is difficult to truly measure.
Though Spielberg might be known for his grand big-budget epics, the director has also taken on a number of smaller emotional dramas, taking on films like The Color Purple in 1985, The Terminal in 2004 and The Fabelmans in 2022. However, no movie has been more personal and cinematically challenging for the director than his 1993 ‘Best Picture’ winner Schindler’s List, starring Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson.
A historic drama taking place in German-occupied Poland during World War II, Schindler’s List tells the true story of the efforts of German industrialist Oskar Schindler who rescued more than 1,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, the country’s largest concentration camp in which over 1million victims were murdered.
Born into a Jewish family, with his father losing many friends in the Holocaust, the story of Oskar Schindler naturally became very close to Spielberg’s heart. Originally popularised in the 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, when the director got hold of the book and discovered Schindler’s story he stated that he would release the film ten years later.
“Schindler’s List took me over a decade to do simply because I recognise its importance,” the director stated in a past interview. “I recognise also the extreme damage that could do if it was not made right, if it didn’t acquit the experiences of the holocaust survivors with honour and remembrance then it would do more harm than good, and so the responsibility for me was daunting, so daunting it put me off the project for almost ten years until I was, I guess, emotionally ready”.
A departure from his contemporary family-friendly projects such as 1989’s Always and 1991’s Hook, Schindler’s List was released the very same year as Jurassic Park, with the director remarkably making both movies simultaneously. Although he was proud of such blockbusters, Spielberg saw the adaptation of Schindler’s Ark as something of a moral obligation.
“It was something I wanted to leave behind for my kids, so when they said ‘dad, what did you do?’, that I could be proud of, instead of saying ‘well, all these big gothic audience entertainments’, I could say, ‘here’s a piece of history you should know about, this is something that happened to our people and to all people,’” Spielberg further explained.
This is likely why Spielberg holds his film in such high regard, seeing it as the pinnacle of his own artistic potential. “I think Schindler’s List is the best film I’ve ever made,” he states, 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”.
Take a look at Spielberg’s full discussion about his 1993 masterpiece, Schindler’s List, which won seven Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’, below.
