Steven Spielberg picks his most important career achievement
Saying that Steven Spielberg is one of the most significant auteurs of all time is a truth that even proponents of the alternative fact cannot deny. The most commercially successful filmmaker in history, Spielberg is a pioneer of both the New Hollywood movement and the blockbuster, with his achievements famous the world over.
Across his long career, Spielberg has delivered a remarkable array of culturally vital titles, including Jaws and the Jurassic Park series. Elsewhere, the production companies Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks – that the director co-founded – have also had a hand in delivering a host of iconic projects.
Spielberg has achieved a great deal in his career, but the question of what has been his most important triumph has long puzzled fans. However, the director put the issue to bed forever during a recent appearance on the BBC radio flagship, Desert Island Discs. The filmmaker revealed that he deems the Shoah Foundation, an organisation birthed out of the success of his 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, as his defining moment. The Foundation has created an extensive archive of Holocaust remembrance through film, and being of Jewish extraction, this holds immense importance to Spielberg.
Explaining how he came to make the movie, the director explained that he first read Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark, back in 1982 but that he waited for a decade before making the project. “I didn’t think I was emotionally or even in terms of my skill sets as a filmmaker ready,” he said. “I had made a lot of popcorn movies and I made a lot of films based on relatively high concepts in terms of genre and I hadn’t made any adult movies. I only really understood how to make that movie [Schindler’s List] once I had directed Color Purple and once I had directed Empire of the Sun.”
Looking back on his relationship with Judaism, Spielberg explained: “I wasn’t raised Orthodox. We were kind of reformed Conservative Jews. We were only Orthodox when my grandparents moved in or came to visit us for a week and then suddenly out went the lobsters and clams… and the meat and everything became kosher. And the second they left the lobsters came back!”
“It wasn’t that I was so much in denial that I was Jewish,” he continued, “It was just I didn’t make an issue of it. I didn’t bring it up in conversation. I didn’t talk about the fact I’ll be out of school next week and the week after because of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, I never announced that ahead of time.”
“What came out of Schindler’s List, which is more important than the film itself,” Steven Spielberg added, “Was the formation of the Shoah Foundation where I was able to empower interviewers and videographers to go all around the world, to gather personal first-person testimonies from Holocaust survivors, who voluntarily would come and talk to our cameras, to create an archive of remembrance. That’s what I’m proudest of – now it’s the USC Visual History Shoah Foundation.”
