Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster year: The stressful experience of simultaneously directing ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Schindler’s List’
Steven Spielberg is no stranger to pressure and intense career stress, with productions such as Jaws, Hook and Saving Private Ryan being renowned for their complex shoots and testing challenges. Whether it be the constant failure of the shark in his titular film that led the crew that call it ‘Flaws’ or the feud between himself and Julia Roberts during the Peter Pan adaptation, the filmmaker has truly been through a host of creative horrors over the years.
However, there was one year in particular that proved to be particularly challenging for the director, with the production of two films coinciding putting an enormous emotional strain on Spielberg as he juggled both.
The legendary filmmaker has always been fascinated by war and portraying it in a non-Hollywood way, wanting to create accurate and unglorified depictions of its true horrors. His first venture into this genre came in 1993, when he directed Schindler’s List, perhaps one of that decade’s most heartbreaking stories.
The film follows a businessman called Oskar Schindler who saved over a thousand Jewish people from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in factories during WWII. While it is one of his most critically successful films and won seven Academy Awards for ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Screenplay’, Spielberg has troubling memories of this period in time due to the simultaneous stress of working on Jurassic Park, which was miraculously also produced during the same year.
Jurassic Park is one of the most beloved films from Spielberg’s filmography, with a clever script and wonderful set of characters that created the perfect backdrop to the thrilling dinosaur tale. However, while both films were met with commercial and critical success, the director does not want to relive the most successful year of his career.
Spielberg described the stress of working on both projects at once, saying, “When I finally started shooting…in Poland, I had to go home about two or three times a week and get on a very crude satellite feed to Northern California…to be able to approve T-Rex shots, and it built a tremendous amount of resentment and anger that I had to do this, that I had to actually go from [the emotional weight of Schindler’s List] to dinosaurs chasing jeeps, and all I could express was how angry that made me at the time. I was grateful later in June, though, but until then it was a burden.”
Understandably, this would be an enormous amount of pressure and creative energy to expel at once, with the director almost experiencing emotional whiplash by going from the action-packed drama of Jurassic Park to the harrowing tale of Schindler’s List. Directing one film is a big enough task as it is, without having to extend your energy to consider decisions on an entirely different project. While Spielberg does not hold fond memories of the constant back-and-forth nature of this time and the burden of having to realise both stories at once, the work paid off, and it remains one of the most impressive runs in any director’s career.
