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Press Conference Interview With Steven Spielberg On Schindler’s List 20th Anniversary

Diector Steven Spielberg made a very special appearance at The Chandler School in Pasadena last week to celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of his greatest and most important movies, Schindler’s List, and to announce the launch of the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Video Challenge.

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We Got This Covered: Before the film came out, how were you introduced to Schindler’s story and what pushed you to put that story on the big screen?

Steven Spielberg: You know something, I am very, very fortunate because my parents were not in the Holocaust. So many survivors will never speak a word to their children about what they experienced in Eastern Europe, but they will talk to our interviewers and they have given their testimonies, and in those days they passed the videocassette along to the children and they allowed their words on the cassette to communicate to their kids where they cannot do that in the same room. Making eye contact was often much too difficult for a survivor to do. My parents who were not involved in the Holocaust often talked about the Holocaust, so it was a subject that was very open in my formative years. I saw a lot of documentaries and I was just a passive witness that wasn’t doing very much about it; I was just taking it all in. I couldn’t believe that something like that could happen in the 20th century; it was just unfathomable, but it did.

My very first experience learning how to count was off the numbers on the arm of an Auschwitz survivor. My grandmother would teach English in Cincinnati, Ohio to Hungarian Holocaust survivors and they all had the numbers from the death camps, and I actually learned how to count on the numbers on an arm. So this was part of my upbringing.

There was a man who was the head of Universal Studios who had read about the book by Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List, and he sent me the New York Times book review the week that E.T. opened in 1982. So that was the first time I read about the book, and I read the book shortly after that, and then he purchased the book. So I kind of credit him for introducing me to Thomas Keneally and the Oskar Schindler story.

We Got This Covered: How would you say working on Schindler’s List has transformed you as a filmmaker, as an artist and as a human being 20 years later?

Steven Spielberg: It took me 10 years not only to develop screenplay with Steve Zaillian, but it took me 10 years to work up the courage to make the film. I know I couldn’t have made the quantum leap from E.T. to Schindler’s List. That would’ve been impossible to make that the film I did right after E.T. I wasn’t ready and I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t have the maturity to tell the story and I had to sort of work my way up to it, always being afraid of the great responsibility to tell any story of the Holocaust or the Shoah. So it took me about 10 years to sort of increase my skills and my own maturity to be able to make adult films like The Color Purple and then Empire of the Sun before I would dare to even explore Schindler’s List on film. When it finally came time to tell the story, I went to Poland and realized quite instantly that as a Jew I wouldn’t have survived five minutes there in 1944, so it was a profound experience.

I had this idea of when I’m shooting a scene that tells a survivor’s story; let me see if the survivor would agree to come back to Poland to be witness to the scene that we are shooting about their lives. Most everybody turned down the offer. They had not been back to Poland since the Holocaust and I can certainly understand that. But four or five very courageous women, not men but women, took us up on our invitation. They came to Kraków while we were shooting to witness the scenes about their lives that we were exploring and retelling, and there was this one woman who said to me “please listen to my story” and I said “I’m telling your story.” She said “you’re telling this much of my story. You have to listen to this much of my story. Will you have the time to sit with me and let me tell you everything?” And that moment with her was the catalyst for the Shoah Foundation. That’s where I realized if she was so willing to unburden herself or at least enlighten me and share the crimes of humanity that were perpetrated on her, will there be others that will talk as openly as she did?

That concludes the press conference but we’d like to thank Mr. Spielberg for taking the time to talk about his film. Be sure to pick up Schindler’s List on Blu-Ray when it releases this Tuesday.