-
16 MENSCH
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
S I X T E E N I'VE SAID TO HIM, "WHO AREYOU? I HARDLY KNOW YOU." BUT STEVEN JUST KEEPS GROWING IN ALL DIRECTIONS. — L E A H A D L E R , 1 9 9 4 H E N he went to Poland in 1993 to make Schindler's List, Spielberg was "hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. AndJewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time." The anguish he felt while making Schindler's List was translated directly to the screen. While immersed in his re-creation of the Holocaust, the viewer can readily understand why the filmmaker felt "constantly sickened" and "frightened every day" on location in Poland. To the almost overwhelming burden of paying witness to the history of his people was added the personal burden of finally coming to terms with himself. Schindler's List became the transforming experience of Spielberg's lifetime. Making the film after more than a decade of hesitation and avoidance was the catharsis that finally liberated him to be himself, both as a man and as an artist, fully integrating those two, sometimes distinct-seeming halves of his personality. What made the day-to-day experience in Poland bearable was what made it possible for him to undertake the project: the presence of his family. Before undertaking his "journey from shame to honor," Spielberg "had to have a family first. I had to figure out what my place was in the world." His second w M i H S C H M E N S C H 4 1 5 wife, Kate, accompanied him to Poland with their five children.* His parents and his rabbi also paid visits to the location of what Jewish Frontierreviewer Mordecai Newman called "Spielberg's bar mitzvah movie, his cinematic initiation into emotional manhood." When he finally accepted his long-overdue Academy Award for directing Schindler's List, Spielberg thanked Kate "for rescuing me ninety-two days in a row in Krakow, Poland, last winter when things got just too unbearable." He told the press he "would've gone crazy" without his family there. ". . . My kids saw me cry for the first time. I would come home and weep, not because I was feeling sorry for anybody—I would weep because it was 50 bloody painful. "Every couple of weeks, he said, "Robin Williams would call me with comic CARE packages over the telephone to try to get me to laugh." Even in those depths, Spielberg was never far from his more familiar niche as a crowd-pleasing commercial filmmaker. Three nights a week, he came home to the small hotel he had rented for his family in Poland, switched on a satellite dish situated in the front yard, and worked on JurassicPark, which had finished principal photography barely three months before Schindler's List began filming on March 1, 1993. Because Schindler's List had to be filmed while it was still winter in Poland , Spielberg left many of the final postproduction chores of his dinosaur movie in the hands of George Lucas. But he reserved for himself the final decisions about the creation of computer-generated dinosaurs and the movie 's soundtrack. High-tech communication methods and computer technology enabled him to see evolving images at Industrial Light & Magic in northern California, along with such friendly faces as those of special-effects wizard Dennis Murenand producer Kathleen Kennedy (who shared producing chores with Gerald R. Molen). Each night when they were finished, composer John Williams would transmit his score, which Spielberg played on large speakers. All this interaction was transmitted from California to Poland and back again, scrambled to avoid piracy. Spielberg's schizoid, "culturally dislocating" existence working on both films simultaneously was "an unusual set of circumstances, and all my own doing. I don't regret it, but I spend two hours on Jurassic Park, and it takes a while to get back into Schindler's List." That bifurcated focus perfectly expressed the duality of his artistic personality at a crucial turning point in his career. His career-long balancing act between the somewhat arbitrarily defined poles of artist and entertainer, while never quite so stark as it was during those months in 1993, had made Spielberg a great popular artist.Even if the purely crowd-pleasing side of his nature often seemed dominant, his * Including his son by Amy Irving, Max...