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other pictures and strug gled with ambivalence about tackling the Holocaust. At
one point he tried to pass the proj ect on to director Roman Polanski. Having sur-
vived the Kraków Ghetto— and lost his mother, who was gassed at Auschwitz—
Polanski could not face the task either (though he eventually directed his own
Holocaust film, The Pianist, 2002). Dissatisfied with Keneally’s script, which he
found too long and not evocative enough, Spielberg hired Kurt Luedtke (Out of
Africa) to write the next draft in 1984. Luedtke gave up almost four years later,
finding Schindler’s change of heart too unbelievable to convincingly depict. In 1989
Martin Scorsese took over as director and hired Steven Zaillian to write another
draft of the script, but soon had second thoughts. Scorsese swapped pictures with
Spielberg, handing the Schindler proj ect back to him in exchange for a remake of
Cape Fear (1991). Fi nally in full control of his Schindler movie, Spielberg asked Zail-
lian to extend his 115- page draft to 195 pages, fill out depictions of the Schindlerju-
den, extend the ghetto liquidation sequence to full effect, and make Schindler’s
moral transition more gradual and ambiguous. Spielberg also did extensive research
on his own. Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, and Warren Beatty all offered to play
Schindler, but Spielberg wanted Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (who would later play Hit-
ler in Downfall, 2004). Failing to secure Ganz, Spielberg offered the part to Harrison
Ford, who also turned it down. Spielberg ended up casting the relative unknown
Liam Neeson in December 1992, after watching him portray Mat Burke in a
preview of Eugene O’Neil’s Anna Christie on Broadway. For Amon Göth (1908 –
1946), a psychopathic SS officer who was Schindler’s influential friend, Spielberg
cast Ralph Fiennes after seeing him play T. E. Lawrence in A Dangerous Man: Law-
rence after Arabia (1992). In uniform Fiennes looked so much like Göth that when
survivor Mila Pfefferberg met him, she found herself shaking uncontrollably. Spiel-
berg cast Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) as Itzhak Stern— a character embodying Schindler’s
conscience that is actually an amalgam of three real persons: Schindler’s accoun-
tant, Stern (1901–1969); his factory man ag er, Abraham Bankier (1910–1956); and
Göth’s personal secretary, Mietek Pemper (1920–2011).
Production
Schindler’s List was shot at or near actual locations in and around Kraków,
Poland, over 72 work days (1 March–1 June 1993), wrapping up four days ahead
of schedule. Spielberg deci ded to film in black and white at the suggestion of his
cinematographer, Janusz Kamiński, who was inspired by an album of photo-
graphs by Roman Wiśniak, a photographer of Jewish settlements in 1920–1939.
To heighten a sense of cinema vérité immediacy, nearly half of the movie was
filmed with handheld cameras. Spielberg considered filming entirely in German
and Polish but deci ded to keep the dialogue in En glish, partly because he felt he
wouldn’t be able to assess per for mances in unfamiliar languages but also to avoid
the distraction that subtitle reading would provide to viewers. The site where the
Kraków- Płaszów concentration camp stood is now a nature preserve, so Spielberg
had a replica of the camp built at the abandoned Liban Quarry outside Kraków,
which was also a Nazi labor camp during the war. Exterior shots of Schindler’s
enamelware factory, 4 Lipowa Street, in the Zabłocie district of Kraków, were filmed
at the actual site (which is now a museum). Interior shots were filmed at a similar