NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Lester Holt talks to Steven Spielberg about 'Schindler's List' 25 years later

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Lester Holt sat down with Steven Spielberg to talk about the legacy of “Schindler’s List,” which was released 25 years ago, and the decision to re-release.

The true story of a Nazi businessman saving the lives of Polish Jews during the Holocaust was not one director Steven Spielberg expected to be a commercial success. I couldn't imagine, based on the story that we told, that an audience would tolerate just the amount of violence, you know, human against human, or inhuman against human. And I just couldn't imagine that audiences would allow themselves to go through a motion picture recreation of the Oscar Schindler story. I was very surprised. But as you're telling the story, you can't pull your punches because history is history. History is history, and if you're making, you know, I felt that if I'm going to make, you know, a story that represents the survivors and represents you're making, you know, I felt that if I'm going to make, you know, a story that

represents the survivors and represents the six million that, you know, who were murdered, I have to be as close to the reality of the people that we had interviewed that told us what it was like for them. Yet Schindler's List became both a box office hit, earning Spielberg his very first best director Oscar, but also a historical touchstone. What took so long to finally do it? I didn't think I was ready to tell the story for a long time. Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal, had read a review in the New York Times review of books on Thomas Keneally's book, Schindler's Ark, as it's called in Europe, and Schindler's

List as it was titled for America. And E.T. had just been released, and we were all very, you know, happy about the results. And he called me on a Sunday, and he said, I want to send you a review of a book I just read. And he had a messenger come over to my house with this review of Schindler's List. And I read it, and I found it very compelling. But he had gone beyond the review he went next the following week and he bought the book for me and yet I wasn't really ready in my own life because I was making movies about extraterrestrials and movies about you know Indiana Jones and sharks and I was into kind of mass popular entertainment concepts and I wasn't ready to go personal like that

and and I received the book before I ever made the two personal movies that allowed me to make Schindler's List. The first was Color Purple, and the second was Empire of the Sun. And those for me were the stepping stones that gave me the courage to take on a story of the Shoah. JOHN CENA, SHOT IN POLAND, WHERE THE REAL OSCAR SCHINDLER FIRST EMPLOYED JEWS TO RUN HIS FACTORY, SPARING THEM FROM DEATH CAMPS. I can't imagine what it was like to shoot this film. You're in Krakow, you're in some of the

places where this actually happened. I know there's cameras around and all the trappings of movie, but the scenes had to have taken a personal toll on you, your crew, your cast? Yeah, well, I think everybody felt that we were memorializing something, and it felt to all of us as if we were shooting in a cemetery. So there was a kind of amazing, I guess you'd just call it an equanimity of respect, and it was quiet on the set, and everybody just did their work. No one was laughing. No one was telling jokes.

No one was talking about football scores back home. It was really, really one of the most—I've only had this experience twice. One was shooting Schindler's List, and the second time, it was very reverential, was shooting Lincoln, the two times that I think the entire company came together to pay their respects and how quietly they dedicated their work. But you met Schindler's survivors along the way. Yes, a lot of them. That's a lot of pressure on a director. You're telling their story. Telling their story.

And you have to make it for an audience, a theater audience, but also you want to be true to them, right? Yeah. But God bless the one Schindler survivor that came over to me. It was, I believe her name was Noisa Nussbaum, and it was the little girl that Schindler kissed that sent Schindler to prison for kissing a Jew, a bit of an act of sedition, I guess they called it. And we invited her, we invited a lot of the survivors

to watch their scenes being reenacted. And she came over to watch us shoot. And she came over to me and she said, I want to tell you my story. And I said, well, I'm telling your story. She said, oh, that's nothing. That was a tiny part of my life. I want to tell you my entire story

of what my life was like, who I am. I want you to see me. And I want to be able to, you tell my story so that story can inform everybody about what happened to me and others like me. And she was the one that put into my mind an idea that maybe when this film was finished, I can tell many stories like hers and send people all over the world to find the survivors and allow all of them to become teachers. And that's how the Shoah Foundation began. The film pulled no punches, remaining bound to a brutal history. The emotion of the movie itself, shooting it, I mean, the scene when the women are led into the shower

and they look at those nozzles, Iles, I felt that I was feeling their fear, that moment of uncertainty about what's about to happen. How difficult was that scene to shoot? Well, let me just say this. No one acted that day. You know, professional actors, a lot of them were brought in from Israel to play the Jewish characters. There was no acting. I mean, they took off their clothes and we were very quiet and we led them toward the showers and there was a massive kind of traumatic reaction that was almost, it just, one reaction

inspired the next reaction and there was kind of a virtual panic that really happened in that very dark space. And it was just frightening. And we did it over and over and over again the entire day. And that was one of the moments on the entire film where nobody had to be an actor. Nobody had to practice their art, their craft. They existed in that reality, and they showed all of us who they really were and how they really felt.

And, you know, violence is a part of so many movies now, and suspense and fear. This movie takes you to a different level of fear and looks at violence through a different lens, if you will. Was that an important leap for you to make? You know, I never thought about the degree of violence I was willing or able to interpret and show an audience. I probably, I shot this movie more intuitively than I've ever shot any movie in my life.

And when I was not using my mind and I wasn't intellectualizing or I wasn't, you know, wrestling with should I do it this way or that way, but the ideas were coming to me so naturally. And there was no effort in for me to know what I wanted to do next during a shooting day. It just seemed to happen. Every shot just seemed to be the only shot that was possible to really tell the truth about that dramatic moment. And so it's one of the few times I've made a movie where I can look back on it and say, I didn't plan anything.

It just came out of me. And it came out of everybody. Ray Fiennes, you know, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley. I think all of us, you know, that story allowed all of us to tap into our intuitive, you know, selves to be the best we could be in those moments. Spielberg insisted the film be shot in black and white. You shoot it in black and white. Yes. What was the thinking about that? I was the only one that wanted to shoot the picture in black and white. The studio didn't. Sid was fine with it, but everybody under Sid was saying, how do we sell cassettes? No one thought the film was

going to make any money, and they were going to go ahead and give me 19, 20 million dollars to go to Poland to tell the story, which I knew was going to be over three hours long. And they were doing it knowing that it was more of a public service message, less of a commercial enterprise. But they were hoping they would make some money when they sold the cassettes, because it was a huge sort of ancillary market for movies in those days, not anymore. But they didn't think they could sell a cassette if it was in black and white. And at one point, they were negotiating with me.

They said, shoot it in color. We'll release a film in black and white, but then we'll release the cassette in color. And I said, no. I don't know the Holocaust in color. I wasn't around then. But I've seen documentaries in the Holocaust. And anybody who's seen any documentaries, they're all shot in black and white. It's my only reference point.

You wanted this to feel real. I wanted it to feel real. PETER BAKER I wanted it to feel real. And the only reference point we had, it was contextualized in black and white for anybody that watched the documentary on it. JIM ZIRIN So there were a few moments of color. And one of the things as I watched it, the little girl in red, what was the symbolism there? Well, you know, in the book, Oscar Schindler, and through all the interviews of all the people that survived the Thomas Keneally interview before he wrote his book, Schindler couldn't get over the fact that a little girl was walking during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto,

and everyone was being put on trucks or shot in the street. And one little girl in a red, red coat was being ignored by the SS. The SS were taking everybody, but somehow they were ignoring this six-year-old child walking down the street wearing the brightest color. And yet she wasn't being seen. And to me, that meant that the people, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, and probably Stalin and Churchill, knew about the Holocaust. It was a well-kept secret and did nothing to stop it. It was almost the Holocaust itself was wearing red. And yet, we did nothing to bomb the Auspahn, the German rail lines.

We did nothing to bomb the crematoria, where there would be many casualties but would slow down the industrialized process of murder for perhaps as long as three to six months, would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and we did nothing about it. And for me, it was like a glaring red flag that anybody, if they were really watching, could have seen. And Schindler, it caught his eye, and that was significant. It caught his attention. That's the other reason it was very important. It caught his attention because he looked at that, and it changed something in him. That moment in his life changed him. The real Schindler was a complicated character.

He was a scoundrel. He's a Nazi war profiteer, yet he does this amazing thing. Was he a difficult character to encompass? Well, he was a grand enigma because he was a character who, you know, he was a bon vivant, for one thing. He liked a good party. He liked women. He liked just the high life. And he was charismatic, and he loved sort of manipulating people into thinking that they were getting the better deal when, in fact, he was. And he was a great manipulator. But there was something about him that he didn't share with very, very many people, and that was he had empathy. In a world at a time where empathy didn't factor in, in terms of an industrialized genocide, such as the Holocaust was,

that here was a man who had a great deal of respect and understanding and empathy, which he hid from his cohorts, his Nazi collaborators, but he shared with his workers, who were all Schindler Jews. This is one of those unfair questions, like who's your favorite child? But your body of work, we're all familiar with you know how many places you've taken us. How does this rank? Schindler. This is the most important

experience I had being a film director and a storyteller because I don't think I'll ever do something anything as you know as important in my to my life the way the way this film personally affected me and my family and Kate, my wife, and my kids who were very young and in Krakow when we made the movie. And so this for me is something that I will always be proudest of. It was an education for you, I assume. Oh yeah.

Although I grew up with the Holocaust being mentioned my family, you know Wasn't shy about talking about it. They didn't call it the Holocaust in those days they called it, you know, the great murders and And so I and we didn't lose direct family. We lost my parents lost second third cousins in Eastern Europe, but This was something that was that was openly talked about in my home. Did you grow? Was that a huge leap for you as a director? Yeah, it was a huge leap.

I think the biggest, the first leap for me, the first step I really took as a director in telling a personal story I think was E.T. That's a very personal story for me. And maybe when I have kids, which I didn't want to have before I made E.T. It could have gone two ways. I could have made E.T. and never wanted to have kids ever after that, but these kids were so wonderful. I wanted to be a dad after I made that movie.

So that was a huge growth spurt for me personally. And the second one was Schindler's List. Very different movies, but I understand. Personal. Personal for him and the actual survivors. What did you get from the actual survivors when they saw the film? A lot of the survivors wouldn't allow themselves to see the film because they had already seen Madonic and Treblinka and Auschwitz and Sobe Bor.

And so a lot of the survivors, you know, truly loved and respected the fact the film was made and the film was getting such a profound response, but they didn't have to endure it. But some of the survivors who were able to find the strength to sit through the film all felt that no movie, no film could ever equal what they experienced, and yet they were very, very happy that we were putting the Holocaust back into conversation again. But I had never heard a survivor say to me, your film was worse than what we went through. Everybody said, your film gets us—people are now talking about—they're not forgetting our stories. We must never forget that the Holocaust happened, and that's why we're happy you made the picture.

But your film doesn't compare to what my experience was, my personal experience was, losing everybody I loved and ever knew in my life. And being the sole survivor, nothing can replace that. Yeah, I can imagine. Is there anything that you wish, that you know today that you wish you knew then when you did this film? No, no. I just, what I'm grateful for and thankful for is the support I got from Kate and my wife.

I couldn't have gotten through the film emotionally without her support every day for almost five months in Krakow. She was there. Every second she was there. My kids were all there, too. Were they on the set during the shoot? Not during the violent parts, but during parts. They came to the set to visit, but Kate was there all the time. But she understood the emotional soul. She understood what I was going through, and I understood what it felt like for her to

experience what her private hell was watching those scenes being shot. So I couldn't have done it without her. Telling the stories of survivors didn't stop with Schindler's List. It was life-changing for Spielberg. He founded USC Shoah Foundation, creating an indelible history of the Holocaust and other genocides, including a visual history archive featuring more than 55,000 testimonies. It's an educational component that is uniquely attached to this film. It wouldn't have happened without Schindler's List. The Shoah Foundation wouldn't have existed. And now we're in an era that anti-Semitism is on the rise.

Xenophobia. We all know what happened in Pittsburgh. Is it possible that somehow we're forgetting, we're losing the impact of that era? Well, I think it's just that hate has become less parenthetical today, it's more a headline. And the Shoah Foundation does its best to counter hate through basically reaching out and trying to teach people about empathy and respect and understanding through testimony, which is why we have 55,000 survivors of the Holocaust as well as other genocides in our database,

and that gets disseminated all over the world. This is a history that might otherwise be lost. This was going to become lost history, yes. What do you want? I mean, this is a movie that you never imagined that this would be a movie they'd be showing in classrooms in 2018. What do you want people to take away from this film who may not—they know about the Holocaust but may not have really focused on it?

JOHN BRENNAN, Well, just that individual hate is a terrible thing. But when collective hate organizes and gets industrialized, then genocide follows. That hate is not something that is not to be taken seriously. We have to take it more seriously today than I think we have had to take it in a generation. JIM ZIRIN. How did the idea come about to re-release it and to remaster it? JOHN BRENNAN.

Well, what happened was we just, you know, we had a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival asked, could we, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary, could the Tribeca Film Festival show the picture? And so we went to this theater, I guess that was called the Beekman, and like 2,500 seats, and they filled the theater up. And I sat, I hadn't seen The Shit Was Listed with an audience in many, many years, and I sat with my wife and we listened and we experienced something I hadn't heard in a long time, which was you could hear a pin drop in that theater.

And it just felt that that audience said to me that we should do something more than just acknowledge 25 years have gone by. Is this an important time to re-release this film? I think this. Is this an important time to re-release this film? I think this is maybe the most important time to re-release this film. Possibly now is even a more important time to re-release Schindler's List than 1993, 1994, when it was initially released. I think it's more at stake today than even back then.