Where to watch Schindler's List (1993)

Trivia & production notes

• Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Jews saved by Schindler, spent decades trying to get his story made into a film, first attempting to produce a biographical movie with MGM in 1963 before the project fell through.
• Steven Spielberg initially told Pfefferberg at their first meeting in 1983 that he would begin filming in ten years, and the director later admitted he felt guilty about delaying the project because he was unsure if he was mature enough to make a Holocaust film.
• Martin Scorsese was attached to direct Schindler's List in 1988, but Spielberg offered him Cape Fear instead because the director felt he needed to make the Holocaust film himself for his own family.
• Spielberg decided to finally make the film after noticing Holocaust deniers receiving serious media consideration and worrying that rising neo-Nazism after the fall of the Berlin Wall reflected dangerous tolerance similar to the 1930s.
• Sid Sheinberg agreed to greenlight Schindler's List only on the condition that Spielberg first direct Jurassic Park, believing that making the Holocaust film would emotionally prevent the director from then helming a blockbuster adventure movie.
• Liam Neeson was cast as Oskar Schindler after Spielberg saw him perform in the Broadway production of Anna Christie in December 1992, and the director chose the relatively unknown actor specifically to avoid letting the star's celebrity overshadow the character.
• Ralph Fiennes gained 28 pounds to play Amon Göth and studied historic newsreels and spoke with Holocaust survivors who knew the real commandant, becoming so convincingly similar in appearance that survivor Mila Pfefferberg trembled with fear when she met him.
• The character of Itzhak Stern was created as a composite of three different real people: accountant Stern, factory manager Abraham Bankier, and Göth's personal secretary Mietek Pemper.
• Spielberg conceived the epilogue featuring 128 actual Schindler survivors paying respects at his grave in Jerusalem only halfway through filming, forcing producers to scramble to locate and fly in the surviving Jews.
• During filming in Poland, Spielberg experienced profound emotional upheaval as the Holocaust subject matter forced him to confront his own childhood experiences with antisemitism and the stories his grandparents had told him about the Shoah.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Schindler's List, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.