Schindler's List (1993)
- To accurately portray their role in Schindler's List, Liam Neeson spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Steven Spielberg.
- Schindler's List utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Steven Spielberg.
Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. Liam Neeson stars as Schindler, a charming, opportunistic businessman who initially exploits cheap Jewish labor for profit but gradually undergoes a profound moral transformation as he witnesses the systematic extermination being carried out by the Nazi regime. Ralph Fiennes delivers a terrifying performance as Amon Göth, the sadistic SS commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp who casually murders prisoners from his balcony.
Spielberg, who had resisted making a film about the Holocaust for years because he felt he wasn't mature enough as a filmmaker, shot the film almost entirely in black and white using handheld cameras to create a documentary-like immediacy. The production filmed at many of the actual locations where the events occurred, including outside the gates of Auschwitz. Schindler's List won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is widely regarded as one of the most important films ever made.
The film earned $322 million worldwide and prompted Spielberg to establish the Shoah Foundation, which has since recorded over 55,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors. The iconic girl in the red coat — one of the only instances of color in the film — became one of cinema's most haunting images, symbolizing the individual human lives lost amid incomprehensible mass murder.
