Steven Spielberg was able to count on the unexpected help of Robin Williams to overcome the intense and emotional filming of “Schindler’s List”.
He is considered the king of entertainment, but many tend to forget that Steven Spielberg is above all a very talented filmmaker. Throughout his career, the American director has produced more intimate, sometimes even autobiographical, works alongside his blockbusters.
In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg set about directing one of his most famous films, Schindler’s List. This feature film traces the true story of German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), Righteous Among the Nations, who helped save more than a thousand Jews from deportation by employing them as workers necessary to operate his factories
The filming of the film allowed the director to reconnect with his Jewish origins, disowned during his childhood due to the anti-Semitism of his classmates. It is therefore with a completely personal ambition that Spielberg decided to tell this story, and to show the horror of the Shoah in the most authentic way possible.
The HBO Spielberg documentary devoted to the filmmaker’s career reveals behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s production. The latter ended each day of filming Schindler’s List in a state of intense mental exhaustion, but his determination to bring this story to life allowed him to hold on and see the project through to the end.
Universal Pictures
“I was laughing hysterically because I had so much to get out”
But Steven Spielberg was also able to count on the unexpected support of his friend Robin Williams. The actor, whom he had directed in the film Hook a few years earlier, got into the habit of calling the director every week of filming. These phone calls lasting around fifteen minutes consisted of a series of improvisations without any meaning.
More often than not, Robin Williams ended their conversation – or rather his monologue – without saying goodbye to Spielberg, while the latter burst into laughter. This ritual, which boosted the director’s morale, gave him the idea of sharing this moment with the entire film crew via loudspeaker. Those phone calls – along with watching episodes of Saturday Night Live – allowed the filmmaker to complete the most grueling shoot of his career.
And his work was amply rewarded, since Schindler’s List won numerous prestigious awards including the Oscars for Best Film and Best Director. The film was also recorded in 2004 in the National Film Registry from the Library of American Congress, and is in eighth position in the Top 100 best films of all time according to the American Film Institute.
Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, will leave the Prime Video catalog on January 31.
Discover the list of films currently available on the platform!