Things about Schindler’s List

War History Online has an article titled 25 Things you didn’t know about Schindler’s List:

Here are 25 things you probably didn’t know about the making of this cinematic masterpiece:

1. One of the twelve hundred Jews that Schindler saved from the Nazis emigrated to the United States in 1948. After opening a luggage store in Beverly Hills, California, he spent forty years trying to make a film about his savior. In 1951, he approached director Fritz Lang, but it didn’t work out. Later on he convinced Thomas Keneally, an Australian author, to write the novel Schindler’s Ark, in 1982.
2. Although Steven Spielberg was one of the very first to acquire the rights, he didn’t feel he was mature enough to direct the movie so he tried to engage other directors. Roman Polanski felt too close to the story, as he himself survived the Holocaust as a child in Krakow, however, he did direct the 2002 film The Pianist, another true life Holocaust story. The same thing happened when Martin Scorsese was asked to give it a go; he insisted that the film should be made by a Jewish director.
3. Although a number of extremely famous names were up on the list for Schindler’s part in the film, Spielberg didn’t want a movie-star actor like Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, or Warren Beatty. Instead he chose Liam Neeson after seeing him in a Broadway production of Anna Christie.
4. Branko Lustig became the producer of Schindler’s List after showing Spielberg his tattooed serial number from Auschwitz on his arm.
5. For the part of Amon Goeth, Spielberg chose Ralph Fiennes after seeing his performance in Wuthering Heights in 1992 and A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia.
6. Spielberg agreed to direct the film, but only after shooting Jurassic Park.
7. Fiennes had to put on thirty pounds to play the part of Goeth.
8. Spielberg didn’t accept to be paid for directing the film, saying that it would be “blood money”.
9. When he filmed at Auschwitz, Spielberg didn’t shoot inside the camp, out of respect for the people who died there.
10. Spielberg wanted to shoot the film in black and white because it reminded him of the black and white documentary footage of the Holocaust, Moviefone reports.
11. Most of the film was shot in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow, however, the Plaszow concentration camp was also built on the edge of the town.
13. During an interview, Spielberg confessed that “the most moving thing that happened for me was on Passover. We had Passover at the hotel, and all the young German actors who were playing Nazis came in with yarmulkes and haggadahs [Passover prayer books] and sat with the Israeli actors and took part in the Passover service. I wept like a baby.”
14. Spielberg spent his days shooting Schindler’s List and his evenings editing Jurassic Park.
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15. In an interview with Time magazine in 2013, Lusting recalled one of the most painful moments for him; the time he had to recruit children to sing songs as they were being herded onto trucks .
16. There were parts of the shoot Spielberg could not watch without breaking into tears. One of them was when some of the Polish extras playing concentration camp prisoners had to be stripped and humiliated.
17. Spielberg insisted on helping the Shoah Foundation record the testimony of numerous Holocaust survivors.
18. During the shoot, Spielberg captured the image of a little girl in a red coat, one of the very few colored scenes in the film. The actress who played the little girl, Oliwia Dabrowska, only three years old at the time ,  had to promise the director she will not watch the film until she was eighteen.
19. There was a real life little girl in a red coat, who survived the Holocaust and wrote a book based on her life, The Girl in the Red Coat, in 2002.
20. She did watch it when she was eleven, and it was traumatizing. However she watched it again at eighteen and “I realized I had been part of something I could be proud of. Spielberg was right: I had to grow up in order to watch the film.”
20. The film was made on a twenty-million-dollar budget, earning a hundred million dollars in North America and two hundred million dollars overseas.
21. During the Warsaw premiere, Spielberg picked up the saxophone and played five or six minutes of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music.
22. Neeson and Fiennes were also seen together in Clash of the Titans in 2010 and 2012’s Wrath of the Titans.
23. Schindler’s List was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won seven of them.
24. There were also some complaints. Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who directed the major Holocaust documentary Shoah, said Schindler’s List was a “kitschy melodrama” and a “deformation of historical truth”.
25. To cheer himself up in order to carry on with the project, Spielberg had Robin Williams phone him.

Rico says he didn't see much kitsch in Schindler’s List, but less, true, in Shoah...