‘Schindler’s List’ is one of the most famous and decorated movies of all time, but Steven Spielberg didn’t pull it out of his sleeve: since 1963 they were trying to make a film based on Oskar Schindler, but it was not until twenty years later, when the director read ‘Schindler’s Ark’, that the wheel really began to turn. It would still take another decade to make… and ended up there as part of a work exchange with Martin Scorsese.
schindler’s cape
Steven Spielberg didn’t think he was mature enough enough to make a good film about the Holocaust, and he passed the script from hand to hand. He tried to get Roman Polanski, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto, to direct it, but he ultimately rejected the project. There were not a few directors involved in one way or another in its pre-production: Billy Wilder, Brian DePalma, Sydney Pollack… And Martin Scorsese.
Spielberg had meanwhile been developing another film: the remake of a 1962 play known as ‘El cape del terror’ in Spain and that in this version we would end up knowing as ‘Cape Fear’. The director was convinced that the role of the villain was perfect for Bill Murray, but he was not convinced that he was the proper person responsible due to the violence of the tape. After all, he had just finished ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ and it seemed like too radical a turn in his career.
“I didn’t feel like it, it’s as simple as that. I couldn’t find within myself what it took to make a horror movie. about a family persecuted by a maniac,” he commented years later. But, at the time, it wasn’t the only one who was having a regular time at work.
Law of Equivalent Exchange
In another corner of Amblin Entertainment, Scorsese was racking his brains to make ‘Schindler’s List’ a film that would not be as controversial as his (then) last film‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, which was heavily criticized for its nude scenes and its revisionist scenes of the Bible. The last thing the director wanted now was to mess with the Holocaust.
That’s when Spielberg came up with the solution: a project swap. Scorsese would direct ‘Cape Fear’ and he would dare to do that project that he feared so much. The step of Hollywood’s King Midas was given after seeing how, Holocaust denial grew after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Finally, both took control of their respective films, giving two of the greatest hits of 1993.
It has to be said that Scorsese immediately swapped Murray for his friend Robert DeNirobut Nick Nolte was not yet in the equation: for a while, The one chosen to play the protagonist of ‘Cape Fear’ was… Harrison Ford. However, Ford was on to other things and ended up starring in ‘The Mosquito Coast’.
In the end, ‘Schindler’s List’ won seven Oscars and it was the first Academy Award for the director (five years later he would win another for ‘Saving Private Ryan’). For its part, ‘Cape Fear’ obtained two Oscar nominations and was also a box office success, still referenced today. The only thing that remains of what could have been and was not only lives in our imagination.