The most important film of the last 50 years

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2001)

In the same week that ET opened in America, Steven Spielberg read Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, the book based on the true story of one man who rescued more than 1,000 Jews from under the noses of the Nazis.

Intrigued by the subject, the film rights were snapped up and the result was the most talked about movie of the Nineties.
Schindler's List rarely fails to stir the emotions. As with all of the cast - especially Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes - Liam Neeson gives the performance of a lifetime as the suave businessman Oskar Schindler, spurred on by the brief that as many people as possible should see the movie - and not just from a commercial point of view, as Neeson recalled at the time of release.
`I remember Steven saying Don't take this wrong, but I want everyone in the world to see this film,' and I knew exactly what he meant.'
It goes without saying that the Holocaust was such an horrific event that any director would have to feel mature enough to tell their story without letting sentiment get in the way.
So, 10 years after he first read the book, the master movie-maker was ready to tackle the most important film of his career.
He had a self-confessed reluctance to confront the Holocaust and his own Jewishness as a subject.
Following his more human' dramas such as The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, the project was still very much in his mind, but his own involvement would be purely on a production level.
After offering it to fellow film directors Martin Scorsese and Sydney Pollack, they both turned it down and Hollywood's favourite son was left to condense the novel into a three-hour black and white movie.
Having successfully fleshed out many of his childhood fantasies and with events in the Balkans at the time mirroring those of fifty years earlier, 1993 was exactly the right time to address the matter.
So keen was Spielberg to make the film, he left the Hawaiian set of Jurassic Park before the film's completion and flew to Poland to start filming.
Old friend George Lucas was left to edit the dinosaur blockbuster while Steven watched the footage on descrambled satellite transmissions.
Both films went on to achieve widespread acclaim, for different reasons. If JP was the sort of a movie an overexcited child would make, then SL was that of a seasoned film-maker at ease with his craft and intent on delivering something extremely adult.
Schindler's List received 12 Oscar nominations, including the elusive Best Director gong which Steven eventually picked up from an Academy that had ignored many of his movies on the grounds that he had been rewarded enough.
Tackling a drama in which six million people ended up dead was not for the novice film-maker - It was for the brave of heart and a director that could tell such a stark tale without alienating his audience from the outset.
Indeed, only Claude Lanzmann had delivered anything that came close with his epic film Shoah, a nine and a half hour documentary about the Holocaust which wowed the critics in 1985.
For his movie, Spielberg was blessed with a polished screenplay by Steve Zaillian, a young writer who went on to direct his own movies such as the John Travolta vehicle, A Civil Action, and who has just spruced up the dialogue for Silence of the Lambs sequel, Hannibal.
Needless to say, this not the sort of movie you curl up with on a Saturday night with a box of chocs and a six pack. It's a harrowing film which has lost none of its power either on the small screen or in the eight years since its release.