Why Billy Wilder Wanted to Make ‘Schindler’s List’

Billy-Wilder-GettyImages-7.jpg, default, Billy Wilder, 1977, photo: s.e.t. / Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

Billy Wilder’s career boasts some of the most celebrated films of the 20th century, which inspired directors as diverse as Lynch, Tarantino, Anderson, and Scorsese. However, his bid to make Schindler’s List, a film ultimately directed by Steven Spielberg, remains a lesser-known yet revealing chapter from the twilight of his career.

Billy Wilder created iconic movies such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment and Some Like it Hot that have gone down in film history. However, most movie-lovers do not know that Wilder had his heart set on directing Schindler’s List, a film ultimately directed by Steven Spielberg – which went on to receive critical acclaim and 7 Academy Awards.

‘It would have been something of my heart, you know,’ he told fellow director Cameron Crowe, in a moment of candour.

In this second piece marking the 120^th anniversary of the film-maker’s birth, we explore how family ties with Kraków did not end in 1916, when the Wilder family moved to Vienna, halfway through the First World War.

As it was, the director’s mother Eugenia returned to Kraków in 1931, after her husband’s premature death in 1928, aged 56. She remarried, and was living just off the Main Market Square at the outbreak of the next world war, in 1939.

Critical choices

Billy Wilder was a man famed for his charm and sparkle – both in person and in the confections he dished up for his audience. When comedian Dick Cavett started going to Hollywood parties in the 1960s, he asked an insider if there were any rules he should follow.

‘Yes,’ his source replied, without batting an eye-lid, ‘try and sit next to Billy Wilder!’

The director was an endless source of anecdotes, told with self-effacement and dry humour. He was capable of giving the darkest subjects a wry twist. Still, when telling a story, he often spun it slightly differently each time, and with conflicting dates, leaving biographers to scratch their heads. One such researcher was Joseph McBride, author of Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge.

‘I have often felt like Dr Watson in “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes”, trying to probe the firmly barricaded personality of a legendary man who gratified the press’s need for a colourful and amusing character but remained a somewhat enigmatic figure due to his emotional aloofness.’

When his father died in 1928, Billy, then 22, was already working in Berlin as a journalist, while also trying to get his foot in the door of the film world. Berlin was the hotspot of the European film industry at the time. Several trailblazers had already been cherrypicked by Hollywood, like Ernst Lubitsch, who would later become a mentor to Wilder, and a collaborator on his first Hollywood hit as a screenwriter – Ninotchka (1939). But the biggest array of talent – about 1500 film professionals – fled after the Nazis took power in 1933. Billy went first to Paris, and then to America in 1934.

‘The optimists died in the gas chambers,’ he said many years later. ‘The pessimists ended up with pools in Beverley Hills.’

Close-up on a cataclysm

In May 1945, Billy Wilder boarded a plane for Europe. Just a few days earlier, tens of thousands had thronged the streets of New York in celebration of victory in Europe – VE Day.

The director left New York with the rank of colonel and a matching uniform to boot. He had been approached by the US Office of War Information, which had learnt that he had worked in the movies in Berlin before Hitler came to power. Perhaps he was just the man they needed to get the German film industry back on its feet – and kickstart the de-Nazification process.

It was a cathartic journey. Wilder had left Europe in 1934, with barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a rudimentary grasp of English. Now he was returning with five Oscar nominations under his belt, just a few months away from winning his first two. Yet he was also returning to a continent in ruins. On a familial level, the situation could hardly have been more poignant – he still had no knowledge of what had happened to the majority of his relatives, including his own mother.

Wilder arrived in Berlin by jeep in August. While filming an army documentary, he joined a flight over the city.

‘I had wanted to see Berlin again. It wasn’t there. It looked like the world had come to an end. Kaput. I had mixed feelings. I wanted to see the Nazis destroyed, but the city destroyed…’

One of the tasks he was given involved opening German civilians’ eyes to the scale of the atrocities that had been committed by the Nazi German regime. Screenings were held of footage taken during the liberation of concentration camps. Wilder had to edit some of this material himself. The short documentary Death Mills (1945) was made from footage gathered by the British and Soviet armies.

Wilder left Europe in October, convinced that most of his family had died in Auschwitz.

Missing ‘Schindler’s List’

Although Wilder tended to maintain an upbeat front, living up to his reputation as an irrepressible wit, the fate of his family haunted him until the end. He acknowledged being wracked by ‘fury, tears, reproaches,’ in one of the last interviews he gave for The New York Times.

By the mid-1980s, he had gotten stuck in a rut. On the one hand, he was getting showered with awards for lifetime achievement, yet on the other, he was having difficulty getting new projects off the ground. This went on for years. Then he came across a novel that struck home.

Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark was set in Nazi-occupied Kraków, and it drew on interviews with Holocaust survivors who had been forced labourers at the enamelware factory of German industrialist Oskar Schindler. The entrepreneur gradually realised that the lives of his predominantly Jewish workforce depended on him, and he used all his wits to protect them. The protagonist was far from being a conventional hero. Yet Wilder had never been interested in black-and-white characterisation. He became determined to make the film. It would be his comeback – and his farewell to the silver screen. Yet as it turned out, someone already had first say on who would make the film.

Steven Spielberg had acquired the rights to adapt Schindler’s Ark shortly after the novel was published in 1982. Yet for many years, he was nervous of taking up directing duties himself, worried that he was not mature enough. At one point, he offered the job to someone who had actually survived the Kraków Ghetto that the Nazi Germans had set up in 1941 – Roman Polański. A child at the time, he escaped from the ghetto and Polish families sheltered him until the end of the war. But he declined. Later, Martin Scorsese was attached to make the film. But eventually, he pulled out.

Wilder went to see Spielberg in person. ‘He was a gentleman, of course, and we acknowledged each other’s strong desires,’ Wilder told Crowe, in a series of interviews about the director’s life. ‘In the end, he could not give it up’. Wilder said that that he had wanted to make the film as ‘a kind of memorial to my mother and my grandmother and my stepfather’.

Several details that Wilder was unaware of show that the script was even closer to his mother’s experience than he knew. Meticulous research by Wilder biographer Andreas Hutter confirms that Wilder’s mother was actually killed at the Płaszów forced labour camp, on the outskirts of Kraków. The very same camp that Oskar Schindler had diverted his labourers away from, through a combination of charm, bribery and determination. Billy Wilder’s mother Eugenia had not had the luck to feature on Schindler’s rescue list. She died at the camp in 1943, aged 61. Her second husband, Bernard Siedlisker, who had run a perfume business in Kraków before the war, shared a similar fate, dying at the Bełżec death camp in 1942. Billy’s maternal grandmother perished in the Nowy Targ Ghetto.

By the time Spielberg made Schindler’s List, Wilder was already in his mid-80s. Fans can speculate about how the film would have turned out. But in the end, Wilder himself was not bitter about missing his chance. ‘They got the best,’ he told Variety magazine in December 1993, within days of the film going on general release. ‘They couldn’t have gotten a better man. The movie is absolute perfection.’

He promptly sat down to write Spielberg a congratulatory letter.

The outsider who conquered Hollywood

Billy Wilder once described the world of his childhood as one of ‘whipped cream and cream cakes’. Yet by the time his family moved from Kraków to Vienna in 1916 that world was collapsing. Rationing and social unrest had become the norm in the Habsburg capital. After the war, Wilder senior was denied citizenship in the new, stump-like Austria. Billy’s sense of being an outsider stayed with him throughout his life. It was a potent factor in his development, as explored by McBride in his recent biography. Yet the film-maker’s charm and humour remained intact. Only a short sentence can be found on his tombstone in Los Angeles, not far from Sunset Boulevard. It’s a riff on the final line of his much-loved comedy Some Like it Hot: ‘I’M A WRITER, BUT THEN NO ONE’S PERFECT’.

The former Nazi German concentration KL Płaszów is in the process of being transformed into a memorial site and museum. An outdoor route opened in 2024, and two indoor exhibitions are due to open in 2027. Find out more here.

_{Sources: Chandler, Charlotte,}_{Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography}_{, 2002; Crowe, Cameron,}_{Conversations with Wilder}_{, 1999; Hutter, Andreas & Peters, Heinz, ‘Gitla stand nicht auf Schindlers Liste’, in}_{Neue Zürcher Zeitung}_{, 2011; Lally, Kevin,}_{Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder}_{, 1996; McBride, Joseph,}_{Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge}_{, 2021; Sikov, Ed,}_{On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder}_{, 1998; Zolotow, Maurice,}_{Billy Wilder in Hollywood}_{, 1977}

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