Steven Spielberg's 1993 film stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a businessman who owns a factory during the Holocaust and manages to save more than a thousand Jewish people by convincing the Nazis that he needs the Jewish people to serve as workers for his factories.
In an interview, Spielberg said he considered making the film entirely in Polish and German, but that he decided to have only some of the movie be in those languages "because I wanted people to watch the images, not read the subtitles. There's too much safety in reading. It would have been an excuse to take their eyes off the screen and watch something else."
Spielberg also discussed how real workers from Schindler's factory came to the set and told him stories. "A lot of them had never actually spoken to Schindler because they were only one of twelve hundred workers on the factory floor," the director said. "But they had observed him. And because they were observing him, they were really able to see him and understand him. He would smoke a cigarette only two puffs and put the cigarette down, so somebody could pick it up and douse the tip and then trade it for more soup or more bread."
