Focus Features

On this day in 1994, Steven Spielberg stood before his peers - and a global television television audience numbering hundreds of millions - and said, "This is the best drink of water after the longest drought of my life." The director was making his acceptance speech for Schindler's List winning the Best Picture Academy Award, just minutes after he himself had won Best Director. However, for a long time, Schindler's List seemed like a movie Spielberg was not destined to make. He was creatively involved in the project, an adaptation of Joseph Keneally's Holocaust novel Schindler's Ark, for years before it finally got made, but as producer not director. He did not feel mature enough to direct the film himself, so approached veteran helmer Billy Wilder to take it on; Wilder did a pass on the screenplay, but opted not to direct. Spielberg also approached Martin Scorsese, but he insisted a Jewish director needed to make the movie. Sydney Pollack also turned down the film, while Sidney Lumet did not want to revisit the Holocaust again after making The Pawnbroker in 1964. Roman Polanski, a Holocaust survivor whose mother had died in Auschwitz, felt the subject was too raw for him. (Less than a decade later, Polanski would make his own Holocaust movie, The Pianist, which itself achieved Oscar glory.) Ultimately, Spielberg - feeling the prescience of the subject in light of the horrific ethnic cleansing in Bosnia - decided he needed to direct the film himself. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that he finally resolved to make Schindler's List when studio executives suggested he make a donation to a Holocaust fund, rather than making a downbeat, uncommercial movie. After the release of Schindler's List, Spielberg went one step better, founding the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization which records the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

On this day in 1994, Steven Spielberg stood before his peers - and a global television television audience numbering hundreds of millions - and said, "This is the best drink of water after the longest drought of my life." The director was making his acceptance speech for Schindler's List winning the Best Picture Academy Award, just minutes after he himself had won Best Director. However, for a long time, Schindler's List seemed like a movie Spielberg was not destined to make. He was creatively involved in the project, an adaptation of Joseph Keneally's Holocaust novel Schindler's Ark, for years before it finally got made, but as producer not director. He did not feel mature enough to direct the film himself, so approached veteran helmer Billy Wilder to take it on; Wilder did a pass on the screenplay, but opted not to direct. Spielberg also approached Martin Scorsese, but he insisted a Jewish director needed to make the movie. Sydney Pollack also turned down the film, while Sidney Lumet did not want to revisit the Holocaust again after making The Pawnbroker in 1964. Roman Polanski, a Holocaust survivor whose mother had died in Auschwitz, felt the subject was too raw for him. (Less than a decade later, Polanski would make his own Holocaust movie, The Pianist, which itself achieved Oscar glory.) Ultimately, Spielberg - feeling the prescience of the subject in light of the horrific ethnic cleansing in Bosnia - decided he needed to direct the film himself. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that he finally resolved to make Schindler's List when studio executives suggested he make a donation to a Holocaust fund, rather than making a downbeat, uncommercial movie. After the release of Schindler's List, Spielberg went one step better, founding the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization which records the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.