Steven Spielberg’s Best Movies: Jaws, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List

Spielberg’s audaciously successful 1993 continued with the December release of Schindler’s List, which he shot in Poland during the day while editing his dinosaur movie at night.

At the time, the haunting black-and-white drama about factory owner (and Nazi Party member) Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 of his Jewish workers from being sent to death camps during the Holocaust, seemed like a departure for the director of all of the above.

And Spielberg thought so, too, recalling to NBC News in 2018 that, when he first read the 1982 book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, “I was making movies about extraterrestrials and movies about Indiana Jones and sharks. I was into mass popular entertainment concepts and I wasn’t ready to go personal like that.”

But once he had The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun under his belt, he explained, that gave him “the courage to take on a story of the Shoah.”

And for his efforts he won his first Oscar for Best Director, one of the seven Academy Awards bestowed on the movie, including Best Picture.