Word: davidtz
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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...Fiennes in the film's most compelling performance. A man of Schindler's own age and background, he likes to sit on the balcony of his house idly shooting prisoners who happen to wander into his gunsight. He keeps as a servant a Jewish woman named Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), whom he constantly beats and humiliates precisely because against all dictates of ideology, he loves her. The point about this man is that like Nazism itself, his irrationality cannot be contained by any appeal to civility, any system of legal or moral constraint. He is evil in all its banality...
...Spielberg, "the worst days came any time I had to have people take their clothes off and be humiliated and reduce themselves down to livestock. That's what tore me up the most. It was the worst experience in my life." Embeth Davidtz agrees. She was in one of these scenes, nude, her head shaved. "It's not like a love scene where you disrobe and there's something in the moment. Here I'm standing there like a plucked chicken, nothing but skin and bone." That is to say, stripped of human dignity...
...there was no surcease. Leaden skies poured rain and snow almost every day of the company's three-month stay in Poland. "I went in there thinking you separate work from life," says Davidtz. "It's the first time that didn't happen." The goofing around that usually makes the boredom and hardships of difficult movie locations bearable was not available to this company. "The ghosts were on the set every day in their millions," says Kingsley. As Spielberg recalls, "There was no break in the tension. Nobody felt there was any room for levity," and people were always "breaking...