After Ovitz’s spoken paragraph of self-aggrandizement, Spielberg swings in with a terse refutation. “I would never have done that. Marty would never have done that. There was never a trade.”
As for what really went down, Scorsese provides a little more detail.
“‘Cape Fear’ was payback,” he says. “The payback at that time was for [‘Last Temptation of Christ’].” Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel was a lightning rod for controversy with devout Christians upon its release in 1988, and the backlash had anti-semitic overtones (given that the studio was run at the time by Jewish executive Lew Wasserman). While Scorsese felt confident defending a film that was in part an exploration of his own Catholic faith, he was worried that he’d be out of his depth handling a project about a gentile industrialist saving Jews during the Holocaust.
“…[B]y the end of it, I felt that if there was any controversy that would come up, I didn’t know if I could’ve stood my ground in terms of who the man [Schindler] was. I didn’t want to do more harm to the Jewish community. I knew it was Steve’s passion project for many years. So I gave it back.”
Several decades on, Scorsese has no regrets.
“[Universal] allowed ‘Last Temptation’ to happen … So I helped them with the ‘Schindler’ thing and I did ‘Cape Fear’ and ‘Casino.’ As Mike Ovitz told me, ‘They’ll get this picture [‘Last Temptation’] made for you, but they’re going to want that pound of flesh.’ So I gave them flesh — I lost some weight.”
And we got three fantastic movies from two masters with a whole lot less involvement from Ovitz than he’d like you to believe. It wasn’t a trade. It was just an extraordinarily convenient situation where two filmmakers were able to do what was best for themselves and the material.