The 1972 Munich Olympics was meant to be a proud moment for Germans. Instead, it will always be remembered as a massacre, as the time when eight members of the Palestinian militant group Black September raided the Olympic village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team and took another nine hostage. Those captives would later die on live television, a live horror show that is now at the heart of the pulsating new film September 5.
“I have recollections of that famous image of the Black September member on the balcony from when I was very young,” says John Magaro, the Jewish-American star famed for indie movies such as First Cow and the Oscar-nominated Past Lives, who here plays Geoffrey Mason, producer for American television network ABC. And indeed, the sight of a balaclava-wearing terrorist surveying the scene is terrifying and every bit as memorable to those who saw it as, say, the Iranian embassy siege that took place in London eight years later.
John Magaro (left) and fellow cast members in September 5[Missing Credit]
While this act of brutal terrorism has been depicted in movies before – notably in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 thriller Munich – September 5 looks at it from a very specific viewpoint. With Munich 1972, the first Olympics to be covered live via satellite, the film is set almost entirely in the cramped, sweaty, smoke-filled gallery of ABC TV’s sports division. “We knew that this was a turning point in media history,” says the film’s Swiss-born director Tim Fehlbaum, who notes how these sportscasters were forced to pivot from “the joyful story of the Olympic Games” to cover its very antithesis.
Ever since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last autumn, the film has won critical acclaim. Nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture (in the drama category), September 5 will also see Fehlbaum and his co-writers Alex David and Moritz Binder compete in the Best Original Screenplay category at next month’s Oscars. “When I met Tim, I could just tell that this guy could make a good film. I could see his urgency to tell the story,” says Peter Sarsgaard, star of everything from Boys Don’t Cry to The Batman, who features in September 5 as ABC president of sports Roone Arledge.
The film raises questions about the ethics of journalism, and how life-and-death situations should be covered. “We’ve seen people get killed on live television in the States,” says Sarsgaard. “And sometimes they’ll even play it in a loop on CNN or elsewhere. For me, this actually makes us more inured to violence. It’s not like I feel more and more each time. One thing repeated horrific images can do is anaesthetise you.”
Peter Sarsgaard as ABC Sports president Roone Arledge[Missing Credit]
Did it change the way he thought about the media? “I’ve been around journalists my entire life,” says Sarsgaard, who previously starred in Shattered Glass, the 2003 media-centric movie about shamed New Republic reporter Stephen Glass. “Many of my good friends are journalists, and, no, I don’t think it has changed my idea of them. There are some sports guys in this movie who are better journalists than the news journalists who were out in the world at that time, and there are probably some news journalists who would be better sports guys! There’s no clean divide to me…especially now that we have infotainment journalists.”
Like Sarsgaard, Magaro was drawn more to the media story than the opportunity the film presented to identify with his Jewish heritage. “I’m Jewish, but I’m an actor. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course, but they can also be their own thing. I was more intrigued by the questions about journalism, because, quite frankly, in my life, watching the news, especially in American media, seeing how sensationalism has overtaken journalism in a lot of ways was a much more interesting story to me than the Jewish elements of the story. I think this is the story we are telling. What does it mean to be a journalist today? What does it mean to tell a story about lives being lost?”
What does it mean to be a journalist today? What does it mean to tell a story about lives being lost? ”
Magaro and Sarsgaard co-star with a host of fine actors, including Britain’s Ben Chaplin (Apple Tree Yard) who has been cast as Mason’s mentor Marvin Bader. Joining them is rising German actress Leonie Benesch (from Oscar-nominated drama The Teacher’s Lounge) who plays translator Marianne, a character amalgamated from several others. How did he manage to pull together such a prestigious ensemble cast? The director admits it helps when you have the likes of Sean Penn on board. “His production company Projected Picture Works is behind the film and his name opens doors,” he admits.
In some ways, Fehlbaum (who made his feature debut back in 2011 with the sci-fi flick Hell) has been plotting this movie since he was a teenager. Back then, he watched Kevin Macdonald’s propulsive Oscar-winning documentary One Day In September, which covered the events of the 1972 terror attacks with brilliant economy. “Before that documentaries were something boring that you would watch at school. Unlike today, they were also something that you would rarely see in the theatre. It really was a new thing and it completely changed my view on documentaries.”Fehlbaum emulated Macdonald’s own depth of research, something that shines through the movie – right down to 1970s broadcast equipment (then state-of-the-art) with which the cast interacts, and which was collected by the production team from museums, television studio basements and private individuals.
Extensive research: September 5's director Tim Fehlbaum[Missing Credit]
“You would be surprised at the number of passionate collectors who collect these walkie-talkies,” he chuckles. “I remember, I walked through the set with the production designer, and he said, ‘Basically everything [in TV equipment terms] that still exists from that period in Europe is now in our studio!’” Magaro also took his research to new levels, speaking with the real Geoff Mason and “shadowing” those who worked in sports broadcasting. “I spent about a month and a half… hearing the quickness, hearing the way they talked, hearing how they ran a show, hearing how there’s no dead air. You have to keep everything moving, how you plot ahead to call the show, how you just have to trust the process and make the decisions. I lived like this for six weeks before we got on set. I couldn’t have done the film without it [this preparation].”
The film also seamlessly integrates real footage from the broadcasts of the famed ABC television host Jim McKay, with whom the cast was able to react to as his words were played “live” on set. “To me, he always felt like the number one actor on the call sheet,” says Sarsgaard. “I had seen the footage. I mean, that was our model and we had to get into the world of this truthful, direct person. We had to create a situation whereby if you cut from us to Jim McKay, it wouldn’t look as if there were pretend actors.”
Fehlbaum had finished shooting the film, and was in the editing suite, when October 7 happened. “Of course, I was deeply affected by what happened and also by the tragic events that followed,” says Fehlbaum. Could – and would – he have made his film after those events? “That’s a good question and one I have asked myself. Yes, I think we could still make it because we are not trying to make a [political] statement.”
While it was obviously shocking for the cast to have completed the shoot shortly before October 7, Sarsgaard is philosophical about the timing. “There have been many, many escalations in this conflict and this is the latest,” says Sarsgaard. “I mean the thing people are reacting to in the film could be happening today, right? The journalistic questions we ask feel relevant because the situation we depict feels contemporary.”
People are reacting to in the film could be happening today, right? The journalistic questions we ask feel relevant because the situation we depict feels contemporary. ”
“The conflict dominates the news now but it has never stopped,” says Magaro. “This is a story about the media and our digestion of news, and I hope that it makes people have discussions with their friends and with their families about this. I especially hope this for Americans, because the way Americans consume news has become very toxic. I hope this film causes Americans to ask what we want out of the news, to ask and what is right and what is wrong.”
September 5 is in cinemas on February 6
