“We Wanted the Audience To Reflect on Our Own Consumption of News and Media,” ‘September 5’ Director Explains Find help us

In 1972, a Palestinian militant organization called Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village during the Summer Games in Munich, Germany. There, they killed two members of the Israeli Olympic Team and took nine others hostage. This event is known internationally as the Munich massacre, told via cinema in documentaries like One Day In September and blockbusters like Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Now, a new film, September 5, tackles the events from a brand-new angle — the ABC sports/news anchors and producers broadcasting the events live for the world to watch on television in real time.

September 5 depicts and recounts the events of the heartbreaking 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis. This film is shot entirely from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew’s coverage of the internationally traumatic events. Peter Sarsgaard leads the ensemble cast as Roone Arledge, the creator of modern sports entertainment, with Ben Chaplin playing Marvin Bader, the VP of Olympic operations during the emergency. The film also co-stars John Magaro (Past Lives) and Leonie Benesch (The Crown).

Collider’s own Steve Weintraub was lucky enough to sit down with the brain trust behind September 5, director Tim Felhbaum and producer John Ira Palmer. Together they discussed the propulsive nature of the story and editing, the difficulty balancing the fast pace with moments of breath, and genuinely hoping audiences leave the theater asking themselves important questions.

Tim Fehlbaum Directed ‘September 5’ As if It Were Broadcast Live

COLLIDER: I have a ton of questions for you guys. I read that you shot a lot of footage when you were on set, and the movie is 90-something minutes. What the hell was this edit actually like?

TIM FEHLBAUM: The person who could answer that question the best, of course, is the editor Hansjörg Weißbrich, but I know that we collected a lot of footage. The way we shot the movie is the DP, Markus Förderer, and I, early on, talked about how we wanted to try to cover it as if we, ourselves, would be broadcasting, on air with the cameras and just shooting everything that’s happening in front of the lens in real time, in a way. We made really long takes with everything that’s happening on the monitors or on the telephones, and also really coming at our cast, and then just covered that. This, of course, leads to a lot of material that Hansjörg had to structure accordingly in the editing room.

JOHN IRA PALMER: Hansjörg has such a sharply focused eye for what works in any given shot or scene. But also, we had such an incredible ensemble cast that every take was usable in that sense. It was a daunting challenge, no doubt, but I think we had the right editor for the job.

Even the Rough Cut of ‘September 5’ Was a Tight 100 Minutes

“It was more about finding moments to breathe.”

What was your first director’s cut? Was it two and a half hours, or were you always thinking this is going to be a 90-something-minute movie?

FEHLBAUM: I like these very practical questions — really questions that you face a lot, of course, when you’re editing a movie. No, interesting enough, it wasn’t much longer. It was never longer than 100 minutes, 105 minutes or so. The script was already really tight, in a way. Actually, interesting enough, often the editing was more about finding moments to breathe or a break or an emotional beat could happen rather than condensing it.

PALMER: I think we knew through our research and then talking to Geoffrey Mason, who John Magaro plays in the movie. We knew they didn’t have time to stop and think that day. It was always, as Tim said, from the script level, meant to be a propulsive story. Tim is a master at visual storytelling, so you pack a lot into every single shot. As a producer, I was like, “Oh, a 100-minute director’s cut. Let’s do it!” [Laughs]

You must have been overjoyed.

PALMER: Always, working with Tim.

I’ve spoken to a lot of filmmakers, and I’ve heard about a four-hour assembly cut, or they have a three-hour movie and they need to get it to two, and they have no idea how they’re going to do it.

PALMER: We were never in that position.

FEHLBAUM: When we had the first rough cut screenings, one of the producers told us that usually the first thing she says is, “Take out 20 minutes,” and in this case, she didn’t have to say that.

Why ‘September 5’ Is the Perfect Film To Watch With an Audience

One of the things that the film does such a great job of is, as people are leaving the theater, there’s so much to talk about — what they were dealing with in real time about what we can show on TV, what’s ethical, what’s moral. It’s still what we talk about today. Can you talk about that moment in time? Because this was the first time the world experienced tragedy in real time together.

FEHLBAUM: If audiences walk out of the movie talking about exactly these questions that you were just mentioning, then that’s what we wanted to achieve. We wanted the audience to reflect on our own consumption of news and of the media today.

PALMER: Partly, this is why it’s such a great movie to see in theaters with an audience. You get the thrilling emotional journey of watching the story unfold, but then you have people next to you that you can talk to, as you say, about these questions that are just as pressing now as they were then. Certainly not any more resolved.

What shot or sequence ended up being the toughest to shoot and why? Maybe because of a camera move or dialogue or both.

FEHLBAUM: There were many scenes that were tough to shoot, of course, but I would probably mention that it was the very last scene between Tom Magaro’s character and Leonie Benesch’s character, where they reflect on everything that’s happened on that day. We did a lot of different approaches to that scene because it’s such an important scene. And with Leonie Benesch and Tom Magaro’s very important input, we somehow found the right way to end this movie.

PALMER: It’s interesting because often the answer to that question is based on technology, the complexity of a shot. This is an interesting example because, in this case, it was really an intellectual and emotional complexity that we knew had to be pitch-perfect, and you nailed it.

FEHLBAUM: From a technological point of view, to say every scene, including this monitor wall… [Laughs] It was really important for us that this really happened on these screens, that we actually have images on the screens and not just green screens so the cast could react on real images. To make that work — because also, it was important, as we talked about this before, that these monitors were actually accurate — that was not easy to do and was always complex.

September 5 is in theaters now.

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During the 1972 Munich Olympics, an American sports broadcasting crew finds itself thrust into covering the hostage crisis involving Israeli athletes.

Release Date

November 29, 2024

Director

Tim Fehlbaum

Cast

Peter Sarsgaard
, John Magaro
, Ben Chaplin
, Leonie Benesch
, Daniel Adeosun
, Corey Johnson
, Solomon Mousley
, Georgina Rich
, Marcus Rutherford
, Zinedine Soualem
, Benjamin Walker
, Robert Porter Templeton
, Rony Herman

Runtime

91 Minutes

Writers

Tim Fehlbaum
, Moritz Binder

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