September 5 director Tim Fehlbaum and co-writer Moritz Binder, who wrote the script with Fehlbaum and Alex David, spoke to ComingSoon about the timely historical drama covering the Munich massacre that took place during the 1972 Olympic Games. The duo discussed the film’s use of archival footage and limited point-of-view alongside their recent Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. September 5 is now available on Digital and will be released on Blu-ray on February 18 with many special features.
“Set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, it follows an American Sports broadcasting team that quickly adapted from sports reporting to live coverage of the Israeli athletes taken hostage,” reads the synopsis. “Through this lens, September 5 provides a fresh perspective on the live broadcast seen globally by an estimated one billion people at the time. At the heart of the story is Geoff, a young and ambitious producer striving to prove himself to his boss, the legendary TV executive Roone Arledge. Together with German interpreter Marianne and his mentor Marvin Bade, Geoff unexpectedly takes the helm of the live coverage. As narratives shift, time ticks away, and conflicting rumors spread, with the hostages’ lives hanging in the balance, Geoff grapples with tough decisions while confronting his own moral compass.”
Tyler Treese: Tim, early on in September 5, we’re only getting audio descriptions of the situation. It creates a really tense atmosphere, and it allows viewers to really use their imagination. Can you speak to limiting the perspective? Because I feel that really works to the film’s strength, even though I imagine that it’s very easy to want to go straight to the hostage situation.
Tim Fehlbaum: I would agree. I’m glad it felt the same for you. I think our film is also about what they don’t see rather than what they see. There are good examples already, of course, in film history where something was more frightening even, or intense because you were actually not showing it or maybe only hearing it.
Quite early on, once we decided that we wanna tell it from the media’s angle, we said like, “If we wanna have a cinematic concept like this, we gotta go really through with it.” So, we show everything from their perspective.
That was, of course, part of the irony that they were so close, but they were in their studio. We also studied a lot of movies that are playing with that. For example, a movie I wanna mention is Das Boot by Wolfgang Peterson, a submarine movie where also with that crew in that trapped tight space, and the only thing that you see from this major event going on on the surface is via the telescopes and the sonars.
Moritz, I read that you were born in Munich a decade later, but I’m sure events were always looming and referenced. What made you really want to examine these events in a professional realm with this film?
Moritz Binder: Yeah, I was born and raised in Munich, and my parents were both born and raised in Munich as well. And when Tim and I found this perspective of the media we were both intrigued because we are both also in media as filmmakers.
And I come from a documentary background, and before that I was a TV journalist. I really clicked with that approach. But on the other hand, like you said, I’m from Munich, and I try to [tell] the stories my parents told me because they’re exactly the age of the one character Marianne (Leone Benesch), who is like a translator. She has so high hopes in these games and showing the world this new liberal face of the young Germany.
And I really could kind of channel my parents’ stories in her because they were exactly the same age, and they had high hopes too. And I think the whole generation had. So I really wanted to bring in this aspect as well, to provide some context why the games were like structured like that. Why they set up this unprecedented technical apparatus to show everything to the whole world, and why, for example, there was no armed police in the Olympic Village.
Yeah, I thought that they kind of added something to the story to get this German perspective as well.
That’s really interesting that you have a journalism background because Tim, I wanted to ask you about this, I feel like September 5 is more relevant than ever just because it is an examination of broadcast journalism and that balance between seeking the truth and also finding an angle that performs well with ratings. What did you find most interesting about sharing their methods of coverage, since it’s very easy for them to kind of forget that lives are at stake when they’re just viewing it as a story?
Fehlbaum: Yeah, I mean, look, I don’t want to compare it to my work that I did. I worked a lot as, not directly, but I worked a lot as a cinematographer for documentaries in my student times, because at the film school, as Moritz had said, we were in the same film school, and he was also in the documentary department, at the beginning at least.
But I worked for a lot of documentary directors at this as DP and I do not even nearly want to compare what we were filming with the tragedy of Munich, but it was also dark subjects, partly. So I know a little bit of that feeling, what you just described, where you wanna stay respectful of the situation, but you also want to find some image in a way. So, in a way, a lot of these questions that this crew gets confronted with in our movie, I could relate to from my previous work. So that’s also why I responded so well to that angle.
Moritz, so I wanted to ask you, since you and the rest of the writers got this great honor of being nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, what does it mean for you when you see that recognition? Especially at film’s biggest stage.
Binder: This is really strictly unbelievable to us. I mean, you have to know that we started with this movie at Venice at the film festival, which sounds very fancy, but actually we were in the sidebar and we were in the sidebar of the sidebar. So we were so lucky that journalists, like you, just picked it up and saw it and wrote about it and enabled this great journey until now. So this feels like an unbelievable journey at the whole journey.
But when we heard that we are nominated, we were overwhelmed with joy. But I think we’re still waiting for that realizing moment because really, it’s not really realized by now. Because it’s something that is really hard to realize until I think you are standing there or sitting there. And even then, I don’t know if I can realize it.
Fehlbaum: I also hope that it — I mean, the movie’s out right now, you can watch it right now in cinemas — so I hope it also motivates people to go and see it. That’s, of course, a great thing about the awards, right? Is that it that it helps to get attention to movies. So I hope it motivates people to actually go buy a ticket and see it.
Tim, one of the aspects I really liked about September 5 was the usage of archival footage. I thought that was deployed very smartly. Was that always in the script? How did you find your balance there?
Fehlbaum: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was an interesting process because, for a long time, we didn’t have the whole footage, and we’re still not a hundred percent sure if you have seen everything. But only shortly before shooting, we worked for a long time with everything you’d find online or in documentaries. Then not too long before shooting, we suddenly received another hours of footage. That was, in a way, very inspiring but also scary because we knew there were so many things that we saw in this footage that we knew, “Okay, we have to have this in the footage.”
To give you an example, the moment when they stopped the interview with the athlete who could escape in the morning because they’re losing the slot on the satellite, this is something we would never come up with. But of course, it makes sense because back then, you still had to book this. There were not so many slots in the satellite. You still had to book a slot. And this is something that immediately was so important for the topic, right? That we had to include it. So we structured the script accordingly, again, very late in the process.
On the other hand, we knew that certain scenes in the Olympic Village we would want to recreate. But what we could never recreate is the image of Jim McKay, the host reporting. At a certain point it was even unclear if we would get that footage. I said, if you don’t get McKay, we don’t have to do the film at all. We would’ve done it anyway, maybe.
But I’m very glad that we got the copyright because he has this very unique way of hosting into the camera. And it was only because we had the blessing of the real Geoffrey Mason and also of his son that we got the copyright for this footage. But I think it’s crucial for the film, especially in the States, where McKay’s also a well-known face.
Thanks to Tim Fehlbaum and Moritz Binder for taking the time to talk about September 5, which is now out digitally.
