The Ultimate Oral History Of Tim Fehlbaum’s Masterful Journalism Thriller ‘September 5’

In the wee hours of September 5, 1972, the serenity of post-World War II Germany shattered into a million pieces with a volley of bullets from an assault rifle at Conollystrasse 31 in Munich’s Olympic Village. The inexpressible trauma inflicted by the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi regime had only just begun to heal when eight members of the Palestinian terror group known as Black September killed two Israeli athletes and took another nine hostage during the Summer Games.

Over the next 22 hours, the world held its breath as the crisis unfolded on live television, chronicled by on-air anchors Jim McKay and Peter Jennings of ABC Sports — the first time anything like this had been broadcast to millions of viewers around the globe. Following several failed attempts by German authorities to get the situation under control, the crisis ended with the death of all nine captives and five terrorists at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield. The optimistically-named “Games of Peace” were no more as Jewish blood had once again spilled on German soil, less than three decades after the Holocaust. The ironic exclamation point dotting the pitiful conclusion was the fact that Germany’s strict post-war laws (well-meaning regulations put in place to prevent the rise of another fascist government) had actually enabled the situation to spiral out of control the way it did.

While the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September and Steven Spielberg’s Munich granted audiences a wider snapshot of the hostage crisis and its aftermath, the minutiae of the pioneering news coverage that cemented the tragedy in the global consciousness had remained largely untouched by the cinematic industry.

Writer-director Tim Fehlbaum’s masterful journalism thriller September 5 (in theaters everywhere January 17) changes all that with a dramatized look at how the tight-knit ABC Sports crew quickly pivoted to the breaking story and followed its every development under the leadership of two media veterans — Roone Arledge and Marvin Bader — and relative greenhorn, Geoffrey Mason. The three men impressively rose to the occasion, rebuffing orders from their superiors to hand coverage over to the main news team in New York, negotiating with competing networks for satellite time, and, when all was said and done, making television history.

“I did not want it to be another hoked-up Hollywood movie,” says Mason, who is portrayed in the film by John Magaro (The Big Short). “I wanted it to be an authentic, accurate, and dramatic portrayal of what really happened that day.”

The resultant film (produced Philipp Trauer, Thomas Wöbke, John Ira Palmer, John Wildermuth, and Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn) goes above and beyond that mandate, delivering a stripped-down, ticking-clock, and voyeuristic hotbox of thriller that is not only the best film of the last year, but one of the best journalism dramas ever made, establishing itself as a fresh mainstay of the genre alongside All the President’s Men, Zodiac, The Post, and Spotlight. “They had to take license in some areas like any movie does, but basically, it is a really accurate rendering of what happened that day,” Mason admits.

September 5 boldly cuts against the established dramatized grain by mainly taking place within the claustrophobic ABC Sports control room in Munich.

“We always referred to this almost as if we were shooting in a submarine,” says director of photography Markus Förderer. “There’s this old German movie, Das Boot, where everybody’s trapped in a confined space and the few glimpses you get [of the surface] are through the periscope. That’s a bit of what happens in our movie. There’s a runner coming with fresh rolls of film and we follow him as we see the film being quickly developed and building up the tension of what’s on that piece of film, especially [because] we hear Peter Jennings describing what he’s seeing via telephone. When we actually see the masked man on the balcony for the first time, this iconic image is quite powerful. Even for a younger generation that wasn’t around back then or very familiar [with the event], they hopefully get a sense of how it must have felt watching this live back in the ‘70s.”

Magaro’s character orchestrates the real-time documentation of history from the close-quartered and dimly-lit control room, forging his own identity as a leader, while simultaneously juggling input from Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Bader (Ben Chaplin). “Roone was a very complex person,” Mason remembers. “He was a genius in terms of content judgment. Roone had an amazing ability to recognize storylines and content that would work. And because he had such amazing insight into what was good television, there were a number of us who basically followed him blindly for years.”

Mason goes on to describe Bader as “a really close friend,” who was hit particularly hard by the events of the massacre. “He was of Jewish heritage and enormously impacted by the events of that day. But as difficult as that was for him … he never let it have any impact on his judgment towards putting together a good show and covering the Olympics the way they should be covered. When it came to being able to trust one person with the final word, I would not have wanted anybody other than Marvin Bader to tell me that they had all been killed and that we could go with it. That I could make sure Roone understood when he told Jim McKay, “They’re all gone.” It was a tough time for Marvin, but he was never better than during that horrible day.”

In September 5, cigarette smoke clings to the stifling air, hot coffee guzzled out of styrofoam cups keeps the characters’ adrenaline pumping, furrowed brows glisten with sweat, and critical broadcast decisions are made on the fly (some of them requiring MacGyver-y improvisations of the technologies at hand). A sort of dark hilarity hangs over the proceedings as the fate of nine terrified human beings are juxtaposed with the casual continuation of the Olympic Games, which were eventually paused, as well as benign commercial breaks for for gasoline and home goods.

“We were working so hard to tell this story, that we didn’t have time to really understand it or feel it. That may be a little dramatic, but we were a mile a minute that day,” emphasizes Mason. “It was stressful, because there was so much to do. It was not stressful because of the nature of the story we were telling. That was a story we had to tell.” Only when the ordeal finally ended, did he have a chance to process everything. “Don Ohlmeyer, one of our key directors, and I hopped in the car, drove back to the hotel, took the elevator up to our connecting rooms in the Sheraton, built ourselves a gigantic cocktail, and cried like babies.”

Packed with all the authenticity and haunting intimacy of a documentary feature, September 5 captures the fast-paced uncertainty of the hostage situation, spectacular failure of German authorities to resolve it, tremendous guilt of a post-war generation (as personified by Leonie Benesch’s translator Marianne), and incredibly difficult questions regarding the media’s responsibility to verify and report on a tense pressurized crisis with far-reaching ramifications.

“We had to design a small world inside the studio, but it still needed. to be enough to tell the narrative of the whole story,” notes production designer Julian Wagner. “This means we had to be very, very precise about all the details, and this was a challenge in and of itself. So if you create a studio set where you will be for 94 minutes, you can’t get away with any mistakes. Every detail will be seen and not only that, but it must also support the narrative for over 90 minutes. This means you have to think very carefully about every centimeter … it was all about details.”

He continues: “The movie is so tangible and so authentic. This is not only because we were so precise and accurate about things, but I also think the collaboration of this team is extraordinary. I haven’t witnessed something like this before.”

Head below for the ultimate account of how they pulled it off…

Interviewees:

• Tim Fehlbaum (writer-director)
• John Ira Palmer (producer)
• Moritz Binder (writer)
• Alex David (co-writer)
• Geoffrey Mason (former news broadcaster)
• Julian R. Wagner (production designer)
• Leonie Zykan (costume designer)
• Markus Förderer (director of photography)
• Hansjörg Weißbrich (editor)
• Lorenz Dangel (composer)

The oral history of awards season contender September 5

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the film!***

The story of September 5 began several years ago with a desire to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the hostage crisis. Based on the release of new police files, which underscored just how much German authorities dropped the ball in their attempt to recover the hostages, the original idea was to cover the event through shifting points-of-view.

FEHLBAUM: I went to film school in Munich, where this story still feels pretty present after all these years.

BINDER: I was immediately intrigued because I was born and raised in Munich, as were my parents. I knew a lot about it, but not everything. We started to do our research pretty fast and pretty deep. The size of the failure was really stunning to me. That’s the complicated thing. It wasn’t like two people screwed up in the decisions; it was the fact that the whole system couldn’t work because it was still a very young nation and the constitution forbade the military from interfering. Everything kind of made sense, but didn’t make sense that day.

We read a lot about the police and politicians that day — and also about the media … The first draft was really long, up to 170 pages, because so much happened. When we were just starting to be interested in the media aspect, we deleted everything except the media portion, [which left us with] 20 pages, but we liked those 20 pages [and began research into] “What did the journalists know? How did they approach the story?” That was a very interesting process to shift perspectives to the other side.

DAVID: They decided on the ABC perspective, which I found fascinating. But I was also kind of terrified that people would not get it; that it might be like hiring someone to film your wedding, and they just take pictures of the DJ the whole time.

FÖRDERER: When Tim told me about this idea to stay strictly in thde control room and only show the audience what the ABC Sports crew could see, I thought it was an amazing challenge. How can we give this scope and build up the tension while not being able to show everything? That’s what the film draws its strength from; by not showing everything, by letting the the audience use their imagination. We give hints, we see our characters observe what’s going on out there on a monitor. This somehow feels stronger than being in the middle of it.

WAGNER: When I saw the latest version of the script, I thought it was a no-brainer. It changed my perspective of the event and I learned so much about what really happened, [and] the work of the media. Suddenly, all these topics are on the table like the moral dilemma and responsibility. This was the first time in my career as a filmmaker where I really felt a huge responsibility to history, and that changed a lot in the approach for me as a designer.

DANGEL: The first two movies [I did with Tim] were science fiction … I read the script pretty early and knew we needed completely different music — not only because it’s not science fiction, but also because of the whole setting, this narrow space. When I saw the first footage from shooting, I realized, “Okay, this is something I really have to adapt to as a musician.”

Not surprisingly, it was the vivid eyewitness testimony from Geoff Mason and others that convinced the filmmakers to narrow their focus.

MASON: A friend of mine named Jimmy Schaeffler called me out of nowhere a couple years ago and said he had some friends in Munich who were looking to make a movie about that horrible day in September 1972, and did I have any interest in helping them make the movie? I said, “Well, I don’t know. I’m busy. Do they have a script yet?” He said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, have them send me a script I’ll look at it, and we’ll take it from there.” So [I got sent the script], read it, and thought it was terrific. It actually brought it all back to me. So I called them, we made an arrangement, and I was aboard.

FEHLBAUM: Before even writing a single word, we tried to do as much research as possible. As we got deeper into researching the media perspective, we were lucky enough to not only talk to Geoffrey Mason, but also to Jimmy Schaeffler. He was one of these runners that smuggled the film past the police barriers [into the Olympic Village]. We were also lucky enough to be able to talk to Sean McManus, who is the son of Jim McKay … We learned how big of a role the media played on this tragic day. Listening to [Geoff’s] story of what he went through and experienced in that control room seemed not only interesting and exciting, but also relevant, especially for today’s world regarding how we consume news today …

The conversation with [Geoff] was the initial spark for taking that perspective. Things like the police coming into the studio and telling them to turn off the cameras. When you hear something like this, you’re like, “This is such an interesting situation.” But then also little things that help you make the dialogue more authentic. For example, they called the satellite “The Bird.” This is something you would never come up with as a writer, unless you hear it from a firsthand source. He would also read every other draft of the script to see if the language was [accurate], because they have a very specific slang in that TV world.

MASON: I think the most dramatic [thing] was when the police burst into the control room. It was late morning, and they told us that we had to turn off the camera that was being used by us from the Olympic Tower. It was there for an Olympic beauty shot. Turns out that also gave one of our two cameras a view of Building 31, where the hostages had been taken. The camera on the tower saw the roof of the building and when I turned to look at what they were pointing at, I realized that we were showing German sharpshooters crawling across the roof of Building 31, perhaps preparing for an invasion to rescue the hostages. And then it occurred to me that if the hostages and the terrorists in that apartment had their cable TV on and had it tuned to [ABC], then they were able to see what was happening above them on the roof. Needless to say, we didn’t want them to see that. So we went from two live cameras to cover this story down to one live camera, which we had moved up on top of a dirt berm between our control room and Building 31.

BINDER: [Geoff is] 82, but a very, very good storyteller. He was sitting in his chair and just telling us about his 22 hours that day. The way he told it was so thrilling and so intriguing. I remember how we looked at each other via Zoom and said, “Well, maybe this could be our movie.”

PALMER: Sean McManus went on to become the Roone Arledge of his time … Sean was a teenager at the time and he was in a room, watching his dad deliver all of these iconic [reports] that we have in the movie. So he had a different perspective on this, which was that of a teenager whose mind was blown by what was going on around him. He then went on to lead the sports and news divisions at CBS … There’s nothing like someone sharing their emotional memories with you, which I think are sometimes omitted from the more dry research documents.

WAGNER: How did you move inside the rooms? What kind of machines did you use and how did you use them? How could you communicate from one room to another, or to Jennings on the balcony? That’s something nobody can tell you. When you see how they used the walkie-talkies and connected them to the speakers and to the phone, those are all the details that make it so tangible and real. This came through Geoffrey Mason. He provided us not only with intel, but also with a few photos from the time that the team had taken

ZYKAN: He told me about the team spirit, or if there was a dress code or not. He said it was actually very casual. Of course, there were above-the-line [personnel] like the producers and anchorman. Then we had these different jackets, the beige ones and the blue ones. Geoff told us the beige ones would be for above-the-line, the blue ones for everyone [else]. But since the blue ones were the cooler ones, above-the-line employees would mostly wear them, too. There were differences between technicians and superiors, but he said it was mainly about being comfortable/casual.

PALMER: Geoffrey Mason is a co-producer and was a real collaborator and ally. So much of the texture and richness of the way that these characters moved through that day really came from our conversations and research with him … He told us that every time Roone felt the conversation was getting too private or too heated, he would just say “Hallway,” and they would all step out into the hallway and have a private conversation, which you see several times in the movie at pivotal moments. We would call him from set sometimes. I remember [we were filming] the scene where Roone is getting congratulated from New York and Bader says to him, “You’re gonna get a big promotion. [Roone] says, “I need a drink.” We called Geoffrey from set and said, “What did Roone drink and where did he keep it?” He kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk. Little things like that bled into the movie from Geoffrey being available to us.

Before a single frame was shot, the entire production crew (from director to cast to department heads) went through a rigorous preparation process that included exhaustive research and many conversations regarding the look, sound, and pacing. In addition, US-born writer Alex David was brought on to help bring an American perspective to the German screenplay and fine tune Mason’s character arc by emphasizing his confidence and innate leadership skills. When cameras did finally get rolling, principal photography was down and dirty, cinéma vérité-style, only lasting about a month.

DAVID: It was just about making it sound like Americans talk and there’s also the time period [to consider]. I think at one point, they had a person say something like, “All of you dudes,” and I was like, “No, they wouldn’t say ‘dudes’ back then.” That’s a term that came in later … A lot of it was just subtle stuff. Sometimes we would do a rewrite and the producers wouldn’t necessarily even know what we wrote, but they were like, “It reads so much better.”

We also changed the John Magaro character at the beginning. Their whole thing was like, “He goes from zero to hero.” He was supposed to be a meek guy who doesn’t speak up. It was things like that, figuring out, “How do we get the maximum impact here?” And so, making him confident, more active, and really wanting to succeed — those were some of the things I worked on with them. I just helped them fine tune it. Tim and Moritz did all the heavy lifting, to be honest.

BINDER: Alex always [spoke] from the American perspective of storytelling. [He said] we needed to at least give some hints on character backgrounds. He always talked about the character arcs and I think that with Marianne and Geoff, you can see this arc over the course of a single day. This layered storytelling really helped us.

FEHLBAUM: There were direct conversations we could have. Then there were biographies from both Roone Arledge and Jim McKay, who both dedicated a whole chapter to that day because it might be the most important day of their careers in the television business. There was also one technician from the ABC Sports crew who wrote a whole book on how they broadcast these Olympics.

BINDER: I was a TV journalist before I [went to film school] and the mindset hasn’t changed much since the ‘70s. Being without a story isn’t an option, showing nothing isn’t an option. You have to show something and if you can’t show something, talk about the problems.

MASON: [They wanted to shoot it] in a model of the control room, which was built to look like our control room. That was where they needed a lot of help; on who sat where, who said what, how everybody felt, what happened when the police broke in, etc. etc. We spent a year just walking through step-by-step of what happened that day. The result was well worth the time and effort we spent and it is, indeed, an authentic recreation of a very dramatic time for us all …

John [Magaro] and I worked for the better part of a year together. We talked on the phone often. When they started shooting and came to a particular point in the script and John wanted some more information as to what really happened, he and I would talk. In getting to know him, I was able to give John a sense of what our team, under the guidance of Roone Arledge, wanted to accomplish for those 22 straight hours. I was able to invest within him a true sense of not only excitement, but anger, stress — all those elements. He did a really, really nice job in the movie.

WAGNER: My biggest challenge in the beginning was to find the right balance between reality and fiction. Authenticity has always been the main goal for Tim. He wanted to create a movie that was so realistic and authentic, you would really [feel like you’re] back in the time. So when he asked me if I could create such sets and such a world, I immediately thought, “Where do we need to be very accurate and at what point do we need to heighten something in order to to support the narrative and emotional world?” The research into all the details about the time, the era, and the technical aspects took half a year.

FÖRDERER: We [thought], “What if we are thrown into the mix? What if we are documenting the ABC Sports crew as these events unfold and how would we film it?” And that’s when the idea came up, “Let’s shoot everything handheld, stay really close to to the actors, and follow them wherever the story takes them.” Our early conversations were, “Should we shoot the whole film as a oner?” There are great examples like Birdman, which appear to have no cuts, or Gravity, which have very long sequences. We thought it would give this real-time broadcast feel, but then we also felt it came with some drawbacks [because now you’re] forcing the audience to walk down a corridor for a minute to get from A to B.

We also knew that editing is an integral part of media storytelling. Our topic is the responsibility of the media and the power of images. What to show, what not to show. So we knew we wanted to edit, but we ended up shooting everything in long masters. Every scene was shot as a oner, usually with no rehearsal. We captured the first energy the actors brought into the room with two cameras, and I always [treated it] as if I had only one opportunity to capture it.

WEIßBRICH: The goal was to to grab as much footage as possible and they were very, very quick. They shot with two handheld cameras at one time, so we had [around] four to five hour rushes per day, which meant a great variety of choices … The script was already a page turner. It was one of the best scripts I ever read. It was so tense and emotional already, and we tried to get that notion into the final film.

ZYKAN: We decided that the costumes should be a bit more timeless, [especially] because the studio itself tells so much of the time, with all the machines and technical equipment. The backdrop settles the movie so much in the period. I decided that the costumes should be a bit more moderate — being, of course, authentic for the period, but not emphasizing it.

DANGEL: One of the first ideas I had was work with analog synth elements, mainly because I thought it [was representative of] that time. In the early ‘70s, you had all the synth stuff going on. I also thought the structure of the analog synth sounds matched with this sort of grainy, analog feeling the whole film has. That was one idea. The other idea was I realized I needed a lot of elements that are really close and dry, almost tactile stuff … We didn’t do any extra cream on it. We didn’t push it and say, “Okay, this [moment] really has to be like action, or this has to be like thriller.” We just held back a little bit because the story is so strong and the acting is so strong, that we didn’t want to to screw it somehow by overdoing [the music]. I call this score a worker’s score, because it really serves the the narration, the dramaturgy. And in a way, it’s very selfless. There’s a lack of vanity or anything like that. It’s really under the radar, but it does a really important job, because it controls the emotions we see in the actors, but they don’t speak them out, because there’s no time. There is a point where the music comes in and expresses some of these emotions.

BINDER: It’s a movie about teamwork, and the movie was [a team effort]. It really shows in that crucial scene at the midpoint where they are discussing whether they can show someone being shot on live television or not. Ben, John and Peter rehearsed and condensed it, which is always magical to see. Sometimes, there’s so much more written in the script and then when [an actor performs it]; it’s all in his face and he just needs to say one sentence that was maybe five sentences in the script.

Like Mason noted, the ABC Sports control room (the brain stem of the operation, so-to-speak) was the key aspect of the entire film, whose success hinged on a convincing recreation. Working off the original blueprint, production designer Julian Wagner scoured all of Europe for different pieces before assembling them into a fully working soundstage replica.

FELHBAUM: Sometimes when you build sets, you have moving walls [to make room for camera setups]. We wanted the opposite, we wanted it to feel claustrophobic. I don’t know if you’ve ever been a to a real control of a TV studio, but it’s a very condensed, dark space. We wanted to have that feeling for the audience.

WAGNER: It became like investigative journalistic work, because we went to basements of TV broadcasters or found old Bosch magazine advertisements from the ‘70s. Bosch was showing off their equipment for the Olympics, because it was such an incredible event at the time [and] they were really proud of their technology. We went to private collectors. You’d talk to someone who knew someone. They’d say, “Oh, I have a friend in the Netherlands and he might still have a few items in his basement.” This is how the search went on and we had such a wonderful team in the prop department. They really did an amazing job by following these leads and hints …

Collecting the machines and equipment was one thing, but then we had to start to refurbish it and to rewire it, so that every button and light would work. This was the next big challenge and at a certain point, the set really became a tangible TV studio. All these machines and devices — every screen, every button — had to be real and had to work. Normally, we would say, “Okay, let’s [use green screen] and then we can place in all the the content later.” But no, we wanted to have them work on set, so if an actor would press a button, it would trigger a screen, and they could react to the original content. I think this changed atmosphere in the room for everyone. The thing was like a character [in and of] itself.

MASON: I never physically walked into the room, but they sent me enough photos for me to understand that they had done a brilliant job of recreating that space.

In addition to enhancing the actors’ performances, the presence of such a tangible space allowed cinematographer Markus Förderer (armed with vintage zoom lenses from the early ‘70s) to underscore the tension and documentary feel of the piece.

PALMER: When Tim and Markus were first talking about the visual language of the film, there was a lot of care crafted around this immersion; that it was handheld and somehow needed to feel very authentic to the time, but also fresh and contemporary for a modern audience to have that access point.

FÖRDERER: I knew I wanted to use the TVs as a main light source … All our characters are wearing glasses on purpose. You see what they’re looking at reflected in their glasses [and if you look even closer], their eye-lights are reflections of the TV wall. There was never a blue screen.

ZYKAN: We found a shop in Munich run by an optician, who is a very passionate collector. You just go there, you tell him what year you want, and he comes with suitcases full of glasses.

FÖRDERER: Usually when you film something on a stage, as an audience member, you can feel that everything is too clean, too polished, too controlled, and we wanted, at a certain point in a story, to embrace this chaotic, hectic feel … On top of the TV wall, which is the main light source, I put a row of soft LED movie lights. They were just out of frame and I programmed certain TV flicker effects. As the tension goes higher in the room, the flicker frequency goes up [which triggers] something very subconscious. Hopefully, you’re not paying attention because you’re immersed in looking into actors’ eyes and watching the performances. But if you watch closely, the flicker goes up and up and up, creating a sensation of unrest. There’s neuroscience research with mice and humans about how certain light frequencies give you a sensation of unrest. You get nervous … It looked quite extreme when we filmed it, because I had to adjust the flicker to our camera shutter, so that it looked right to the camera, but on set, this was 10 times stronger. People would come up to me from the video village and say, “Hey, Markus, why are the lights flickering? Are they broken?’”And I had to say, “Please, trust me, this will make sense in the scene.”

FEHLBAUM: The flickering is a good example because this is something you usually would try to avoid. You spend a lot of time adjusting the cameras so they don’t interfere with the lights from the monitors that flicker at a certain frequency and we were looking for these imperfections in a way.

DANGEL: My main focus was the tension in the room and the time aspect. We agreed not to focus too much on the tragic side of the movie, because the film is not about the tragic story. It’s more about the situation in the the ABC studio. Having said that, I think it was a pretty wise decision, because then we could use the music in a few spots, maybe three or four scenes, where we really got emotional, and that had a much higher impact because we weren’t used to the music being emotional over the whole film. These instances are where the music really steps out; it’s really in your face and surprises you with an emotion. This is only possible because I hold back in all the other scenes and concentrated on the drive.

The goal of the editing process, says editor Hansjörg Weißbrich, was “to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and experience in real time what our characters experienced back then.” Again, the team succeeded beautifully, submitting a rare film edit trimmed of all fat, with every frame serving a purpose.

FEHLBAUM: We gathered all this footage and then in the editing process you [have to figure out], “Okay, how do we try to get certain rhythms for certain scenes and make variations so it doesn’t feel too repetitive for an audience?”

PALMER: How do you build that progression? You’re supposed to feel a little claustrophobic, but not trapped as an audience member. [You just want to feel the sense of] trapped that they felt.

WEIßBRICH: It comes down to an intuitive approach. There’s a lot of intuition involved for rhythm and and stuff like that. I just tried to to make it as dense as possible. We watched the whole thing quite often. I started on the first day of shooting and then I sent the assembly of the day to Tim in the evening. He was shooting in Munich, I was editing in Berlin, and once a week, I sent him the whole cut at that point, so we could carefully watch if something was missing. Everything worked out quite well. And then after shooting, we watched it once a week to always get an overall feeling for the arc of the film … My first draft cut was not much longer than the final version of the film, which I actually try to do, if possible. [I try] not not to have a long rough cut. I think the viewing experience you have when watching a rough cut that is two or three hours long can’t be the same if you know the final version will be [around] 90 or 100 minutes. I think it’s better to have a tight first rough cut and then eventually add here and there.

ZYKAN: The whole movie takes place over one day, so the costumes must be everything. Usually, you have many chances to tell something for a character with the costumes [but] we could only have some development. For instance, Roone Arledge comes in wearing a suit, [which] he loses [piece-by-piece]. He loosens the tie, he opens the buttons, he starts sweating. It’s all these little steps that tell you what’s going on. In the beginning, Roone’s outfit tells you he’s on top and very ambitious. But he loses all of that, making him look like everyone else, which quickly emphasizes, “Okay, now we’re a team. We’re all in it now. Let’s go for it.”

DANGEL: Composers in Europe are very close to the directors and editors, so there’s a lot of time to communicate and exchange [ideas]. In this case, we had Hansjörg as the editor, who did an amazing job. He’s somebody who works very precisely. What we did was a sort of triangulated conversation, because every time I sent something, both of them were watching it, and we had a conversation between the three of us. That sometimes made things a little bit more complicated, but in general, it was them sending me scenes, me offering something, then there was a discussion, and eventually we changed things. It was quite a lot of back and forth and also working very precisely. Sometimes, we talked about a few seconds like, “Should the music do this rather than do that?”

WEIßBRICH: The cut was changing so fast. We were trimming all along the way, [so] every version we sent him was outdated after two days, but we managed to deal with that. For me, it was really important to have the final music before we locked the picture, because it’s so delicately balanced with the music. I could not have imagined locking the picture and then waiting for a composer to start composing, because then I would have had to monitor the whole process.

Like any historical dramatization, September 5 does make use of real archival footage, though not as much as you might think. A number of key moments from the actual event — including the masked terrorist on the balcony — were painstakingly recreated by the team.

WAGNER: That was great inspiration, but we couldn’t use all of it, [out] of respect for the victims or anyone who was hurt by the incident.

FÖRDERER: We had all the reference material from different sources, from different TV stations — not just from ABC — to see the events from different angles. With Julian Wagner, our production designer, we tried to triangulate the right positions. Where would the camera have been back then? We always mixed film with digital, and the film became a reference to to make sure our digitally shot footage looked like film. But it worked amazingly. There’s not that much we had to do, because we used the RED Raptor cameras with a large-format 8K sensor. When we shot archival pieces, I could window down the sensor to a 2K section, which is a small fraction of the sensor, similar to the size of 16mm. Then I used very high ISO sensitivity to get it grainy.

PALMER: Markus would roll a film camera on set each day so that our post team, [mainly] our colorists, could look at the quality and texture of exactly what it would have looked like to have a 16mm camera in the room.

One thing they didn’t want to fake, however, was the iconic and tireless reporting of Jim McKay, who covered the crisis from the ABC Sports studio until the final word was in. His grave pronouncement of “They’re all gone” still manages to send shivers down the spine over half a century later.

FÖRDERER: His performance is so unique and so strong, the way he delivers these last words when it was clear what the outcome was. I think Tim and the producers explored who they could cast to pull this off, but we always felt he was the face of this. That’s what we used archival footage for. We used the original Jim McKay and had a fantastic double who acted in the wide shots. We could also shoot him from behind to feel his presence, so it’s not just the talking head on a monitor. In a wide shot, we see see our characters observing through the blinds into the studio as the double walks in and sits down; then I tilt down on a monitor and we see the real Jim McKay sitting down in his close-up. That was one of our biggest challenges, making sure the audience buys into having him there.

MASON: Jim McKay was the best there ever was. When I called Margaret, his wife, to get him out of the pool early that morning, he was taking his morning laps. They had the day off and were going to take a drive into the country. Margaret got Jim out of the pool, he grabbed the phone, and I said, “Jim, you’ve gotta to come in.” He said, “Why?” I said, “It looks like we have a very serious situation here. We have a hostage situation about 100 yards away in the Olympic Village, and we’re going to need you right away.” And he was there right away.

There was never any hesitation at all, either in his coming or in Roone’s deciding that he should be the man to host our coverage. We could not have been in better hands than we were with Jim McKay. And to be perfectly candid with you, within several days after, Jim shared with us a telegram that he had gotten the next day from Walter Cronkite, congratulating him on the high level of professionalism and passion that McKay had covered that story with. That was when we all began to realize, “Okay, yeah, this was a big deal.” We didn’t need anybody to tell us that Jim McKay was the guy to be there, but it legitimized in everybody’s mind that the number one news person on the planet, Walter Cronkite, was really in favor of how we covered it.

Despite taking place over half a century in the past, September 5 prompts the viewer to reflect on the responsibility one has when deciding to share a piece of information in the age of smartphones and social media.

PALMER: This was an interesting moment because it was a time of explosive technology, where there was a huge step forward in how media was able to be transmitted and certainly, we’re in another one of those moments right now. The questions around the ethics of journalism, and also our consumption of it, are just as relevant now as they were in 1972.

BINDER: All those questions they had as journalists are now questions to everybody, because we all participate in sharing news and sometimes creating news.

FÖRDERER: There’s no easy answer for the media’s responsibility, but every person who has a camera in their pocket and chooses to share a piece of information [needs to ask], “Is this vetted? Is this really true? Is it worth being the first to go out with it?” … We all make choices by how we show something, from which perspective we tell the story, and hopefully, this helps the audience to reflect. There’s no easy answers, but we need to be critical of what we see and what is shown to us.

DAVID: We debated the closing scroll for a long time. At one point, I wanted to have, “All these people died and ABC got 26 Emmys out of it.” But then it seemed like we were clearly making them the villains. We’re not trying to say they’re villains. There was another version with a quote from Margaret Thatcher talking about how putting terrorists on the air gives them oxygen. In the years after this, the amount terrorist acts exploded and one of the factors became, “How many people see a terrorist act?” You don’t know causality and stuff like that, but they helped make it huge and [sent the message] that this can be an effective thing. There’s a lot you can take out the film, and I will let other people decide what they want to take from it.

September 5 is now playing in select theaters across New York and Los Angeles. It opens nationwide Friday, January 17. Click here for tickets.