#Director on Navigating Media Ethics & History

There are filmmakers who start big and get bigger, their project mushrooming ever larger as new ideas, characters and scenes enter their landscape.

Then there’s Tim Fehlbaum.

The Swiss writer-director — he previously made two indie sci-fi films — started really big. He was going to capture from every angle that fateful day of Sept. 5, 1972, when eight terrorists from the Palestinian militant group Black September infiltrated Munich’s Olympic Village and attacked Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine hostage. (All would end up dying.)

Police officers, Olympians, journalists, civilians, government diplomats — Fehlbaum and his co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David would cut between them all, creating a Rashomon for the Olympic era. The seismic event — a brazen act of evil on the world’s biggest stage — demanded a big cinematic treatment. Fehlbaum would give it nothing less.

But then a little voice called financial reality piped up. “We had a script and I think it was quite good,” Fehlbaum says. “But I looked at Philipp [Trauer, his producer] and said, ‘How are we going to do this?’ There was simply no one who was going to trust me with the kind of budget we needed to make a movie like this.”

Film is what happens when ambition runs into disappointment. And Fehlbaum had just suffered a head-on collision.

The movie that would result instead — a 91-minute bullet train about media ethics titled September 5 — created a buzz out of Telluride, prompting an acquisition frenzy and vaulting to the top of THR’s Feinberg Forecast best picture list, where it continues to sit ahead of its limited release by Paramount on Dec. 13. But the road from there was filled with more speeding obstacles than the Autobahn.

Media Studies

When the full extent of the resources needed to shoot that 160-page script became clear, Fehlbaum, Binder and the producers slipped into a funk. Who would give them the money for a project that big? And there was no plausible way to make it smaller. It all seemed like the end, games over, medal unclaimed.

But they hadn’t counted on the man known as Mase.

Geoffrey Mason, as he is more formally known, was not the kind of person who was going to make Swiss auteur dreams come true. Heck, he wasn’t even the kind of person who knew any Swiss auteurs. Mason, now 83, spends his days working as a sports producer from his home in Naples, Florida. He had been a young television producer that 1972 day, just past his 30th birthday, manning the ABC Sports control room for what was supposed to be a competition-lite 24 hours. He liked yachting and finding the right angle for diving competitions. Global terrorism? That was less his world.

Then the attack happened. Mason found himself thrust to the center of the news stage; the world was literally watching every choice he made. In 22 hours, he and his ABC Sports boss Roone Arledge changed the way Americans thought about sports coverage, terrorism and a half-dozen other realms. “I didn’t know anything about Hollywood when Tim and Philipp called a few years ago,” Mason says. “But they seemed like smart guys, so I told them what happened.”

As he talked about the on-the-spot improvisations and charged decisions — this essentially was livestreaming long before cable news and YouTube — the filmmakers realized they had their golden ticket. “It was such a rush,” says Binder. “They were inventing this as they went along, with all this adrenaline, and we all felt the same listening to Geoff.”

Adds Fehlbaum: “There was something very compelling about a decision made on the spot about what they would show.” A new, reined-in approach seemed apt.

The filmmakers knew about the many films concerning Munich, from Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 doc One Day in September to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 globe-hopping Munich. “But the media angle,” Trauer says, “that felt unique.”

Fehlbaum also had watched United 93 and loved the idea of a scripted drama told in the style of a vérité documentary, as if the camera was just catching what was happening in the room. “I find it interesting to make a film in a controlled space, where you have this narrow window to the outside, like the air traffic scenes in United 93,” Fehlbaum says, citing submarine thrillers as a reference point too.

The director also valorized Aaron Sorkin, the leading expositor of modern control-room intrigue with shows like Sports Night and The Newsroom.

In just a matter of weeks, they’d dived into every aspect of the media coverage of that day. Hundreds of pages were unearthed from archives. Books were inhaled. Tapes were watched. Long hang sessions were scheduled with personalities like CBS Sports executive Sean McManus (he was at the Munich Games as a teenager with father Jim McKay). Fehlbaum — at 42, born a decade after the attack — also set about immersing himself in control rooms, particularly of CBS Sports, his way in paved by McManus. “Even if it’s just a regular-season Knicks game, when the game starts, it really doesn’t matter what the stakes are — you feel the excitement,” Fehlbaum says.

Little discoveries would beget bigger revelations that would become key moments in the script, a scavenger hunt of cinematic research. When, in Arledge’s memoir, the filmmakers read about the charged exchanges he’d had with McKay, they tracked down tape of those discussions; when they watched it, they realized that the satellite feed was temporarily lost during coverage. This became a pivotal moment in the film.

Fehlbaum later even brought control room staff from German news media onto the set, casting them as extras so they’d be there for actor reference. If the film feels uncommonly lived-in and authentic, these informal consultants are part of the reason why.

When Fehlbaum, Trauer and the writers finished their research, the team (other producers include Thomas Wobke and Sean Penn) hadn’t just reconstructed one of the 20th century’s most fascinating media enterprises — they had conducted one of their own. “It was really like a whole documentary operation,” says Binder.

Staffing the Room

Casting was its own challenge. Filmmakers needed actors who resonated with modern audiences but also brought an air of ’70s grit. Peter Sarsgaard, a quiet voice of journalistic authority in Shattered Glass, would play Arledge. “Actors like to act and show off, but the piece did not call for that,” Sarsgaard says. “There is a more potent form of authority — where you just know you have the power and don’t have to demonstrate it.”

British actor Ben Chaplin fit the bill as Marvin Bader, a real-life Olympics operations maven who as the son of Holocaust survivors carried some baggage into the control room; he says he identified with the tension of shouldering another’s pain as you also try to shed it. The film skates thrillingly not just through every logistical hurdle but every moral and character wrinkle, and Bader proved a fitting vessel.

German actress Leonie Benesch would be cast as Marianne — a young, dedicated production assistant who would not just serve as the linguistic link between the U.S. team and German locals but as a thematic fulcrum as well, representing a new fresh-faced Germany that in its futility to stop the attack is suddenly showing its wrinkles. She is a composite character, but Benesch notes that “the feeling that Marianne had of not being able to show that Germany was in a new place was very real.”

And then there was Mason. John Magaro was not an obvious choice — a workaday actor known for the violent-but-sensitive Vince Muccio in Orange Is the New Black and indie roles like Past Lives and First Cow. Then again, the real-life Mason was not an obvious choice either — a workaday type himself thrust into the spotlight. The match took, and the production had its Mason.

The real-life Mason was trying to make tough moral choices on the fly while also attempting to seize the moment, and Magaro latched on to the tension. “Geoff was trying to make his way in the business, and one way to do that is to lean into the sensational, while the other is to be a journalist in a pure form like Marvin Bader,” he says. “This gray area was a rich thing to play.”

Magaro also spent months in control rooms, which Mason helped set up. “I just made a few calls because I wanted him to see what it was like,” Mason says.

Mason picked up the phone for a different purpose. The crucial moments in the film when McKay talks about how all the hostages have been killed — “They’re all gone,” he says eerily — couldn’t convincingly be re-created and required rights to the original clips. But ABC wouldn’t part with such footage easily. Fortunately, Mason had an old pal with a little bit of sway at Disney: Bob Iger. Mason called his old colleague, and the production had the footage.

It was only the start of big-time people paying attention.

The finished movie, edited with whiplash precision by Hansjörg Weißbrich, began drawing buzz at Venice and continued to crackle at a Telluride screening. Republic Pictures, Paramount’s global acquisitions label, had rights to the film internationally, but U.S. distribution was up for grabs. That’s when a handful of studios flipped for it, including Warner Bros. Seeming to realize what it had, Paramount stepped up and acquired the movie for U.S. release, making September 5 a centerpiece of its 2024-25 Oscar plan.

“It’s basically a German movie that just happens to have American actors,” Trauer says. “We never would have expected this.”

The Meaning of Munich

As in-the-moment urgent as the film is, the real work on the part of viewers, the filmmakers hoped, would come later ­­— in processing whether ABC made the right choices while staying live on the hostage situation.

Mason says the decisions flew by so fast, it was only later in the hotel that he, Arledge and others could reflect on what they did. Binder says he wants audiences to have the same experience, undergoing the film in a vertiginous rush but spending the next few days in Mason’s conflicted shoes.

Chief among these dilemmas is the portrayal of violence. Media instincts might demand keeping the camera rolling, but the film balances this with the question of what is gained by watching people held hostage or killed in real time, especially considering the families were watching, too. There is one reading of the film as a glorious tale of intrepid truth tellers, especially considering some of the MacGyver solutions they come up with to keep the story live. But Fehlbaum subtly balances this with a darker possibility, in which decisions made that day are a villainous origin story for our voyeuristic infotainment era.

“Now everyone has a camera in their pocket,” says the director. “Should we show everything or does it have an irritant effect? I don’t know the answer.”

Magaro says he infused that uncertainty into the performance and emerged questioning his media habits. “Hopefully audiences will come away from this thinking about how they consume news as I did,” he says.

Middle East politics brought its own resonance. The film was in postproduction when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, kicking off a brutal war. Though September 5 focuses on a Palestinian-led act of violence, Fehlbaum says the filmmakers tried to keep away from root causes and hew to the facts and assumptions of U.S. media in 1972.

But Sarsgaard says he feels the film by definition grapples with the conflict. “Who is getting to tell the story is something worth thinking about,” he says. “A live camera pointed at the window [where the hostages are held] tells you one thing about the conflict, and a live camera pointed somewhere else tells you another. All stories are created.”

Finally, there is the German question, as a country that had hoped to move past the propaganda of Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics suddenly finding itself back in a place where it can’t keep Jews safe. In the end, the film is not only about how media views a country but how a country sees itself. What is the nature of national self-identity and collective guilt? “It was very clear to us as a German production this topic had to be omnipresent,” Fehlbaum says. “It’s another question I hope audiences come away asking.”

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.