JOE spoke to the cast and director of the nail-bitingly tense, Oscar-nominated thriller about sports journalists covering a hostage crisis.
There’s been a lot of brilliant movies about journalism from ’70s classics like All the President’s Men and Network to more recent films like Civil War, The Post and Spotlight.
Joining that canon is September 5, the new thriller from co-writer and director Tim Fehlbaum (Hell) out in cinemas now which chronicles the terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
Unlike other movies about the topic, however, Fehlbaum’s film is told entirely from the perspective of the ABC Sports broadcasting crew (led by Peter Sarsgaard) who thought they were going to be covering the Olympics but ended up providing live coverage to the world of the ongoing hostage situation.
Brilliantly acted and nail-bitingly tense, September 5 succeeds as both a claustrophobic ticking-clock thriller and a fascinating portrayal of how a newsroom covers a crisis.
A Swiss director, Fehlbaum – Oscar-nominated this year for co-writing the movie’s script – said he became interested in the real-life historical events while studying film in Munich.
However, it was only when he met with the real-life Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro) – who served as head of the ABC Sports control room on that fateful day – that he came up with the movie’s unique approach to the story.
“It came from a conversation that we had with someone who really experienced that, who was in that room working as a young man for ABC Sports, coming into the studio thinking there will be another day reporting on the Olympics and then suddenly this tragedy happened,” the director explained.
“And he was in that control room during all these hours, during this 22-hour marathon of broadcasting. He experienced how they made that switch as a sports broadcast crew to report on the dramatic situation.
“And listening to his stories and learning what challenges they faced, what questions were asked in the control room, that seemed so relevant and so also worth a movie.”
The movie depicts a major turning point in journalism towards a 24-hour news cycle – something we discussed with the cast.
On this topic, Sarsgaard told JOE:
“[My character] Roone Arledge (president of ABC Sports) was really about trying to get the most eyes on the channel as possible. He started off doing that with sports and he was quite effective with Wide World of Sports and then the Olympics.
“And then he took that into straight news and there was quite a bit of entertainment in his news and celebrity anchors and things like that.
“I think this was a moment where better intentions were involved where Roone really was just trying to tell this story in the best way possible. It was when they realised afterwards how many people had tuned into watching this that they tried to repeat it in the future with live coverage of these events.
“And why do we need live coverage of a hostage crisis? I mean, certainly the people trying to help in the crisis need to know what’s going on minute by minute. But I’m not sure that news helps with that and a lot of the time news becomes part of the story.”
His co-star Ben Chaplin – who plays Marvin Bader, ABC Sports’ head of operation – added: “Or [news] changes the outcome and we’ll never know whether it did or not, right? Because it happened.”
As for what makes journalists so compelling to watch onscreen, Sarsgaard compared them to lawyers – which is noteworthy given the actor’s recent scene-stealing turn in the legal thriller series Presumed Innocent.
He said: “Well, they’re storytellers. It’s why lawyers are compelling to watch on screen. A prosecuting lawyer is a storyteller. He’s telling the most plausible story and I think storytellers are always appealing.
“And journalists are also after something. They have a goal. You are trying to get the interview with this person to be able to tell this story.”
Jumping in, Chaplin adds: “Or expose something, uncover something,” to which Sarsgaard responds: “It’s set up perfectly for the structure of a movie.”
Magaro – who said that journalism was “forever changed” on the day that September 5 depicts – also remarked on the appeal of journalists on screen:
“I think it’s the discovery. It’s kind of like a mystery in a way, like a Sherlock Holmes. I think there’s something about the discovery, the solving of a puzzle, the piecing it together that is inherent to journalism. I think it’s that component that makes journalism thrillers really really exciting.
“People like to see a puzzle put together and that’s what we’re doing in this. We’re figuring out how to broadcast this. Where problems are being presented, we’re figuring out how to solve them in real-time.
“And then if you add the component of it being live on the air and life and death circumstances, then I think it just ups the stakes even more.”
Leonie Benesch, who plays Marianne Gebhardt – a translator for the broadcasting crew – noted as well: “I also think that journalism is one of the pillars of democracy. It’s a profession that everyone has an opinion about.
“These days, it’s become very fashionable to hate on journalists and blame them for a lot of the things that go wrong in the world.
“But I do think it’s just one of those professions where – it may not be accurate – everyone has an idea of what that means and how they would do it better so I think there’s just a genuine interest.”
September 5 is in cinemas now.
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