Film puts us in the room as Munich’s ‘Happy Games’ turned to horror

The Germans had dubbed them the “Happy Games”. The Munich Olympics of 1972 – the first Olympics on German soil since 1936, when the Nazi government turned them into a vehicle for racist propaganda – were supposed to be a window on to a transformed, liberal Germany.

There were no armed police in the Olympic village, where participants limbered up in the sunshine; the vibe was summer of love. Presumably, it was quite easy for the eight Black September terrorists, fighting the Palestinian cause, to find out where the Israeli athletes were staying. “And then,” says Peter Sarsgaard, “all these people died.”

Sarsgaard plays Roone Arledge, head of the reporting team from the American ABC network, in September 5, a fictional retelling of the hostage crisis that left 17 people dead, including 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Sarsgaard remembers arriving in Munich to shoot the film and telling the doorman at his hotel that the project dealt with the events at the 1972 Games. “I just saw what his face did. It kind of dropped,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Wow, it’s still something they feel sort of ashamed about.’ It still lives on, for a lot of people, as a painful memory.”

September 5 follows the TV crew as they try to capture the story, one of their heavy cameras focused on the Israelis’ balcony in the hope of catching a glimpse of the gunmen or their prisoners. ABC was providing rolling coverage – the first time that had been possible – from within a tiny, windowless studio. Director Tim Fehlbaum, who is Swiss, soon abandoned his original plan to film the same events from several points of view: the police, the politicians, and so on. They would stay in one room with the American reporters. The film would see exactly what they saw.

Arledge was a legendary broadcaster, says Sarsgaard, who changed television news forever. He is credited with inventing the celebrity anchor, who would take viewers inside the story. His Olympic reports turned athletes into personalities, telling their stories and interviewing their families.

When the terrorists struck, ABC’s Burbank bosses insisted that their political reporters should take over from the sports reporters on the ground. Arledge refused to budge; nobody was taking away his team’s story. The network had two cameras. It was Arledge who decreed that one should be wheeled outside to point at the Israelis’ apartment balcony.

Arledge, however, was something of an enigma to the actor trying to portray him. “Somewhere I read that the way that he led, his strength, lay in keeping some amount of what he was thinking private,” says Sarsgaard. “He was not an open book: he kept a lot of his ideas in his own mind and only explained when he needed to explain. That was an interesting idea to me. To keep your power.”

Roone Arledge at the 1980 Winter Olympics in New York.Credit: Getty Images

Sarsgaard trained at the Actors’ Studio in New York and has had a strong stage career; when he wants to make a point about acting, his reference point is a renowned production of Uncle Vanya. While he has had supporting roles in blockbusters, he has been more notably an intriguing presence in independent dramas such as his breakthrough Boys Don’t Cry (1999) with Hilary Swank, and his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021).

Peter Sarsgaard as prosecutor Tommy Molto in Presumed Innocent.

In last year’s TV adaptation of Presumed Innocent, he played a prosecutor with murky motives for going after Jake Gyllenhaal’s Rusty Sabich. And in 2023’s Memory by Michel Franco, he appeared opposite Jessica Chastain as a man with early onset dementia and a shadowy past he can’t remember. You don’t forget Sarsgaard, however. Like Arledge, he always conveys the impression of holding back something you want to discover.

One way into a character, he says, is wondering about their heroes. “That is actually something I think about quite a bit. In order that you’re not just playing yourself every time, you think: who does this character idolise? And I thought Roone looked up to athletes, to the likes of Muhammad Ali: people who expressed themselves physically and in ways that seemed transcendent.”

A director, says Sarsgaard, can also be a guide to character. “You’re sort of playing your director sometimes. Actually, if you’re lost, it’s not a bad idea to just start playing the director. Pretend to live in their world. They’re sure to like it; it’s sure to make sense to them.” Tim Fehlbaum is Swiss, with the precision that suggests; he was a stickler for the authenticity that makes September 5 live and breathe.

Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) leads his broadcast team through the crisis of the Munich Olympics hostage drama in September 5.Credit: Paramount

“I think the thing that actually attracted me to doing it was his kind of obsessive need to make it right,” says Sarsgaard. “Like the equipment, the way we looked. He would be working with some actor who had barely any lines for 30 minutes, saying, ‘If you patch the phone through to the walkie-talkie to the speaker, how would this all work?’ In most movies they take two wires, twist them together. Nobody worries about how it actually happened.”

But in the midst of apocalypse, real people do focus on small stuff. The only way to deal with the fact people are being picked off by gunmen is to concentrate on how to record an interview on a dial-up phone you can hardly hear: to do your job. The film was made in the same spirit. They were shooting on a sound stage, but Fehlbaum felt it had to be made in Munich, as close as possible to the Olympic site, in a room that was a replica of the cramped studio.

“And he made it so the walls couldn’t fly away, which makes no sense when you’re on a sound stage,” says Sarsgaard. “The camera was on top of us. But he wanted it to be as it would have been.”

Director Tim Fehlbaum on the set of September 5.Credit: Paramount

Exactly, says Fehlbaum. “From a filmmaker’s point of view, I found it an interesting challenge. How can I tell a story that takes place entirely in one setting, with the monitors the only window to the outside world? Hitchcock once had this idea he wanted to make a film entirely within a phone booth. I like the idea of that: the limitation of time, space and perspective. Because the movie is as much about what they don’t see as what they do.”

Roone Arledge is in control, as much as anyone can be, but he is not the hero. For a voice of reason that is also heartfelt, there is the German translator Marianne, played by Leonie Benesch; she must suffer the humiliation of the ruined German Games in the midst of these Americans, who suddenly seem very alien, while never missing a word. But it is the dispassionate, measured professionalism of the anchor in the home studio, Jim McKay, that encapsulates what is valuable in journalism.

McKay was already held in high regard as a serious news journalist; on September 5, he proved to be a rock. Throughout the siege, he received bulletins, interviewed experts and finally reported on the athletes’ deaths without letting his voice flinch. That commentary over 22 hours is woven into the drama; Fehlbaum was determined to use the original footage. Without it, he says, he would not have made the film.

“We did also recreate a lot of the footage from the village, but what we could never recreate was his performance and his way of talking to the audience,” he says.

Original footage of Jim McKay’s reports on the Munich Olympics crisis is included in September 5. Director Tim Fehlbaum says he wouldn’t have made the film without it.Credit: Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

“Can you imagine if we’d had an actor try to play that part?” says Sarsgaard. “How deeply any actor would have made that about themselves? Fundamentally, as actors, we don’t just want a story to go through us. We want to be seen, as individuals. But with Jim McKay, it’s almost like he’s allowing himself to disappear slightly to give people the news. Now we live in an age where the anchor person emotes in front of us. The information is there, but it’s wrapped in a lot of feelings that may or may not be your own reaction; you are being told what to feel.”

For old-school reporters like McKay, he says, that would have been anathema.

Between the urgency, the snappy dialogue and rising fear, September 5 deals with the morality of journalism. Fehlbaum says news journalists who have seen the film say that the questions the crew asked themselves – what they should show, whether they were inadvertently undermining the police and, most of all, whether their work was turning tragedy into cheap entertainment – are still their most insoluble moral quandaries. Arledge tells his crew to keep their posts and not fail. “It’s very simple: we point the camera in the right direction and we follow what happens,” he says drily. “That’s our job.” But there is nothing simple about that.

“I think there is an illusion that a camera shows an objective truth, and we have all suffered under that illusion for a long time,” says Sarsgaard. “Because in any situation, depending on where you have the camera and who is holding the camera, it’s going to tell a different story.”

Peter Sarsgaard in September 5.Credit: Paramount

He questions what story is being told, moreover, by a camera pointed at the corner of a building. Did it help anyone understand why this was happening?

“I would say that what rolling news does is put the journalist’s face so close to the event you can’t see anything, you have no perspective,” he says. “When news took a little bit longer to tell the story, I think they got it right more of the time. This is the advent of something quite different: creating drama where it hasn’t quite happened yet. An empty balcony, in this case, with very little happening, becomes a very compelling thing to watch. You could keep watching it for 24 hours! What is that? I’m not sure that’s about trying to understand anything. That’s satiating something else.”

September 5 is in cinemas from February 6.

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