“September 5” feels as much like a time capsule as a pressure cooker of a film, as an ABC Sports crew doing cutting-edge live broadcasting of the 1972 Munich Olympics ends up covering much more than that.
In its most compelling moments, the Tim Fehlbaum film shows the audience the gulf between the journalists making decisions with imperfect information and the implications of those decisions — the characters’ goal may be “to follow the story,” but real life never abides by the rules of journalistic objectivity. To create this tension throughout the film, production designer Julian R. Wagner needed to craft sets that felt as grounded, authentic, and (sometimes) claustrophobic as possible.
So Wagner and his production design team made their lives a lot more difficult in service of giving “September 5” as honest a depiction as possible of what it would’ve been like to walk the halls of that Munich studio in the summer of ‘72. “Normally, you would build a lot of mini-sets and [the editors will] just cut from one set to another. But here, the idea was that, just as the cast should be trapped in [the studio], the crew should also be trapped inside, and you should be able to walk from one room to another,” Wagner told IndieWire.
Accordingly, the walls couldn’t be flown in and out to give the shooting crew more room. The entrances and exits of the film stage where “September 5” shot were integrated into the design of the studio set. Wagner designed in 360 degrees so that Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer could behave like a tiny documentary crew, following the actors in long takes that continually ramp up the pressure on Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) to cover the unfolding hostage crisis.
“[When] you walked inside the set, the whole studio became a real TV studio. I think this gives the actors something because usually, you step into a studio set, and you see all the lights and the technicians and whatever. Not here,” Wagner said. “You entered the studio, and you were in 1972.”
All of the set dressing, the period devices, cameras, monitors, and edit bays, down to the smallest button, were period-correct and designed to work. These devices were another massive challenge for Wagner and his team to solve. It’s all well and good to want period-accurate screens, cameras, and heavy filmmaking machines that work. But you can’t just run to any prop house and pick it up.
“You have to go to museums [and collectors] and you have to sweet talk them,” Wagner said. “You have to go [to them] and convince them and gain their trust. You can’t just write an email and say, like, ‘Hey, we have this wonderful movie, and we need your very rare BTR machine in your basement.’”
Wagner, set decorator Melanie Raab, and production buyer Johannes Pfaller started collecting all the machinery they would need eight weeks prior to shooting and assembling them into a working studio. Then technicians and propmakers refurbished everything to bring it back to life on a lightning turnaround. “The research into the devices became investigative journalism unto itself. It was incredible work,” Wagner said. “Sometimes you get pictures of machines or a conference room, and then you realize that it’s from ‘76, not ‘72, and to see the difference, you really have to go into the details of which kind of cable existed in ‘72.”
The authenticity in the technological details, however, helped to give the studio spaces a sense of depth and heft that helps the characters feel contained, and sometimes constrained, by the limitations of space. Wagner previously worked on spaceship or submarine sets meant to be contained worlds, but each act in the hostage crisis in “September 5” needed to reverberate through the control room. “This was a totally new challenge for me,” Wagner said.
The giant wall of (working!) video monitors that Wagner and his team built ended up being a great way to pull the characters, and the camera, into the same astonished viewership as the ABC audience. “ We decided to play the real, actual footage on the monitors, which technologically, it was a big hassle to do that. But it helped the actors to have something to play with. It was like an antagonist, and they could really react to it,” Wagner said.
This video wall was slightly moveable, so it could be more or less domineering in specific shots. Every design and architectural decision made an emotional difference. “The scale of the [control] room was so precise that just 10 centimeters made a big difference,” Wagner said. “Then we had the adjoining TV studio in the back and if you would open the windows and the light of the environment changed, it was like a pressure relief valve. The accumulated pressure inside the room could just escape, and the characters could breathe again. I think that helped a lot to play with your emotional state.”
Wagner also worked with false perspective to subtly play with the characters’ and the audience’s emotional state. “We had to have the feeling of being trapped in every single image,” Wagner said. “We also had different ceiling heights, and then we hung huge lamps and curtains in the room to divide the open space above [everyone’s] heads. The whole room was filled with so many details, but it couldn’t be cluttered.”
Cramped but not cluttered is a fine distinction, but Wagner and his team use enough working detail, enough subtle variation in colors and tones, and that rigid sense of the walls being exactly where they would be to create a believable vision of the ABC crew’s studio. “We had to fill it in a way that it just tells the story of the journalistic work,” Wagner said. “Everything had to be there for a purpose.”
“September 5” is in select theaters now.
