The Craft of ‘September 5’: How Director Tim Fehlbaum & Craft Team Used A “Limitation Of Space” To Increase The “Nail-Biting Tension”

deadline.com:

It can be incredibly difficult to tell an expansive story while restricting yourself to a single location. However, with September 5, the restriction actually enhanced the storytelling for the filmmakers and craftspeople, once they realized they found themselves in a very similar position to that ABC Sports team in 1972.

Told through the perspective of the ABC Sports team, September 5 takes place during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, where Israeli athletes were being held hostage by a terrorist group. “As someone who’s working in the media myself, I thought that I could say something that is especially relevant in today’s world about our complex media environment,” says director Tim Fehlbaum.

Deadline spoke with writer-director Tim Fehlbaum, writer Moritz Binder, cinematographer Markus Förderer, production designer Julian Wagner, editor Hansjörg Weißbrich and composer Lorenz Dangel to discuss how the team told an expansive story from a small location.

As he was researching the subject of the film, it wasn’t until he met with Geoffrey Mason, played by John Magaro in the film, that Fehlbaum realized this was how he wanted to tell the story. “Listening to his story of what he experienced on that day during this 22-hour marathon of broadcasting was so interesting,” says Fehlbaum. “Even after the first conversation, we thought, ‘Maybe we could tell the tragic story of what happened that day in Munich entirely through that perspective.’” When he began working on the script with writer Moritz Binder, the two started to see the difficulty of telling the story from a newsroom. “You start thinking of about the problems, like you can’t be at the scene, you can’t be with the police, you can’t be outside the