Hansjörg Weißbrich, editor of the mesmerizing journalism drama September 5, started out planning to be a teacher. He had traveled from his home country, Germany, to study in Paris and work as an assistant teacher, with plans to eventually teach music and French. He took a job at night as a projectionist at a small art house cinema.
The night job changed his life. Other art house theaters let him watch films for free, as a kind of professional courtesy.
“I had no money, and I watched like two or three films an evening. And after that year, my passion for film was so big that I decided to look for jobs in the film industry. And eventually I ended up in the editing room, and quite quickly I found that’s my profession — that combines all of what I like,” Weißbrich says.
The first feature he edited, the 1995 comedy-romance Nach Fünf im Urwald, was a great success, and the breakout role for future Run Lola Run and Bourne Identity star Franka Potente.
As he worked on dozens of other projects over the decades, Weißbrich stayed in touch with one of the film’s producers, Thomas Wöbke. Wöbke had long dreamed of making a movie about the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, in which members of a pro-Palestinian terror group killed 11 members of the Israeli team.
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That film eventually became September 5, which takes place almost entirely in an ABC Sports studio, starting early on that dark day in 1972. It hews close to the facts in recounting the many in-the-moment decisions of real-life ABC executive Roone Arledge — played by Peter Sarsgaard — and a team that includes German interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), ABC executive Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), and producer Geoff Mason (John Magaro).
Weißbrich, who was just five when the massacre took place, didn’t see any of it play out on television. But growing up, he was very aware of it: “It’s just very present in Germany,” he says.
The attacks have been memorably explored before in the Academy Award-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September and in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich.
Weißbrich hasn’t seen either film, which helps September 5 feel completely new and vital. The film is different from past depictions of the story in that it focuses on journalism, and how bad journalistic decisions in a breaking-news situation can cause chaos and even potentially jeopardize lives.
“I hope you see its relevance to what’s going on today in terms of the way that we consume our news, and who gets to tell the story,” Sarsgaard said last year at a Newport Beach Film Festival screening of the film.
From the very opening moments, September 5 is a film about editing — what to show, when, and how. We see how even a seemingly straightforward narrative — one Olympian winning, another losing — can change depending on which athlete’s reaction is shown first.
The film is both an emotional drama and a ticking-clock thriller, and one of Weißbrich’s greatest challenges in the edit was striking the right tone.
“You really experience the film like the news crew — live and and being in the position of making big moral decisions in a time where there was no precedent,” Weißbrich notes. “We wanted to create that atmosphere in the way we shot the film and the way we edited the film. It should be very close to the conflicts, to the characters, to the stress level in the control room.”
He felt a special affinity for the Geoff Mason character, who makes many of the key decisions about what to show the TV audience. Weißbrich was struck by the ABC team editing on a Steenbeck editing suite, the same flatbed editing table that he used when he started out in the ‘90s.
Today, he edits with Avid. But the technological limitations of the 1970s only added to the stress of decision-making.
“I think it’s interesting for people today who don’t have that knowledge and that history to see all those old-fashioned techniques and how complicated it was to get images,” he says. “Nowadays you just grab your mobile phone and it’s so easy. But they had to send out the film footage, they had to bring it back. They had to develop it. It was just so complicated and took so much time.”
As the film shows, on September 5, 1972, one member of the ABC crew even had to disguise himself as an Olympic athlete to smuggle film in and out of the Olympic Village. The 1972 broadcast included a combination of filmed footage taken from the scene, which was edited for air, and live footage of both the scene and ABC sports reporter Jim McKay, who interviewed people in the studio.
September 5 Editor Hansjörg Weißbrich on Reality and Re-Enactments
One of the most striking elements of September 5 is how seamlessly it combines re-enactments of the crucial moments of the attack with real footage of McKay, who earned two Emmys for his coverage of the story.
While the film re-created some of the most famous images from September 5, 1972, director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum opted not to cast an actor to play McKay, who died in 2008, and to instead use archival footage of his historic reporting.
That was a challenge for Weißbrich, who only had one take of McKay — the one that aired live — for all of his scenes. But the limited footage also made things simpler, in a way, because the editor had fewer decisions to make.
“There is a certain limitation in terms of editing, because if they cut in the original footage to something else, we don’t have Jim McKay speaking. That was just the fact. We had to build around that,” Weißbrich recalls.
“But also because they knew we would have to do that, long before shooting, it was in large parts implemented into the script already, and they knew what we had and what we could use.”
Teaching, Music
By sharing journalistic lessons from half a century ago, Weißbrich has gone back, in a way, to his plans to teach. But he also relied heavily on his musical background.
He started off editing scenes using temp tracks from other films — “an important step for me to explore in what way we could design the film” — and he cuts very precisely to music.
Composer Lorenz Dangel began work early in the process, and Weißbrich adjusted his edits according to Dangel’s music.
“That back and forth was a little bit challenging, I would say. But that’s the way — you can’t change it. It’s a good process, because you don’t get used to temp tracks you can’t really use because they are from other films. You have to get rid of them, very early, because otherwise you’re stuck, and the composer feels frustrated to recompose the temp tracks.
“But on the other hand, it means you don’t have a locked picture for composing, and for a lot of composers I’ve worked with, that was always a little bit of a frustrating factor. But I don’t know any way to change that. I think that’s what you have to deal with, and I think it’s good to have that interaction between composing and editing.”
September 5 is now in theaters, from Paramount Pictures.
Main image: September 5. Paramount Pictures