Centred around the ABC Olympic Sports reporting team being on the ground in Munich in 1972 during the Israeli hostage crisis, September 5 is a propulsive vérité style film. New York sports producer Geoff Mason played by John Magaro was expecting a day covering the hopeful Olympics. Instead, shots rang out and the world witnessed a tragedy unfolding. Director Tim Fehlbaum relates the chaos, confusion, and horror the ABC Olympics journalists experienced capturing the first live broadcast attack by militants. Also starring Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch, September 5 recreates how the journalists involved became accidental windows to an atrocity.
Nadine Whitney speaks to John Magaro about how he crafted his character and the process of truth telling.
“The events depicted in September 5 was the moment that news media forever changed. This was the start of what now is the 24-hour breaking news cycle. I think it's important for us now, in these really polarised times where people have just become desensitised to tragedy and tragic news events, I think it's essential to revisit it and again, start asking these questions of what's right and what's wrong and what's the responsibility of journalism. Because at the end of the day, that's what makes a democracy a democracy, and if it continues down the road it's on, I'm fearful for democracy.” – John Magaro
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John Magaro: Hi Nadine. Thanks for talking to me.
Oh, thank you. I have been watching your career with interest for years, and this is a real full circle moment for you, isn't it? You started off as an extra in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and you're back in Munich for September 5.
JM: Yes, this time, I'm actually in Munich, literally in Munich as well. We shot it there. It has been a journey. It's been twenty years since Munich, at least since I shot it. Who would have thunk that I would be back here?
I was just a young, skinny, eager, green boy in New York wanting to get on a set. I got a call after submitting headshots to everyone you know, [and it was] two days as a background actor on a Steven Spielberg movie. I was star-struck seeing him from a distance. It's been a journey, and it's been a slow build. There have been ups and downs and falls and stumbles and successes along the way. But that's what this life is. You know, it's a carnival life, what we do as actors, and you’ve got to really love it to keep going in it.
You had some extraordinary successes. You're kind of a go to now for Kelly Reichardt, which is amazing, because she's an incredible director. Your performances in Showing Up and First Cow are heartbreakingly beautiful. Then you've done things as off the center like The Umbrella Academy, and not to forget Celine Song’s Past Lives.
JM: I’m a worker. My grandfather has instilled that in me. You work hard. They were from the depression, and every penny counted. So, it was a message that got through loud and clear. I'm the type of person that if I get a month off, then I start to get really anxious about when the next thing that’s going to happen. I hope maybe I'll learn to slow down a little bit. Being on set is when it's the best for what we do.
Let’s get to September 5. It's far from the victory lap that you would expect. The final lines are your character Geoff Mason essential saying, “That was the worst thing I've ever been through in my life, a catastrophe.” Geoff emerges from the studio sort of blinking into the sunshine going, what did I just experience? Can you tell me a bit what it's like taking on the mantle of playing someone who's still living?
JM: I've played people who are alive, who have died, who have family still with us, and it's always a challenge. It's a challenge. There's just no denying that, because there's a different kind of responsibility than playing somebody who's totally fictional. You feel that you don't have the total ownership of it, because you feel a piece of you that is beholden to honouring or depending on the person, maybe not honouring them. But there is a pressure there.
Sometimes when you play these kinds of people, talking to your real counterpart or their family can actually send you down the wrong road, because it's tough for people to be objective about themselves, especially their major life experiences. But in this case, Geoff Mason was just such a valuable resource, and I couldn't have done what I did in this film without building a friendship and a bond and picking his brain and calling upon every resource that he had available to him, I just couldn't have done it from our first conversations. You know, I sensed apprehension, obviously, from our first conversations, and justifiably so, but I tried to put him at ease that my approach to this was going to be as honest and authentic as I possibly could, and whatever I could do to help get it to that place I was open to. And that meant talking to him, him sending me a lot of material, sending me photos and sending me some pieces that had been done about them at anniversaries. I think there was an ABC Studios piece from the 1990s that he sent me. All sorts of material.
We started discussing what it was like building up to that day, his time going back and forth between ABC in New York to Munich as they're building this facility from scratch for the first time. This facility that is going to broadcast the Olympics globally live. And the excitement around that, and then, almost like the Titanic, it just crashes into an iceberg, and everything unexpected occurs, because there's this horrible hostage situation.
He made it very clear that once that happened, it's almost like his Journalism 101 kicked in. Do your job. Stay on focus. Stay on target. Don't get emotional. Don't get frazzled. Don't get too frantic. Just tell the story.
Not until after, when he and Marvin Bader (played in the film by Ben Chaplin) went back to the hotel and shared a drink did they let it wash over them and began to weep. I mean, I think we try and achieve a semblance of that at the end. But even Geoff said, it really wasn't until after, when they went home that any real emotion kind of hit them.
On top of that, Geoff got me into sports control rooms where I was able to shadow directors and producers for a couple months before we did this, which gave me a huge advantage just having that language and understanding how sports broadcast is called. I mean, I couldn't have done that without Geoff and without those experiences in the control rooms.
September 5 has that sense of vérité to it. There is also the sense that even though Geoff’s journalistic instincts kick in it isn’t his ballpark at all. Geoff is asking questions with Marv and Roone. Like, “If we show this story, are we giving them (Black Saturday) the story? Are we giving them what they want? Is this ethical? How do we how do we do this? We must tell the story, but should we tell the story? What are we going to do?” All those questions are kind of half cut off because you're flying blind as much as everyone else is.
How did you work with the cast to get that sense of backwards and forwards, the feeling of being in the dark as much as everyone else?
JM: For us – the cast and actors – personally we were all kind of discovering it as we went along. Every day was a conversation of collaboration, much like the conversations that they're having in the story of figuring out what to do next. There was naturally just a tone of collaboration that was happening around set, where the lines became a bit blurred, of when the camera is rolling and when it's not; and also, everyone was always on set. We were all there together in this space. It wasn't like people went back to their trailers and were very separate at lunch. It created a constant flow of ideas for problem solving and collaboration. I mean, that's really the actors; we have great cast. It makes your job a lot easier because you're passing the ball around.
But you also touched on something. You know, none of the questions are quite resolved. They pose the question, they've got kind of a tenuous solution, but it's never anything solid. And that's what you know. Geoff said they just had to keep going, and they weren't going to give up the story. They're competitive. They're journalists by nature. Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard) was going to hold on to that story. Once they made the decision that they were going to be the ones airing it, they had to figure out something to put on the air. They couldn't put on black screen so they would have these conversations, come up with some sort of idea of a resolution, but never really solve it. And because we were aware of that, we really wanted to make sure that's also how we portrayed it.
A great example of that was a scene in the hallway where we asked, “Can we show someone being shot on live TV?” That scene on paper was resolved much more cleanly, like there was much more of a clear decision being made for us. A couple weeks into shooting, we realised that's not the story we were telling. We were telling the authentic experience to this where everything isn't necessarily tidily wrapped up and clear. Through discussions we kind of got to this place where it's chaotic and there is some sort of resolution, but it's not, it's not totally resolved, and we'll come back to this later when we get a chance. And that kind of energy, we wanted to just keep imbuing into the story and into the film to make it as real as possible.