Editor Hansjörg Weißbrich on Infusing Authenticity and Tension in Newsroom Drama ‘September 5’
For 22 nail-biting, torturous hours in a crammed studio in Munich during the 1972 Olympics, an ABC Sports broadcast crew suddenly found itself in the middle of the action when violence broke out in the Olympic Village and Israeli athletes were taken hostage. In writer-director Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping take on that historical day, September 5 follows young and ambitious producer Geoff Mason (Robert Altman recipient John Magaro) and legendary TV executive Roone Arledge (Spirit Award nominee Peter Sarsgaard), who led a valiant effort to report the deadly event to the world, inadvertently broadcasting a terrorist attack live on the air for the first time in history.
We recently spoke to veteran picture editor Hansjörg Weißbrich (Unorthodox, She Said), who is singularly qualified for this project thanks to a combination of his German language skills and his familiarity with analog editing equipment prevalent in the film.
Before we start, I just want to say that you worked on one of my favorite foreign language films, I’m Your Man, by Maria Schrader.
Thank you so much! It’s interesting that you mention it – that’s a relatively small German production which made it into the world. I actually got a job through it on a New Zealand production called We Were Dangerous, which I think should be released soon. It’s produced by Taika Waititi. After they saw I’m Your Man, that’s when they contacted me.
How wonderful! It’s such a quiet, subtle story, but it also explores so many thought-provoking questions about what it really means to find the perfect partner in life. It makes one question the need for perfection.
It was a brilliant script by Maria Schrader and her partner, Jan Schomburg, one of the best scripts I’ve read. Maria and I have been working together for almost 15 years now.
On September 5, I really liked the opening sequence using the real ABC footage from the 1972 Olympics. Those first few minutes highlight the optimism to juxtapose the terrorist act that will sadly follow. What was your process of cutting that opening sequence?
It’s great that you mentioned that, because that’s exactly what we wanted to create—the feeling of optimism. The Olympics at that time were designed to highlight the changes in Germany after WWII. So, it was designed as the serene Olympic Games, and all of a sudden, that terrible attack happened. So, it was very important to create that feeling in the beginning, to highlight the stakes that were ultimately shattered by the attacks. We had two ways to approach that. One was to not show the ABC spot in the beginning, but a little later, when Geoff first enters the studio, they could be in the middle of reporting. Ultimately, it was better to start with that TV spot to immediately convey that optimism. We also wanted to provide the audience with all the information right away—where we are and the setting—in a very tight way.
The authenticity really shines through with all the analog technology—you see the map books, the analog switchboards, and how they had to physically organize the alphabets to generate the captions and title cards on the screen.
Tim and the production designer Julian Wagner collected all that stuff. They wanted all of it to really work so the actors could really play with them, which helps create that authenticity. That 16mm editing table you see in the film was very familiar for me. I started cutting feature films on a Steenbeck editing table before switching to Avid during the 90s, when we transitioned from analog editing to digital editing. That was like traveling back in time for me.
That’s pretty cool that you’re very familiar with that vintage equipment. I assumed they were props and didn’t work.
No, it was all functioning. They needed to train the actors a little bit. But I was the best person to edit that footage since I could tell if they made a mistake.
The film is very gripping, which is not easy to do where most of the scenes are people talking and editing in a newsroom. How did you add that suspense and dramatic tension?
We tried to cut it as tight as possible. Tim and his DoP Markus Förderer shot it like a documentary film team would. They didn’t do a lot of rehearsals and just covered everything, followed the actors, and the flow of it. Shot with two handheld cameras, it had a lot of dynamic movement to it, and no take was the same. So, we had a lot of footage to choose from to create that dynamic feeling. And you’re completely right—it could have easily been a static situation with these people who never leave the studio. The [TV] monitors are their windows to the outside world, so you don’t feel like you’re stuck in that studio, you always have that view to the outside. It was tricky to balance the time we spent on the ticking-clock atmosphere with the emotional beats, which are very important. We wanted the emotional parts to feel like a gut punch, for example, when they discuss the moral dilemma about how far they can go, whether they can show someone being shot on live television if things go south. Another pivotal part is when they eventually learn that all the hostages are gone, leading up to the iconic moment when Jim McKay announces that to the world.
Speaking of the emotional beats, this story takes a firm stance on journalistic ethics. We see Geoff and the team questioning whether they can go live with a story without two confirmed sources, or when he tells the anchor to just go with it and use the phrase “as we’re hearing” to deflect any potential liability. Can you talk about that?
That’s one of the most important scenes in the whole film. That was the first time the Olympics was broadcast live worldwide. When the attacks happened, it made that Olympics the first time an act of terror was broadcast live. There was no precedent for them. Now, everyone has an iPhone and uploads everything on social media without much consideration. This makes the story so timely—it reminds us how important it is to be responsible with images, and the power that images have. That’s what we hope the audience would get from the film, to evaluate responsible journalism in these times of “fake news.”
It really brings you back to a time when journalistic integrity was a reliable certainty.
Yeah. The film shows how complicated it was at the time, because they had to wait for the picture to come back. This is also part of the movie—it was a huge challenge in editing to build up to the moment [of finally seeing the masked terrorists on the balcony] without showing the picture. There’s a lot of reporting before we actually see the images. In terms of editing, we decided to use the full frame for the first time when they go on air with that picture. Peter Jennings tells us what he sees over the phone, but we had to create the powerful moment once we show the picture, when the film footage was brought into the studio after it was developed and processed. Only then could they watch it for the first time at the editing table before broadcasting it to the world. Today, all that happens in an instant.
What were some of the more challenging sequences to edit?
It was a big challenge to find the right tonality. For example, when they first go on air, there were two story layers we could highlight. We had Geoff’s excitement to get the broadcast running, or we could highlight the terrible news, which Jim McKay was reporting to the world at that moment. That was our main question throughout the film, when to highlight the action versus the drama. As an editor, I approached the whole film more as a drama with some thriller elements than a straight thriller. We had to balance the drama part of the story carefully because we wanted to be respectful. We didn’t want to manipulate it in any way out of respect for the tragedy.
Another aspect I really enjoyed about this is that language became a big part of the plot once production assistant Marianne Gebhardt played by Leonie Benesch is suddenly pulled in as the only German interpreter for Geoff’s American crew. Amidst all that chaos, she became a crucial information clearinghouse.
That was another delicate part of the editing because I had to balance the two languages. We always hear the original and then the translation. That was a very nuanced part of my work to get that right, to highlight a bit of the original but still have the translation on top.
Much of this film involves matching what was shot with the archival footage and newsreels. Can you talk mixing the two components?
The archive footage was an integral part of the script. Tim and his co-writer, Moritz Binder, did extensive research because Tim wanted to be extremely accurate. They got access to ABC’s original broadcast tapes, but it wasn’t clear if we could get the rights until two weeks before shooting. We were lucky to finally get it since Tim wanted to use Jim McKay from the original footage, instead of reenacting with an actor. Jim wasn’t always on-screen, so we needed to build around what we actually had on him, but it worked out quite well. We found a way to match it with parts of the archive footage that we recreated, for example, for the scenes at the balcony. Tim wanted to recreate that out of respect for the families of the victims, he didn’t want to show the real hostages at the window. We were lucky that we could shoot those at the original location, since not so much has changed in that spot. That Olympic Village has since become a World Heritage site for architectural reasons. Tim studied in Munich at some point and I think he has stayed there, it’s a students’ apartments now.
It’s even more astounding since this is now almost 51 years later.
Yeah, really amazing. Actually, now that we’re talking about it, I remember that I also stayed there when I first started in the film industry. I think I worked on a student film there and spent two or three weeks in one of those apartments. That’s amazing! That just came to my mind!
Wow! That IS really cool!
I spent 15 years in Munich when I first started working as an editor. The very first feature film that I’d cut was produced by Thomas Wöbke, one of the producers of September 5. We’ve known each other for 30 years, so this was a nice reunion.
September 5 will be in select theaters on December 13 before expanding nationwide on January 17, 2025.
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