Claustrophobic Cinematography: Inside the Dark, Cramped Shooting of 'September 5'

12/19/2024 03:00 PM

Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum's “September 5” takes an unusual approach to the story of the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, which ended with the deaths of the 11 athletes and coaches who had been taken hostage. For most of its running time, the Paramount film never leaves the ABC Sports studio where a staff accustomed to broadcasting sporting events tried to cover breaking news that was going out to an estimated 1 billion viewers worldwide.

By focusing on a control room, a small studio and a few offices and hallways, the film situates its big story in a small, crowded pressure cooker — and that's how Fehlbaum and his longtime cinematographer Markus Förderer shot it, too.

"The art department was building the set on a soundstage, and they asked us, 'Which walls should we break away? Do you want the ceiling to be open to light from the top?'" Förderer told TheWrap. "And Tim and I always said, 'We want to embrace the claustrophobic nature of the set and not cheat.'"

The set was built as a full replica of the ABC studio, based on the original floor plans with a few tweaks to make the flow work better for the film. There were no movable walls for easier camera access, no open ceilings to hang lights. "If you add artifice by creating camera positions that would not be possible in a real room, if you move the camera outside the set, I think you can always feel that as an audience member," he said.

The cramped spaces meant that Förderer had to use the smallest possible cameras and rehearse his movements before the actors arrived on set. "Tim and I walked the corridors and tried to block out certain movements ahead of time," he said. "But on the shooting day, we tried to create a fabricated chaos."

The actors — who included Peter Sarsgaard as ABC Sports president Roone Arledge, John Magaro as producer Geoffrey Mason and Leonie Benesch as translator Marianne Gebhardt — did not rehearse with the two camera operators, Förderer and Stefan Sosna, who got what they could in the moment. "We captured it as if we had only one opportunity to tell the story, almost like what our characters are doing when they say, 'We follow the story wherever it takes us,'" Förderer said. "There were certain shots we needed to get, but we wanted a real-time energy."

In the many scenes in which footage is visible on screens in the control room, the filmmakers avoided using green screen monitors and placing the appropriate footage in them during postproduction. Instead, the monitors played actual footage — some of it archival and some shot by Förderer to match original video. But all those flickering screens caused their own problems.

"The biggest challenge was lighting those spaces," Förderer said. "All the lights in the set look like old fluorescent tubes, but they're actually very modern high-tech LED lights, which we programmed to look like tubes. Usually the lighting is polished and perfect and static when you shoot on a sound stage, but we wanted to have a little flicker, a little randomness to them."

Sometimes, though, the flickering was anything but random. Watching documentaries like “One Day in September” and “Apollo 11,” Förderer noticed that unsteady on-screen monitors created a sense of unrest and tension.

"I explored light pulses and did some research into neuroscience on how certain light frequencies affect your heart rate," he said. "In the control room, we had a big TV wall and above that a row of film lights. They were LED soft lights, always out of frame and covered by a curtain on the set. Those lights helped push more light onto the actors' faces — and if there was a quiet scene, there was almost no flicker. And as the tension got higher, we ramped up the flicker frequency. It's very subconscious, but it really makes you nervous."

Förderer, whose other work includes the Roland Emmerich films “Stonewall” and “Independence Day: Resurgence” and the TV series “Constellation,” said that the four-week shoot on “September 5” was tiny compared to other projects, but also richly satisfying.

"In a way, it was the most challenging movie I've ever shot, but also creatively the most liberating one," Förderer said. "It was such a small film that nobody was watching us. We had so much creative freedom that we just thought, let's do the best we can in these 27 days in what basically felt like a submarine."

This story first appeared in the Below the Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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