“When you have the script and the story in your mind, and then you’re standing there in the Olympic Village, it changes something inside of you.”

Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5” is a powerfully immersive retelling of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics hostage crisis, grippingly framed from the point of view of the ABC Sports team covering the events in real-time.

The film’s authenticity and period accuracy owe much to the meticulous work of production designer Julian R. Wagner, whose collaboration with Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer began with 2021’s “The Colony.”

Most of “September 5”, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay by Fehlbaum, Alex David, and Moritz Binder, unfolds within the ABC studio where the team of journalists delivers unprecedented live coverage of the Israeli Olympic team hostages within the Olympic Village. John Magaro stars as Geoffrey Mason, an evening producer thrust into the center of history as he oversees the first-ever global live broadcast of a terrorist attack.

To bring this world to life, Wagner carefully reconstructed the studio’s control rooms, editing bays, and hallways, ensuring not only historical accuracy but also an emotional connection for the audience. His approach went beyond mere replication, aiming instead to capture an authentic sense of time and place.

“We talk a lot about authenticity when we talk about “September 5”, and I learned there’s a difference between reality and authenticity,” explains Wagner. “It is not just about replicating what has been because that would be a documentary; authenticity to me means to make something feel real.”

Wagner spoke with Awards Focus about creating false perspectives within the constructed control room, how it felt to watch the cast engage with the built sets once production commenced, and his experience of walking around the Olympic Village.

Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures

Awards Focus: You’d previously worked with Tim Fehlbaum on The Colony. What was it about that collaboration that made you want to work together again?

Julian Wagner: Tim is such a visionist, and we basically had the same heads of departments for “September 5”. Tim has a particular vision and is very passionate about it. At the same time, he allows everyone around him to bring in their own visions and to enrich whatever he brings up. For me, as a designer, it’s the best way to work with every head of department.

AF: What was it about the script that got you most excited to work on this project?

Wagner: It has such a unique perspective on the event. We were all aware of what happened, but not in that way. I knew about the tragedy but didn’t know about the journalistic work and that an ABC sports team was behind the story, and I didn’t know about all the mistakes we had made in Germany around it. This perspective was brilliant, and focusing on the media changed the genre of this tragedy. It became a one-room thriller, and this genre has always intrigued me.

AF: Did it feel like an immense responsibility to authentically bring the event to life through your designs?

Wagner: Responsibility and authenticity are both two big words when it comes to the script. Never before had I felt such a responsibility regarding the history and the victims. Authenticity became the main goal, and I viewed my role as a production designer as supporting a narrative and supporting an emotional world. To bring those together was a challenge and very exciting to create that connection between the script and the audience.

Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures

AF: When coming into the research component, what’s your starting point to source materials and items from fifty years ago, and in building the interior set?

Wagner: It’s all about research in the beginning, as with any project, but this time, we knew there was no room for mistakes. We had to do this right. I wanted to find the right balance between authenticity and more of the emotional world from what I would normally do as a designer. We started to research how the studio looked and the workflow of the journalists because I had no idea about how journalists worked at the time.

We had great insight from the real Geoff Mason, who was a producer on the ground at the Olympics. He told us a lot about what they’d done and how they did it and provided a lot of images and photographs from the time. But they were only fragments when it came to the studio. It was like a big puzzle with pictures here and there. They showed a few of the machines and devices in the background, and then we went to a lot of experts and people from the time, including crew from the era, and they explained more. We had a great production buyer, Johannes Pfaller, who went out, found old catalogs from manufacturers, went to broadcasters and storage areas, and found what kind of machines would have been used.

Bit by bit, we saw the bigger picture, and it was really interesting. We had a picture with some cables in the background or buttons in the foreground, and then we researched and were able to link these all together. There were about six months of research where we developed a blueprint of the original studio. We then decided how to balance it and what kinds of prop machines and devices were needed to be accurate.

Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures

AF: Were you building a set with moving parts to accommodate for crew and lighting or was it something closer to the scale of the actual studio to maintain that authenticity?

Wagner: Tim and [cinematographer] Markus Förderer took a very special approach to the filming process. They decided to follow the actors and events exactly as the journalists did in ’72. They wanted to follow them like a documentary, so instead of building multiple mini-sets that were divided, they needed to build a continuous set where you could walk from one room to another and through the hallways into another set.

I intended to create a set where you would enter and you would never look behind a wall or a curtain. It was like a time machine, and the control room was its heart—the engine of it all. We had to be very precise about sizes. The crew had to maneuver, and the entire cast had to be in it. We had to support a feeling of claustrophobia as well. But the room also needed to work like a pressure relief at some point. We wanted to take a breath again, and in order to do it all, we had to be super accurate, so size became crucial. Every ten centimeters was very important.

We decided to have the video wall movable and the huge control desk movable so we could squeeze in the cast and a little bit more if we wanted. Also, by creating false perspectives and different ceiling heights, we wanted to pull the cast and the audience into the video wall, so we played with aspects of that.

AF: How did you collaborate with Markus [Förderer] and the gaffing team to make sure the lighting fit within the frame of each shot? The studio’s interior is quite dark.

Wagner: Light and dark were the two main lighting situations we had in the control room. One was for being on air, and when not on air, they had the working light. All of this was integrated into the set to create these continuous sets. There was no room for any technical lighting equipment. I had a very good collaboration with Markus because we knew each other from the previous movie.

I worked with the gaffer to identify the light sources they needed so that I could modify the set and integrate them. We did a lot of testing, and I usually do very precise concept drawings for all the light moods. So, it’s not only about the set and the decorations but also about what needs to be done in VFX.

Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures

AF: I was really amazed to learn that scenes outside the studio, like the Olympic swimming event, were actually filmed and weren’t archival footage. How did you achieve that so seamlessly?

Wagner: That’s correct. There were a lot of shots where, later on, we wondered, “Have we shot this or not? Is this archival footage?” Sometimes, I was not sure anymore, and that was the goal. We wanted to blend the shots and the archival footage so well that we couldn’t tell the difference. We did have a lot of archival footage, but at the same time, we decided, for respect of the victims, not to use any shots where we see victims. There are a lot of shots, everything around the Olympic Village, where we didn’t get the copyrights. We couldn’t use the archival footage. We had to reshoot most of it.

We also wanted the audience at the end of the movie, after they saw it, to have the impression that they have been at every place but without actually being there because they just see it through a monitor.

The swimming pool was quite difficult because the Olympic Village itself is a listed complex. It’s a heritage site, so it’s in quite good condition, and it hasn’t been renovated. It was more about cleaning it and refurbishing things. We had to use a lot of graphics and then a lot of set decoration. However, regarding architecture, the swimming pool had been renovated twice, once after the Olympics and then ten years ago, so it was not easy to shoot there. We had only a few angels that we agreed to use and would try to recreate the angles in a way that fit the archival footage.

AF: What was that like for you to be in the Olympic Village where it all happened?

Wagner: When you enter such a space, you realize the tragedy much more intensely than before. Even though we all know about the tragedy and have learned about it, we have seen so many pictures, movies, and documentaries that it underlines our responsibility, especially standing there and looking at the balcony where the masked men came out. Our responsibility goes beyond the tragedy, and it was quite intense from time to time.

AF: After you spent months researching, sourcing, and creating the sets for the film, what was it like seeing the cast come in and engage with the environment?

Wagner: This is usually a very crucial moment because everything comes to life in this moment. You have to let go in a way before you have everything under control, and you have your own vision and images and expect things to be. I’m always nervous, and when the cast came in, they were respectful. I have never seen it before. The sets were so real and authentic that the cast could feel it, and I think they wanted to contribute to this authenticity.

It was a gift. When I was standing there, and I saw this great ensemble playing and acting inside the sets, there was one scene in particular in the editing room where Geoff (John Magaro) saw the masked man for the first time and decided it would be the opening shot. Then he goes to the control room, and they’re all inside. It feels so organic. They use the equipment and react to the video screen, then they step out again in the hallways and discuss the moral dilemma of a journalist’s work. “Can we show someone being shot on live TV?”

I was standing there, and I had goosebumps all over. It was such a relief that everything came together and I was just very happy to have contributed my part to it and see that it works.

About The Author

Founder, Deputy Awards Editor

Matthew Koss is the Deputy Awards Editor at Awards Focus and a Senior Film and TV Coverage Partner.

He is the host and creator of the weekly YouTube series The Wandering Screen with Matt Koss, which features dynamic reviews of all the latest film and TV releases. His writing has also appeared in The Movie Buff, Voyage LA, and ScreenRant, and he is a moderator for post-screening Q&As.

Since joining Awards Focus in 2020, Matthew has interviewed A-list talent, including Academy Award nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emmy winner Alex Borstein, and Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors, across film and TV. He also appears on red carpets for major studios and film festivals, most recently with Netflix's The Crown and Hulu’s The Bear.

After moving from Melbourne, Australia, to Los Angeles in 2014, Matthew has worked in various areas of the entertainment industry, including talent and literary representation, film/TV development as a Creative Executive, and at film festivals as a Regional Manager. Matthew is also a screenwriting consultant, most recently partnering with Roadmap Writers, where he conducted private, multi-week mentorship consultations, roundtables, and monthly coaching programs.

Matthew is also a producer, and he recently appeared at the Los Angeles Shorts International Film Festival with his film Chimera, directed by Justin Hughes.

He continues to work with entertainment companies such as Warner Bros. Discovery, Zero Gravity Management, Sundance Institute, and MGMT Entertainment.

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