Carol Allen in Conversation with Director Kevin MacDonald and Producer John Battsek
"One Day in September" won the Oscar for best documentary in 2000. It was released in British cinemas in May of that year, which was when Carol Allen talked to producer John Battsek, then aged 36 and director Kevin MacDonald, then 32. Macdonald started his film career by writing a book about his producer grandfather, Emeric Pressburger and making documentary with his brother, producer Andrew MacDonald in the pre "Shallow Grave" days. "One Day in September" was his first brush with the big screen, apart from a short run at the ICA of his much praised documentary about the late Donald Cammell, co-director with Nicolas Roeg of "Performance". Battsek worked in publicity and marketing before moving into production. He has since gone on to produce several other films, mainly documentaries, including the hilarious "Live Forever" (2003) about the British music scene in the 90s which features the Gallagher brothers and Tony Blair in his rock and roll days. Kevin has also stayed in the documentary field. He is the director of the highly praised "Touching the Void" (2003). They talk first about how it felt to win that Oscar.
Kevin: It's a bit like being in a car crash because it doesn't feel quite real and it doesn't have quite the impact that you would imagine for a funny reason. It's such an iconic moment isn't it? It's one of those moments everyone dreams about, being up on the stage, winning an Oscar I suppose and it seems extra dreamlike because of that.
John: It was a surreal moment. You just think, hang on, this is not my life, it can't be and I was strangely calm. You'd think getting up on that stage in front all those people actually live there and a billion tv viewers you'd be freaking out but it was all so bizarre and surreal that you just took it in one's stride a bit. But it was great, it was an amazing moment and my dad was there and my sister was there, our editor was there, my partner in Passion Pictures was there so it was like, to have them all there, to be able to enjoy it as well, and Kevin's wife was there. It was an extraordinary moment.
At the time the film was released it was comparatively unusual for documentaries to get a cinema release. Since then the situation has changed - something which Kevin saw coming back in 2000.
Kevin:. I think it is changing a bit. There have always been some documentaries shown in the cinema, way back to “Nanouk of the North”, the famous flirty film about eskimos made in the 20s, but in the last few years there's been a spate of them, most notably "Crumb", “Hoop Dreams”, “When We Were Kings”. A lot of people, if you say to them, I've made a documentary for cinema they say, "Why would I ever go to the cinema to see a documentary? and I think that's a hard habit to change. But watching something on the big screen is always more emotional, you get more involved in the film and especially this film, it's 90 minutes long, it's feature length, very gripping hopefully, and we've paid a lot of attention to making it very tense and driven by narrative and those are all things you associate with a feature film. I think people are as entertained and stimulated and thought provoked, if you can say that, as they would be by any feature film.
John: Ultimately it's about does the story work, is it compelling for an audience, does it move you.
Perhaps the best way of describing this film is as a documentary thriller. It's almost a new genre.
Kevin: That's one of the things we set out to do, was to try to do something that was a crossover, a new breed as it were and we concentrated very much on building tension and on tension but of course this story is a godsend in some ways because you have this built in tension of the 24 hours, are they gonna live are they not, what's going to happen at each deadline as the clock ticks by, so you've got almost a cliched thriller plot but of course there are things in it that you would never believe if they were in a fiction film because they're so extraordinary, like the false good news, when the Germans say, everyone's safe and they're not safe, that’s so outrageous people gasp in the cinema and you couldn't do that in a fiction film, nobody would believe it.
There was a feature film called "21 Hours at Munich", made in 1976, which was a bit of a glamourisation and didn't stick to the facts, and another film called "Without Limits" with Billy Crudup. The material does have potential for a feature film. Why did your decide to go for a documentary treatment instead?
John: Initially because what prompted me to even think about doing this was seeing "When We were Kings" (1996), which is a feature documentary about the "Rumble in the Jungle" between George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali and I actually thought I wanted to make a film like that. I didn't want to make a huge drama feature at that point. I'd just made one (Serpent's Kiss) and it had taken a long time. I didn't want to spend four or five years trying to make another one at that point and I felt that it was a story that could lend itself to making a film in the same mould as Kings and also I'd seen a film Kevin had made called "The Ultimate Performance" about Donald Cammel and the making of "Performance" which I just ...I mean, I find great feature documentaries are so compelling and that was another example of a film that I really felt was an incredibly enjoyable 90 minutes in the cinema and so I really wanted to that.
Making a documentary sounds in theory comparatively simple - interview a few people, get some archive footage, should only take 18 months/2 years. It's actually taken a long time to get this going hasn't it?
John: To this point today it's probably three years since we started.
Kevin: Not three years solidly though. About 18 months solidly but it's 3 years of off and on, developing it and then John had the money at one stage and then it fell through and then it came back, so it's a long process but actually making something for the cinema adds a whole other level of complexity that you don't have on a normal documentary, just making something last for 90 mins and getting everything onto film and doing a kind of sound mix up to a theatrical standard is a whole different ball game. Technically speaking it was a big undertaking for the amount of money that there was.
John: Ultimately we spent a million pounds. Arthur Cohn (co-producer, mentor and backer) actually warned me about this fairly early on. With a subject like this you don't know what it's going to cost to make until you've made it, because on a number of occasions people appeared out of the woodwork or people were persuaded to let us interview them, who for months and months and months had said, forget it, no chance and as Kevin said, when we came to do the mix, when we came to choose the music for the film, things started getting bigger and bigger. As our ambitions for the film, I suppose, continued to get bigger, so did the budget. The film is financed by British Screen, by the BBC and Arthur Cohn. There were other people involved earlier on, but ultimately the budget at the end was financed by those three.
It was you who brought Cohn in. How do you know him?
John: I didn't. I was tipped off by Sandy Lieberson who was featured in Kevin's previous documentary, who said, "You might as well give this guy a call and see what happens", and I did out of the blue and in his own inimitable style he said he wasn't remotely interested and then in 24 hours he was in London.
John Arthur Cohn has made a lot of documentaries. Were they for the cinema?
John: Yes a couple of them were. He made "American Dream", which was made for the cinema, I'm not sure what kind of life it had in the cinema because that was a particularly tricky subject, about a meat packer's union strike in America, but he had made several feature length documentaries which played in the cinema. He had never made one that had subject matter that was as accessible as this and had the potential to appeal to audiences in the cinema as this one did.
Kevin: He's alternated between making foreign language films, there's been a couple of English language films but mostly in foreign countries, "Central Station" in Brazil, films in France, Germany, Italy but he also did a few documentaries. There was one which I'd never seen in the early 60s "The Sky Above, the Mud Below" which apparently was a hugely successful theatrical film. it's set in Papua New Guinea.
Some people have thought he put pressure on you to up the ante on the Zionist aspect and make the film Zionist propaganda. Is there any truth in that?
Kevin: No I don't think there is. We always saw eye to eye in the cutting room with Arthur. There are perhaps a couple of small things in the film which perhaps I would have like to do a little bit differently, and did a trade-off with Arthur on other things, but they were only relatively small things and they're not really to do with the political content. Arthur is more interested in making a good film than he is in making propaganda and I don't think - you be the judge, I don't think we have made a propaganda film for the Zionist state. I think what we've made is a humanist film, a film which is about human beings and actually the important thing for me in directing it was to tell human stories. This is about 11 Israeli athletes who are innocent of any crime and they die and therefore naturally your sympathies are for them, not for Israel as such. There's very little politics in the film actually. We deliberately decided not to. We had an interview for example with a Palestinian, who was involved on a senior political level with the Black September movement but we decided not to use that because it was very political and we wanted to steer clear of that. We wanted to tell the story clearly because the facts are so amazing and let people make their own minds up and actually I've been please by how people have not thought the film was too politically biased. Anything to do with the Middle East, to do with Arab-Israeli question, you're never going to please everybody. In fact you're probably not going to please anybody, other than the people involved. There has been some criticism in Israel and there'll doubtless be criticism in the Palestinian territories and in Germany but that's a good sign as far as I'm concerned.
The film was John's idea. He is himself Jewish but at the time of the events in Munich he was a small child. So why did the subject capture his interest?
John: I have a clear memory of being in my kitchen in Hampstead Garden Suburb where I lived watching the balaclavad terrorists on the balcony and listening to David Coleman commentating on it. That is as far as my memories of it go, and what made me think about it three years ago was that after watching "When We Were Kings", I actively spent the next hour trying to think of a subject that would make good subject matter for a film like this. When the thought came into my mind, as a massive sports fan, which is what I am and what so many people are, for that incident to have happened in 1972 and for me to know relatively little about it and I really am a sports nut and therefore I assume for most people on the street to know nothing about it was in itself remarkable. Eleven competing athletes died at the Olympics. So I talked about it to Kevin immediately and we thought it was definitely worth looking into in terms of doing some preliminary research but that's as far as it went at that stage. The idea of Munich literally came out of nowhere into my head when I was just thinking about what might make a good subject. It was the first idea I had in terms of potential for a feature documentary.
Kevin: When you're doing documentaries, obviously there are a lot of subjects that you look into and they don't turn out to be very good but this one, the more we looked into it the more depth there seemed to be to it, particularly when I went off to Germany and met with two of the widows, Ankie Rechess Spitzer, who's the woman who appeared in the film (widow of Andre Spitzer, Israeli Fencing coach) and another one and they spent an afternoon just telling me stories and it kind of seemed like wild conspiracy theories, what they were talking about at the time, where there was no real evidence for what they were saying. They still felt 26 years late that they didn't know why and how their husbands had died and felt there was a cover up so that really was the clinching thing.
There are two elements to the film - the interviews and the archive footage. First the interviews. You went to Germany and you met two of the widows, you've got interviews with the German authorities and a very interesting interview with the last surviving terrorist.
Kevin: For the most part that was my department. We discussed in advance who should be interviewed but it was fairly obvious in most cases who were the people to try to get and then we had researchers in each country who made first approaches for us in most cases and we did actually a lot more interviews than we used. I don't remember how many we didn't use, probably about another 8 or 10, cos a lot of it we didn't know quite where the story was going to go, you end up with not quite the story that you originally expect, it's not the one you're going to get, you're surprised by what people say. But obviously the hardest thing about this film was getting people to talk full stop, particularly in Germany but also the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, didn't want to talk and didn't want to talk and he was persuaded finally by the argument, "Did he want Israeli history to be told by Arabs and Germans?", that seemed to be the clincher for him. Hans Dietrich Genscher, who was the German Interior Minister in 72, then Foreign Minister and who played a key role in the event and whom we have only very briefly in the film, he refused and refused and refused. He's never talked about this to the press since the day it happened and he eventually agreed I think a week before we locked the cut. So it took 18 months or more to get him to talk and he gave us a 10-minute interview.
Why were the Germans being so cagey?
Kevin: Because they're deeply embarrassed about it and I think what's happened is they're deeply embarrassed not so much now at what happened but about the cover up and the fact that they've actively been preventing people from finding out the truth all these years. I don't think there was any corruption, anything very deliberate about what happened. I think it was just lack of experience and incompetence on a simple level and secondly I think they did not - it was kind of like a Freudian slip on a giant scale; like the thing that you most don't want to say in an interview. and in a way this was the same thin. The one thing in this case you don't want to happen is for any Jews to die. Erasing the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of the war, that was the point of the Munich Olympic Games. Why else did they spend so much money, why it was so happy, sunny, smiley, so when what happened did happen, there was a kind of funny inevitability about it, may be that seems silly but I think there was, and nobody wanted to take responsibility cos no one wanted to be seen to be the person who was responsible for these athletes dying. I think that's also when things went wrong because nobody would take responsibility, a lot of things just fell through the gaps.
Another fascinating interview you've got is a real scoop getting the surviving terrorist Jamal Al Gashey to talk to you, which does balance things. It's very touching when see him today and footage of him at press conference as an 18-year-old.
Kevin: We were very lucky apart from anything else that he was such good-looking young man and such a strangely charismatic individual. Unfortunately I can't say very much about how we got that interview. All I can say is it was a series of coincidences and connections with people - somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew him. He was very nervous about talking because he had never talked about it before in public and so part of him didn't want to say anything but another part of him did and in the end he did it, because he wants the story to be told and he trusted us to tell it in a humane way.
When it came to the archive material you must have had an embarrassment of riches, it must have been where do I start?
Kevin: Not really actually. There was a lot of stuff. What we did was get an archive researcher, who covered every base and went to every archive in the world - Russia, Poland, Kenya all over the place and some of them had stuff and some of them didn't but most of them had the same material and there were two reels, little bits and pieces here and there, a couple of minutes from the BBC that were good and so on, but then the two real saving graces were the ABC material from America, cos they’d kept their live coverage and other people hadn't, and because also there was the great thing that Jim McKay the reporter covered from morning right through the night and you can see him getting tireder and his beard growing and all of that so that is effective obviously in building the tension. But then a second stroke of luck was finding the out takes for the official Olympic film that was called "Visions of Eight" which was made of that Olympics and those out takes were sitting in a storage vault and hadn't been looked at for years and years in Los Angeles with an organisation called the American Athletics Foundation, who'd been given them. Something like 150 boxes of stuff, each with 15 rolls of film in each and I spent a couple of weeks there ploughing through all of that and finding stuff, but it was out of order and I don't know if I got all the best bits still but I hope I did and that was really where we got the great sports footage and where we got some of the good stuff of the terrorists really. There was some material there which had not been seen before of the bus leaving and that sort of thing.
And how about this wonderful stuff of the terrorists watching the police operation on tv which is almost funny?
Kevin: It is tragically funny. I think that came from Germany. Often what we did, in a sequence there's one shot from one place and another from somewhere else and they've all been pieced together so you get different angles on the same event, but it was difficult and I think sometimes you do see the shortage of the footage and there is a little bit of repetition cos there wasn't that much really good, some really good stuff but there wasn't quite enough and we scoured everywhere to find what we could.
Michael Douglas is the narrator, which is going to up the appeal at the box office. Was that your idea John?
John: We all had the idea that we wanted someone high profile to narrate the film and it so happens that Kirk and Arthur are good mates and at Arther's request we sent a fairly early rough cut to Michael on video. I was in Portugal with 4 friends playing golf I'm ashamed to say when Kevin rang me to say he'd agreed to do it. I was totally stunned. Douglas was only in it for the ethics. He was a friend of the Spitzers.
Kevin: But what is good about his voice is that it's very authoritative but also quite neutral. A lot of American narrators and narration is very overly emotive and we deliberately did not want that, we wanted something quite objective, quite cold almost and there's a kind of hardness of heart there which is good.
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