Munich

[Pozer]

The only movie he spent extra time on was Minority Report, and it shows.

Then how did he forget to include PTA's cameo?

[modage]

i like it. 

[Ravi]

very un-Spielbergian but it really could be great. 

"Un-Spielbergian" came to my mind also when I saw the trailer.

[MacGuffin]

For Spielberg, mum's the word still on 'Munich'
The director nixes the usual publicity blitz for his new film about the Mossad's trackdown of '72 Olympics terrorists.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Silence — for now.

Avoiding the customary ruckus of pre-release promotions and Academy Awards campaigning, Steven Spielberg's "Munich" will be accompanied by a remarkably quiet publicity campaign before the controversial film's Dec. 23 debut.
 
Spielberg and the film's cast and crew not only will steer clear of the usual TV talk shows and print interviews but also skip the countless question-and-answer screenings and cocktail parties that typically accompany a movie's Oscar pitch.

"He wants everybody not to have preconceptions, to see the movie and make up their own minds," said Marvin Levy, the director's personal publicist. Levy said that neither Spielberg nor co-screenwriter Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") nor key members of the creative team plan to speak publicly about the project or participate in the usual Oscar season screenings and filmmaker conversations.

Universal Pictures, which is releasing "Munich," will, however, show the film to awards groups and take out "for your consideration" advertisements in Hollywood's trade newspapers.

Star Eric Bana also will turn up in the pages of In Style magazine, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski will discuss his craft in a cinematography magazine.

And Spielberg is reserving the right to change course as the film enters the public consciousness.

"When people see the film, then it could become a different matter," Levy said about whether Spielberg will eventually grant interviews.

Spielberg had been signaling for months that he intended to sideline the traditional publicity machine, and his exact game plan has become fodder for the blogosphere; news of the stealth campaign was first reported by LA Weekly.

Written by Kushner and Oscar winner Eric Roth, "Munich" tells the tale of the aftermath of the 1972 Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were killed after being taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September. Israel subsequently organized a squad of Mossad agents to track down and assassinate the perpetrators.

From the beginning, "Munich," Spielberg's most politically challenging work, has been shrouded in secrecy. No journalists were permitted to visit the set during its production; filming locations included Malta, Hungary, France and New York.

Levy said that Spielberg's decision to remain quiet during this pre-release period was partially shaped by "Munich's" story line, which dives straight into the animosities that have racked the Middle East for decades.

Months before its release, figures as disparate as Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the attack, and a raft of former Mossad agents have publicly complained that their input wasn't solicited for the film.

Levy said extra security precautions were taken during filming, owing to the overseas locations and not, as some close to the production surmised, to the fraught subject matter or Spielberg's status as a prominent American Jew when anti-Semitism is still a factor throughout Europe.

To help guide the film's release strategy, Spielberg hired crisis public relations consultant Allan Mayer, former White House communications guru Mike McCurry and former presidential envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross. They were brought on, in part, to open up communication with the various constituencies who are highly interested in the film, from politicians in Israel to Jewish groups in America.

The film's debut will be preceded by an elaborate schedule of tastemaker screenings, particularly among leaders in the foreign policy establishment. Both the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine are sponsoring screenings before the film's release.

Until this week, no one, except for the editors and a handful of collaborators — among them, producer Kathleen Kennedy, Kushner and Kaminski — had even seen the movie. Spielberg will begin screening the film for the media next week.

So far, Spielberg, an active Democrat who usually eschews political controversy, has made only one carefully worded public comment about the film.

"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific episode that we usually think about only in political or military terms," he said in a statement released on the eve of principal photography earlier this year.

"By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today."

[MacGuffin]

Spielberg talks about film 'Munich' in magazine



Director Steven Spielberg said his new film "Munich," the story of Israel's revenge for the killing of its athletes by Palestinian guerrillas at the 1972 Olympics, is "a prayer for peace," Time magazine reported on Sunday.

Leaders of Jewish and Muslim groups as well as diplomats and foreign policy experts will preview the film before its December 23 U.S. opening but Spielberg has shied away from the media hype and costly promotional campaigns that typically precede a big-studio movie.

The magazine said its interview was the only one the Oscar-winning director planned to do before the release of the film, which focuses on Israel's response after a Palestinian group took members of its Olympic team hostage at the Munich Games. Eleven Israeli athletes, five kidnappers and one German policeman were killed.

"Somewhere inside all this intransigence there has to be a prayer for peace," Spielberg told Time, "because the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence."

The director also discussed another film project he is initiating in February, in which he is buying 250 video cameras and players and giving them to Israeli and Palestinian children so that they can make movies about their own lives.

"Not dramas," Spielberg said, "just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they had to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to."

Spielberg said the children will then exchange the videos with one another.

"That's the kind of thing that can be effective, I think, in simply making people understand that there aren't as many differences that divide Israelis and Palestinians. Not as human beings anyway," he said.

The director told Time he's very proud of the fact that "Munich" doesn't demonize either the Israeli or Palestinian side.

"We don't demonize our targets," Spielberg said. "They're individuals. They have families."

The movie stars Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush.

[Alexandro]

a new quote from spielberg (about how he has no one to blame if he fails):

"I always say thank goodness for Jaws, because Jaws gave me final cut. I've had it now for 30 years, and because of that I only have myself to blame for anything that goes wrong."

[Ravi]

http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2005/12/spielberg_on_mu.html

Spielberg Takes on Terror
Munich adroitly blends high-pressure action and humanity in a historical story that's all about our times
By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The first and most important thing to say about Munich, Steven Spielberg's new film, is that it is a very good movie—good in a particularly Spielbergian way. By which one means that it has all the virtues we've come to expect when he is working at his highest levels. It's narratively clean, clear and perfectly punctuated by suspenseful and expertly staged action sequences. It's full of sympathetic (and in this case, anguished) characters, and it is, morally speaking, infinitely more complex than the action films it superficially resembles—pictures that simply pit terrorists against counterterrorists without an attempt to explore anyone's motives and their tragic implications.

Munich begins and ends with, and frequently reverts to, an account of an especially heinous historical act: the capture and eventual murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September. Because television was omnipresent at the Games, the entire world was witness to that awful event. Indeed, it's not too much to say that most of us for the first time perceived the face of modern terrorism in the images that abc and the other networks broadcast of those frightful 24 hours. Or, in fact, did not fully perceive it, since the iconic image of the attack was of a ski-masked terrorist standing on the balcony of the Israelis' Olympic Village quarters peering back at the cameras that were peering at him.

But—and this is why munich works so well—the movie is not primarily about that Munich. It is about the aftermath, in which the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Golda Meir's full endorsement, mounted a secret war of revenge against the murderers. In one of the movie's most crucial lines, she says, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." That negotiation—also carried out in the increasingly troubled mind of Avner Kauffman, leader of the Israeli hit squad on which the movie concentrates (there were several)—raises Spielberg's film above the thriller level, granting it real, often poignant, distinction. "You are assigned a mission, and you do it because you believe in the mission, but there is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating," says Spielberg. "Perhaps [your victims] are leading double lives. But they are, many of them, reasonable and civilized too." Killing them, he says, has unintended consequences. "It's bound to try a man's soul, so it was very important to me to show Avner struggling to keep his soul intact." (The moviemakers would not reveal the identity of the real Avner, whom they talked to at length during their research. In Spielberg's opinion, though, his soul was tried too much. "I don't think he will ever find peace.") More significantly, Spielberg wonders if the Israelis and the Palestinians will ever find peace. "I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine," he says. "There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?"

A big, expensive movie—reported to have cost around $70 million—that dives headfirst into Middle East conflicts: Does that give, say, a studio head pause? "Yes, to be honest," says Universal chairman Stacey Snider without hesitation. "At the time when we started it, [the story] felt more quaint. But as we went through the development process, the good and bad news was that it became more relevant."

Indeed, since June, when filming began, the movie has been surrounded by rumors, criticism and suggestions that Spiel- berg was too pro-Israel to make a fair movie on the subject. The filmmakers responded by keeping the details of the movie very quiet. Reporters were not allowed to visit the sets in Malta, Budapest, New York and Paris, and only a few actors got the complete script—many didn't even know what the whole movie was about. The shoot took three months, a quick turnaround for a movie to be released Dec. 23. That lessened the chance of leaks, as did the fact that most of the crew members were loyal, tight-lipped veterans of past Spielberg movies. When Time saw the movie, it had just been finished. There had been none of the usual test, press or studio-executive screenings; the movie's star, Eric Bana, had not even seen it. And there has been little advance publicity; Spielberg has done no interviews about the movie with anyone but TIME (see page 70).

"I never like to draw lessons for people," says screenwriter Tony Kushner of how his script deals with the Middle East question. "It's not an essay; it's art. But I think I can safely say the conflict between national security and ethics raised deep questions in terms of working on the film. I was surprised to discover how much the story had to do with nationality vs. family, and questions about home and being in conflict with somebody else over a territory that seems home to both people."

There is an entirely fictional scene in the movie in which Avner and his Palestinian opposite number meet and talk calmly, with the latter getting a chance to make his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. That scene means everything to Kushner and Spielberg. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills," says Spielberg. Without that exchange, "I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie—good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture." He almost did not make this picture, which he thrice denied. It was Kathleen Kennedy, his longtime friend and frequent producing partner, who acquired the book on which Munich is based, George Jonas' Vengeance, in 1998. But Spielberg shied away from it, in part, he says, because he had learned at his parents' knees that Middle East politics is such a difficult, passionately argued and unresolvable topic. "I'll leave it to somebody else," he recalls saying, "somebody braver than me." Then, in 1999, the persistent Kennedy prevailed on him to at least reconsider the matter. But two years later, 9/11 happened, and Spielberg felt the story would be perceived as exploitative. The fact that Spielberg could not get a script that in any way satisfied him—three were written—stalled him further.

"We all talk in genres," Kennedy says, "and this is clearly a thriller from a movie-making standpoint." On the other hand, it had to be a character-driven and intellectually acute thriller to satisfy her and Spielberg's ambitions for it. So "we knew and took the approach early on that we are not making a documentary." At some point the phrase "historical fiction" entered their conversations. They understood that they would have to compress and conflate some of their material. And, yes, do some inventing as well. "The fiction," says Spielberg, "comes in the interpersonal relationships of the five members of the ex-Mossad team" on which the film focuses. "I was very careful," he says, "to start the movie by saying 'Inspired by real events,' because until the secret files are opened up nobody will really know actually who did what."

But Kushner could make a good, entertaining guess. Spielberg had long wanted to work with the Pulitzer prizewinning author of Angels in America, and once he had solved Kushner's concerns about formatting a screenplay ("I said, 'Well, there's a program called Scriptor—put it on your laptop and you don't have to worry about that again'"), Kushner said he would try a few scenes. They became a 300-page first draft, written largely on spec, after which he and Spielberg happily collaborated for a little more than a year to complete the script. "You speak the words, and I'll provide the pictures," Spielberg remembers saying. "It was a lot of e-mails and arguments on the phone," Kushner says, "and an exciting amount of give and take. I think we really affected one another politically and emotionally." Another challenge was to create a sense of identification with Avner and his team. Avner, in particular, is a man not very in touch with his inner life. "I always felt like the character was trying to convince himself of an ideal without necessarily coming to terms with what the ideal was," says Bana. The whole team, says Kennedy, is five men on a mission who don't want to think of themselves as anything like the men they are pursuing.

Kushner located a dry, allusive, sometimes bleakly comic language for them, and Spielberg often found himself just listening to Kushner's words, momentarily forgetting his picture-making part of their deal. In a situation rare in modern filmmaking, the screenwriter was on the set 90% of the time. "When something was more action driven, Steven would take the lead," says Kennedy, "and when something was more dialogue driven, Tony would take the lead." Says Spielberg: "It was as close as I've ever come to directing a play." That does not mean the picture is sedentary. It ranges the world from Paris to Brooklyn, with stopovers in London, Beirut, Israel, Spain (or their geographical stand-ins), and it is full of derring-do and suspense. (Best such sequence: a child innocently answers a call on an explosive-laden phone meant to blow her father to kingdom come.) At more than 21/2 hours, Munich allows itself time to efficiently develop character, particularly among Avner's team, which is run—mostly from afar—by Geoffrey Rush's hard-assed executive spook.

The assassins include a hot-blooded South African hit man played by Daniel Craig, who is the next James Bond; Ciaran Hinds as his opposite, a meticulous cleanup artist; Mathieu Kassovitz as a toymaker who dabbles in bombmaking; and Hanns Zischler as an expert document forger. None of them have particularly accommodating natures, but the stress of living under constant danger becomes their bonding agent. The cast too came from all over the globe, including Israel and other parts of the Middle East. "It was like going to the U.N. every day," says Bana, an Australian. "There was always plenty of rich social and political discussion, no doubt about it."

Spielberg is at his best in visualizing a world he believes to be more menacing than it has ever been. That is more than a matter of noirish shadows. It is the hint of suspicious movement in the back of the frame, a pan that goes on a few frames longer than necessary, suggesting the possibility of a menace that may be present. Near the movie's end, a casual pan along the Manhattan skyline reveals the World Trade Center buildings. Had to show them, the director says. They existed at a historical moment in the mid-'70s. But there is more than historical veracity at work in that shot. The Twin Towers are the symbols of our new age of high (and endless) anxiety. Maybe there is, as Spielberg insists, no resonance between the fate of the Towers' victims and the fate of a few athletes in long-ago, faraway Munich. But inevitably the destiny of those Towers tinctures our thoughts, however much we wish to deny them. Dutiful men like Avner Kauffman will be sent forth to improvise a response to terrorism, whatever its source. And to live with the unintended consequences of their actions. Any movie that subtly, yet insistently reminds us of this blunt truth about the world we have inherited is worth seeing. And pondering.

[Ravi]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051219&s=diarist121905

WASHINGTON DIARIST
Hits
by Leon Wieseltier 
Post date 12.08.05 | Issue date 12.19.05    


A few days before I read in Time that Steven Spielberg's new movie is so significant that there would be no advance screenings of it, I went to an advance screening of it. The fakery is everywhere, isn't it, though in this instance it nicely captures the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film. The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays. For this reason, perhaps, they have devised a movie that wishes to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time. It tells the story of the Israeli retaliation for the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972--specifically, of the nasty adventures of a team of five Israelis that is dispatched to Europe to destroy eleven Palestinians. The film is powerful, in the hollow way that many of Spielberg's films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid. Spielberg knows how to overwhelm. But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away.

The real surprise of Munich is how tedious it is. For long stretches it feels like The Untouchables with eleven Capones. But its tedium is finally owed to the fact that, for all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself. It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israelis make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents. All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective. (I am referring only to the war between the terrorists and the counterterrorists. The larger picture is darker. Over the years more civilians were killed in Israeli air strikes than in the Palestinian atrocities that provoked those air strikes. The justice of Israel's defense of itself should not be confused with the rightness of everything that it does in self-defense.) No doubt Munich will be admired for its mechanical symmetries, which will be called complexity. But this is not complexity, it is strategy. I mean of the marketing kind: I note that the filmmakers have nervously retained the distinguished services of Dennis Ross to guide the film through the excitable community of people who know about its subject. Munich is desperate not to be charged with a point of view. It is animated by a sense of tragedy and a dream of peace, which all good people share, but which in Hollywood is regarded as a dissent, and also as a point of view. Its glossy caution almost made me think a kind thought about Oliver Stone. For the only side that Steven Spielberg ever takes is the side of the movies.

The screenplay is substantially the work of Tony Kushner, whose hand is easily recognizable in the crudely schematic quality of the drama, and also in something more. The film has no place in its heart for Israel. I do not mean that it wishes Israel ill; not at all. But it cannot imagine any reason for Israel beyond the harshness of the world to the Jews. "The world has been rough with you," the oracular gourmand godfather of an underground anarchist family, a ludicrous character plummily played by Michael Lonsdale, tells Avner Kauffman, the Israeli team leader. "It is right to respond roughly to such treatment." Avner's mother, whose family was destroyed by the Nazis, preaches this about the Jewish state: "We had to take this, because no one was going to give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes." Zionism, in this film, is just anti-anti-Semitism. The necessity of the Jewish state is acknowledged, but necessity is a very weak form of legitimacy. There are two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse. One of the Israeli killers recalls a midrash about God's compassion for the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, and keeps on killing. Another one of the Israeli killers protests that "Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. ... We're supposed to be righteous," and keeps on killing.
   
All this is consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was "not the right answer," and that the creation of Israel was "a mistake," and that "establishing a state means fucking people over." (If he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean fucking people over.) When Avner's reckoning with his deeds takes him to the verge of a breakdown, he joins his wife and child in Brooklyn and refuses to return to Israel, as if decency is impossible there. No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive. And the progressive Jewish playwright Tony Kushner's image of Israel oddly brings to mind the reactionary Jewish playwright David Mamet's image of Israel: For both of them, its essence is power. 

The Israeli response to Black September marked the birth of contemporary counterterrorism, and it is difficult not to see Munich as a parable of American policy since September 11. "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," Golda Meir grimly concludes early in the film, and one is immediately grateful for the un-Cheney-like sensation of a dissonance. Yet the film proclaims that terrorists and counterterrorists are alike. "When we learn to act like them, we will defeat them!" declares one of Avner's men, played by Daniel Craig, already with a license to kill. Worse, Munich prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion. This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety of other people can hold.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR.

[cron]

reads like something godard would write nowadays.

[Pubrick]

reads like something godard would write nowadays.

ouch!

[cron]

apparently i'm not the only one who thinks so

from the guardian blog:

Spielberg, who has tagged Munich a "prayer for peace", has constantly (and rather optimistically) maintained that his new film should serve a specifically political end of increasing the level of mutual understanding. Jean-Luc Godard, whose remarks about Michael Moore's Cannes victory have not gone unreported, would presumably have something to say about it. What do you think?

more about Munich response here:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2005/12/13/the_moral_maze.html#more

[MacGuffin]

Into the fray
Violence and empathy, revenge and doubt. For the director Steven Spielberg, there was no escaping "Munich."
Source: Los Angeles Times



For years the story of "Munich" hung over Steven Spielberg, drawing him inexorably like a black hole. "I never thought I was going to do it, but I couldn't keep my hands off of it. There was a real sort of negative energy that drew me into it when I first began developing it, that frightened me," says the 59-year-old director.

And why wouldn't he be frightened?
   
The film examines one of the pivotal moments in modern terrorism — the killing of 11 Israeli team members by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics — and then focuses on the secret hit squad assembled by the Israeli government to track down the perpetrators and assassinate them. It's a 30-year-old story that resonates today, and the thought of wading into the virulent Middle East animosities, with all of their moral conundrums, has daunted most American artists — even those who don't come with the pulpit and responsibility, which clearly weighs on him, of being not only Hollywood's most famous director but its most public Jew. He's the one who made the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List," about the Holocaust, and devoted all of his earnings from the film to his Shoah Foundation, which has been collecting the oral histories of Holocaust survivors.

Spielberg is not by nature a provocateur, but an entertainer.

Yet, he says with some urgency, "I couldn't live with myself being silent for the sake of maintaining my popularity. And I'm at an age right now where if I don't take risks, I lose respect for myself. And this was an important risk for me to take."

The director is slumped — almost curled up against a pillow — on a banquette by a window overlooking the Pacific. His hair is gray, his face pale, his manner muted. He seems tired — soul-tired — almost emptied out, as he talks; gone is the excited purposefulness that is the hallmark of his on-set persona. He's just finished both "War of the Worlds" and "Munich" in a blazing 18-month streak, and although he doesn't mention it, just hours earlier sold DreamWorks, the company he founded with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to Paramount. It is the end of an era for him; the end of his dream of owning his own studio.

The day is waning in his home office, a spacious, immaculate hacienda, stocked with original Norman Rockwells and Remingtons, beautifully colored parrots and a parakeet in elaborate cages, and guns — at least a dozen polished shotguns in a cabinet, which Spielberg uses for skeet shooting. The rare sits alongside the sentimental. On one table is the only extant copy of Orson Welles' original radio broadcast script of "War of the Worlds" and a book of crayon drawings of farm animals that his father drew for him, with 'Stevie Spielberg' crookedly inked on top. Both books are under plexiglass.

After more than six years and what Spielberg describes as "many, many low points, more low than high points," "Munich" has just begun to screen for journalists and tastemakers, part of the campaign leading to its general release Friday. Based on the book "Vengeance" by Canadian journalist George Jonas, the film, co-written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, uses the conventions of a heart-pounding '70s-style thriller as a framing device for an ethical examination about terrorism and counterterrorism, the origins, the repercussions, the costs it exacts on its practitioners. As the Israelis wreak retribution across Europe and retribution is rained down on them and their country, some squad members — in particular their leader, Avner, played by Eric Bana — begin to succumb to fear and doubts about whom exactly they're killing and whether their mission will ever be successful when one terrorist is simply replaced by another.

It's a hyper-violent work that lodges in the brain like a shard of glass.

Politically, the film is a Rorschach test — almost impossible to view except through the lens each individual audience member brings to the theater. There are those who will see a glamorized Israeli Mossad squad, dispatching villains with ingenuity, fiercely committed to the perpetuation of the Jewish state, while others will be infuriated that any of the Israeli commandos express any qualms about their mission. Some will be troubled that the Palestinian terrorists have been humanized, and others will be sure that they haven't been humanized or validated enough. At the end, it's a visceral, emotional piece of work that doesn't offer any specific solutions — a fact that will anger a whole other set of viewers. Some will complain that it lacks a point of view.

Spielberg and his colleagues are preparing for a gale of controversy. Already the citizen reviews have begun — from the murdered athletes' families who publicly praised the film, to some of the early pundits, as well as the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, who've suggested that Spielberg was naïve and ill-informed to make a movie that strives for the illusion of balance in a situation that is not.

On this Friday afternoon, an uncharacteristically low-key Spielberg says, "I worked very hard so this film was not in any way, shape or form going to be an attack on Israel." A moderately observant Jew, he unambiguously condemns the actions of the Black September terrorists and supports Israel's response at the time, a reaction he feels was necessary to prove Israel's strength to the rest of the world. Yet, he says, "The simple truth is sometimes we have to choose from bad options. And sometimes there are unintended results." Answering aggression with aggression "creates a vicious cycle of violence with no real end in sight."

The brewing controversy was what always made Spielberg nervous about making "Munich," says Stacey Snider, chairwoman of Universal Pictures, which is releasing the $70-million film in the United States. "If you're on either side in an extremist way on the issue of the source of the Middle East conflict, you're not going to just be upset, you're going to be really upset. Is that the reason not to make it? That was the gist of all of our conversations."

Spielberg's apparent skittishness about entering the political fray has influenced the promotion of the film. He's given one brief interview to Time magazine, and after months of requests, he suddenly agreed to an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Yet he's so far eschewed the usual press junket, a stance that could affect the film's Academy Award nominations. In the early run-up to the Oscars, "Munich" has landed on multiple top 10 lists but did not nab the top kudo with either the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. Film Critics Assn. "The whole experience [of making 'Munich'] was incredibly raw. He's still trying to wrap his head around it," says "Munich" producer Kathleen Kennedy, who's produced the vast majority of Spielberg's movies.

Stating over and over again that he didn't want to make a position paper, the director says, "[The film's] a discussion — it's like the Talmud is a series of discussions. It's just like Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abraham bargained with God about 'how can you punish the righteous with the wicked?' The film is a series of structured arguments between the members of the Mossad teams that reflects different points of view and allows you to choose the one that more easily fits how you see the conflict. And maybe even better can maybe change your mind about how you felt about this."

Questions, he points out, are an inherent part of the Jewish faith. "My whole life as a Jew has been a series of arguments; we're always arguing and discussing. The movie is certainly told from the Israeli point of view. But it is told with a great deal of empathy. I just wanted to put empathy in every direction, because the situation is not cut and dried. I was not interested in telling that kind of a tale of vengeance and I didn't want this to be a morality play, the way that 'Private Ryan' is a morality play."

Spielberg's refusal to demonize either side is precisely what seems to be fueling the outrage of early political critics of "Munich." The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier suggested that the film toyed with "the sin of equivalence," a charged term in the fractious debate that suggests both the Palestinians and the Israelis are equally culpable.

That accusation drives Kushner nuts. "That term is offensive," says the playwright, who seems more naturally suited to the role of the politically engaged. Even so, he too declines to clarify the moral of the movie.

On the phone from New York, he says, "What Steven shows with his camera is how frightened people are in moments of violence. The film enlists your empathy even at moments when politically or ethically you don't want your empathy enlisted. If the film had any point at all, I think where Steven and I met most, is you can't approach this situation with a notion of simple right or wrong. This makes a lot of people very upset. Murdering athletes is a horrible thing, and it's wrong, absolutely. But one of the questions is, why did that happen? What kind of horror produced this horror?

"It's the context ... the thing that in a sense makes it a very Jewish movie is that it's searching. The film really reflects where Steven and many people in the cast started out, let's dive into this hell, into this horrible, terrible tragedy and stay there and keep our eyes open. We didn't try to provide answers to things we don't have answers for."

Watching it happen

Spielberg remembers clearly watching the Olympic massacre unfold on TV — the image (which is now seen in the film) "of the Black September Fayadeen with the ski masks on, leaning over the balcony at 31 Connolly Strasse, guarded, but at the same time strangely confident."

For the first time, TV had brought this kind of political violence into living rooms around the world. "I don't think I ever heard the word 'terrorism' before September of '72," says Spielberg. "I couldn't believe it was not a re-creation, it was happening as I was watching it. And I couldn't turn away from it, like a car accident."

Until the moment the athletes were killed, Spielberg thought that Black September was just another leftist revolutionary fringe group, like many sprouting up all over the globe during that era. "I thought, well, maybe this is the Palestinian branch of Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army [Faction]. But when the Israeli team was murdered, then I think it became an attack on Jews everywhere. At least as a young man that's how I felt."

In the late '90s, young producer Barry Mendel, backed by Universal, acquired the rights to the Jonas book. Published in 1984, it had already been made into a miniseries by HBO starring Steven Bauer and Michael York. Mendel, in turn, enlisted Kennedy, with whom he'd produced "The Sixth Sense" and who brought the book to Spielberg in 1999.

They ultimately commissioned three scripts, from Janet and David Peoples, who'd written "Unforgiven"; Charles Randolph ("The Interpreter"); and, most notably, Oscar winner ("Forrest Gump") and top Hollywood writer Eric Roth, who wrote multiple drafts of the script for over a year, and has received credit on the final screenplay. Spielberg put the film down right after Sept. 11 because he was afraid it would be seen as exploiting the national tragedy but started again in 2002. "I just could feel that somehow this story had my name written all over it and I couldn't deny that. It just stirred up all these questions and arguments inside me."

Still, it wasn't until he met Kushner that he began to feel a "rapid kind of conductivity." Spielberg says his work with the 49-year-old Kushner is the most intimate collaboration with a writer of his career.

When first approached by Kennedy and then Spielberg, Kushner says, he was impressed by the nerviness of the project "to go after an aspect of the situation that is the most potentially incendiary, that really confronts the question of violence so directly. It's not something he needed to do."

Still, Kushner initially demurred. He didn't know how to do an action movie. He was busy with plays on Broadway and off. But he took a look at the script and wrote up his thoughts.

Ultimately the playwright tried writing a couple of scenes and then what would eventually become a 300-page script — initially working without a paying contract. "He wouldn't be obligated until he could experience it in his own way," says Spielberg. "Tony probably spent four months writing the project sort of experimentally, if he was leading the story, or the story was taking him. And once he realized that the story was taking him, then he committed 100% on working together."

"I think Eric's script was a wonderful script. I feel I changed it quite a bit, but I'm perfectly proud to be sharing credit with him," adds Kushner.While clearly one of America's leading playwrights, the choice of Kushner is controversial to the ardently pro-Zionist faction in Jewish and Israeli circles, mostly because of his leftist politics and public condemnation about how the state of Israel has conducted itself, most notably in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Today, Kushner admits his attitude toward Israel "changes a lot. I love going to Israel, but I'm not a Zionist who necessarily believes that the solution to the problem lies in nation states."

Kushner's familiarity with the arena (he co-edited the book "Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict") infused Spielberg with confidence, says producer Kennedy. "That didn't mean that Steven had to agree with Tony, but he could serve as a creative sounding board from a genuine basis of real knowledge. That helped Steven tremendously."

Indeed, all involved point out that Kushner is politically far to the left of Spielberg. They argued frequently but apparently not at high decibels. "We both whine to each other," says Spielberg, laughing. "We're whiners."

Further controversy has swirled around the project because it's based on George Jonas' book, the veracity of which has been questioned ever since it was published in 1984. In truth, other books — such as Simon Reeve's "One Day in September," based on the same research that went into the Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name — document (albeit with little detail) most of the assassinations that appear in the film. Although the Israeli government has never formally claimed responsibility for the operation, largely viewed as the birth of counterterrorism, a number of former high-ranking Israeli officials have acknowledged its existence.

Spielberg and Kushner met and interviewed the model for the Avner character, widely assumed, according to press accounts, to be Israeli security expert Yuval Aviv. (After the publication of "Vengeance," Jonas and Aviv got into a legal dispute over the rights to the book, and in the lawsuit Jonas identified Aviv as a key source in the book.) Since the publication of "Vengeance," Aviv has continued to be trailed by occasionally virulent criticism, especially after he investigated the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, on behalf of the airline and came to controversial conclusions.

Kushner and Spielberg decline to reveal the real agent's identity, though Kushner says: "I believe him. I know there are conflicting accounts, but there is no account that discredits his. [The 'Vengeance' account] is in dispute as are histories of the French Revolution. The part of the historical record that we had to be sure about was that we could say that there was this program, conducted by Israeli intelligence as a response to Munich, in which people were targeted and assassinated. This is not in dispute. Did it happen in exactly the way we describe? No. That's where our licenses as artists kick in. We're not claiming to make a documentary."

Spielberg also checked the facts with other sources that he declines to name, but it's clear that the director used the real Mossad agent as an important touchstone. "I needed somebody who was there to talk to. I needed the details," says the director. Indeed, much of the team's bumbling humanity — the fact that Avner isn't always proficient with his gun — came directly from the agent's reminiscences.

Although Spielberg showed the script to his rabbi and such close associates as former President Clinton (all in the vain hope that they'd talk him out of doing it, he insists), he appears to have pointedly stayed away from showing the script to Israeli officials. In the run-up to the film, a number of former Mossad agents, including the former Mossad head Zvi Zamir (who appears as a character in the film), have publicly complained that Spielberg did not solicit their input.

"I wanted to finish the movie before anybody saw it," he says. "I just always felt that [the Israelis] had to trust me, and I hope I haven't let anybody down."

Security on the set

Spielberg says the shoot was one of the most painful and difficult of his life. Malta, Hungary and Paris doubled for the various European capitals and the Middle East, and there was elaborate security, with dogs sniffing down all the locations and infrared cameras watching the sets overnight. "There was a threat of terrorism every day. We were in Malta very close to the Arabian coast and very close to Tripoli and Tunis. It was that small hundred-mile divide of water between Tunisia and the beginning of the Arab countries, and we were all concerned." Then they were in Hungary with its own porous border and France with its homegrown militants. It was a logistical nightmare. "My cast and crew, I had to ensure their safety."

Unlike a film like "War of the Worlds," he didn't preplan the shots on the computer or come to the set armed with storyboards. He shot the assassination sequences in continuity — exactly how they appear for the audience. "I wanted the movie to sort of tell me what to do with it," he says. "That's tremendously stimulating, to be able to have a movie talk to me directly and take me by the collar."

"He was really creating in the moment. It's like he's being channeled," recalls Kennedy. "He was not relying on anything that was derivative of himself, which at times he's allowed himself to do."

As a whole, the film feels more herky-jerky, tense and jagged than the usual visually magisterial Spielberg universe.

They spent three weeks re-creating the Munich massacre in Malta and Hungary, with Arab actors from Syria, Iran, Libya, Egypt and France playing the terrorists and Israeli actors playing the Israeli athletes. None of the actors had read the entire script, only their small portion.

"It was just very, very difficult for me to play war with them," says Spielberg. "With real people from the real regions, and then to be staging these scenes of brutality as well as compassion. And it was — it was brutal and cathartic at the same — all in the same breath, to stage a scene where Jews have been killed and then I say, 'Cut.' The Palestinian with the Kalashnikov throws his weapon down and runs over to the Israeli actor who is on the ground and picks the actor up and falls into the Israeli's arms and is sobbing. And then the Israeli actors and the Arab actors all running into this kind of circle and everybody is crying and holding each other."

"It wasn't like we all held hands and sang, 'Let's give peace a chance,' " says Kushner, who was on the set every day. "People were very careful, and really sympathized with one another. Everybody arrived sort of saying, 'I know this is hard for you coming from where you're coming from.' " Kushner has seen this before, working with Israeli and Palestinian actors both in Israel and the territories. "There's a real — sometimes it's clumsy, sometimes it's not — but a real desire to say, 'OK, we're trying to speak to one another across an enormous divide.' "

Spielberg seems to come closest to describing the point of "Munich" as he grapples for the words to describe all the young actors, steeped in the history and suffering of their two tribes, nonetheless trying to communicate with one another. His voice is tremulous, as if the words can't hold the emotion behind them. "It was so positive to see these two sides — actors, professional actors — coming together and being able to discuss what's happening today in their world. Over dinner, between shots. There was always open discussion. No fighting. Just understanding and listening. I wish the world would listen more and be less intransigent. These kids weren't talking on top of each other like trying to win an argument. These kids took time to listen before they spoke."

[Ravi]

Salon article:  The War on "Munich"

[matt35mm]

This was pretty good, but not great.  A little reflective of the whole year, I feel.

This is effectively two movies: one an espionage thriller, one a political/human commentary.  They don't quite fit together, I feel.  So even though the pacing is excellent (it's thriller structure is depends on that, and it is very suspenseful when it wants to be), and is never boring or dragged out, it feels too long in that it contains too much.  It also gets repetitive, as many of the missions are quite similar (get the name from the source, plan the assassination out, execute, run).  It becomes much more interesting toward the end, when things get more complicated for Bana's character.

As you can probably assume, the recreation of the Munich events were brutal and superbly executed.  Hard to watch, but not gratuitous.

One of the reasons it feels like two movies can probably be explained in one of the articles above that state that, essentially, Kushner was in charge of the dialogue-y parts, and Spielberg took over for the action/suspense scenes.

As a 70s filmmaker himself, Spielberg recreates the 70s perfectly (sounds silly when a 20 year old says that, but while watching the movie, it's very clear that it's all very period-accurate).  The filmmaking itself is more 70s than modern, as well, and the film certainly doesn't shy away from grain.

This is certainly a positive review, and a strong recommendation, but I think it has some glaring problems.  At the end, it feels slighter than it should, after some of what it contains.  A lot of times it feels like a serious thriller, the likes of which we've seen before, and the Israeli-Arab hostilities are a somewhat incidental background.  It's not really as important a film as it's been hyped up to be, and it's got some glaring problems, but it's a smart and solid film nonetheless.  B+

[Ultrahip]

Haven't seen The New World yet, but as of now, Munich is my pick for best of the year.

There's a great self-referential moment when Bana is cleaning up the evidence after a murder, he grabs everything identifying the body, except the guy's hat. The camera just lingers on the hat, waiting for it to be picked up, but Bana leaves the room.