Kevin Macdonald sat in a hotel room somewhere in the Middle East, feeling like a character in a John Le Carre spy thriller.
The documentary filmmaker was expecting instructions from a terrorist. No one knew where Macdonald was, not even his Oscar-winning producer, Arthur Cohn (“Central Station”). He had been ordered to travel alone and not tell anyone of his whereabouts.
After eight months of fitful negotiations, aborted meetings, canceled airplane flights and secret locations, terrorist Jamal Al Gashey had finally agreed to talk — on camera.
In Macdonald’s hastily packed bag was the wig-and-mustache disguise he had been ordered to bring for Al Gashey, the sole surviving perpetrator of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by members of the Palestinian group, Black September, an offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The much-anticipated interview was expected to be the cornerstone of director Macdonald’s feature-length documentary, “One Day in September,” an expose of the hostage crisis that won the 2000 Academy Award for best documentary. The movie opens for a two-week run at the Music Box Theater in Chicago on Friday.
“It was all very cloak-and-dagger,” the 33-year-old filmmaker recalled during a telephone interview from his London home. “I wasn’t quite blindfolded, but I had no pre-knowledge of the location of the interview. I couldn’t even use the cameraman of my choice, because Al Gashey had selected the person in advance, a man he knew and trusted.”
The terrorist, who was in hiding in Africa with his wife and two daughters, had reason to be careful. According to the film, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, had already assassinated the two other Black September members who had survived the 24-hour hostage crisis and the fiery gun battle with German authorities in ’72. There had been many attempts on Al Gashey’s life over the years, also courtesy of Mossad assassination squads, according to Macdonald.
As the filmmaker waited in his hotel somewhere in the Arab world in April 1999, his perseverance was about to pay off. Al Gashey’s unrepentent testimony is the centerpiece of the stunning, suspenseful “September,” which answers questions about the massacre that have puzzled investigators for almost three decades.
With his face in shadow, the terrorist speaks of his training in Libya, his continued pride at having confronted the Israelis, and the bloody deaths of the first two hostages. He describes the murder of the remaining victims at the Furstenfeldbruck military airfield near Munich, where the terrorists had demanded a plane to take them to Libya.
Narrated by Michael Douglas, the documentary also includes graphic, gruesome police photographs of the corpses, heart-rending interviews with victims’ relatives and jaw-dropping revelations about German incompetence during the crisis.
The movie asserts that when the Palestinians fled the Olympic Village with their captives, German authorities at the Village saw that there were eight terrorists instead of the presumed five, but they did not warn officials at the airfield that there were more terrorists than anticipated. Thus the German special forces at the airfield had only five sharpshooters — and they weren’t in radio contact with each other.
Then, at the air base, the policemen disguised as crew members aboard the Libya-bound jet that the terrorists had demanded decided that their mission was “too dangerous” and aborted it at the last minute.
No wonder the film has been controversial in Germany. According to Variety, “September” was turned down by German distributors and attacked in the German media. It was also rejected by the Berlin Film Festival.
“Not only did they turn it down, they hated it,” says Macdonald, whose sources included high-ranking German officials and internal police documents. “They made it clear they were appalled by the film and found it unfair. We were so devastated.” Nevertheless, he insists, “I didn’t set out to make an anti-German film. I set out to make a film about a terrorist attack.”
Macdonald admits he seems an unlikely person to examine an Israeli tragedy. He was only 4 years old on Sept. 5, 1972, the day the terrorists stormed the Israeli compound, killing two athletes and taking nine others hostage. He grew up on a sheep farm in rural Scotland, far removed from the arena of Middle East politics.
But then again, his grandfather was the Hungarian-born Jewish screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, who fled the Nazis and later collaborated with British director Michael Powell on legendary films such as “The Red Shoes.” “I knew I had cousins in Israel,” Macdonald says. “I was well aware that I had Jewish blood in my small, rural community.”
To Macdonald, the shy, retiring Pressburger was “a slightly enigmatic, exotic character” who stood only 5 feet 4 inches but told larger-than-life yarns of living as a tramp in 1920s Berlin and writing his first short stories on forms at the post office. “He told the most fantastic tales about his life in the movies,” says Macdonald, who still has the Nazi-era letter Pressburger received stating that his German film studio bosses could no longer employ Jews. The day after a colleague warned him that he was to be arrested, “My grandfather packed one bag, left his key in the apartment door and took the train to Paris,” Macdonald says.
Macdonald, an Oxford graduate who has published a biography of his late grandfather, began his film career in the early ’90s, directing television documentaries on filmmakers such as Howard Hawks and Errol Morris.
But by 1997, Macdonald — the brother of Andrew Macdonald, producer of “Trainspotting” and “The Beach” — wanted to stretch creatively with a film that felt more like a dramatic thriller than a “60 Minutes” episode. He hoped to focus on Israel and terrorism in the 1970s; when a colleague suggested the Munich crisis, Macdonald quickly realized that was the perfect project for his ambitions. “I knew the subject would work well cinematically, because it had built-in tension,” he says.
“The events take place over a nerve-wracking 24 hours, which provided us with a structure around which to tell the story.”
Before Macdonald even turned on his camera, making “September” proved to be his most challenging endeavor. Zvi Zamir, who was head of the Mossad during the hostage crisis, refused to do an interview for eight months. Dr. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the former German interior minister who offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israelis, granted a meager 10-minute interview three days before the film was completed.
“Getting the Germans to speak was like banging my head against the wall,” Macdonald recalls. It didn’t help that the filmmaker had no previous investigative journalism experience. “I had to learn by doing, and it was very, very tough,” he says. “Many times, people weren’t talking to us and everyone was closing down. I despaired a lot. There were times I would have given up if I could.”
Slowly, though, he knocked down all the barriers. His greatest coup, of course, was tracking down Al Gashey, a junior member of the terrorist gang who appears in “September” in an archival clip wearing a striped jacket and guarding a door on a first-floor balcony. Early on, the director met a Palestinian journalist who had almost landed an interview with Al Gashey — until the terrorist became convinced she was a Mossad agent. “From that, I learned two things: that Al Gashey was alive and that in theory, he might grant an interview,” Macdonald says.
He made contact with the terrorist through “a strange kind of `Six Degrees of Separation.'” Sources led him to a valuable middleman, a Palestinian who had grown up with Al Gashey in a refugee camp in Beirut. But the interview itself was on-again, off-again. On a number of occasions, Macdonald found himself at the airport, ticket in hand, only to learn that the terrorist had canceled yet again.
When the go-ahead finally came, the director flew to the Middle East but did not know his destination until Al Gashey’s friend appeared and drove him to a small television studio.
Over the next six hours, the terrorist spoke in fits and starts, sometimes angrily storming out of the room or shouting and arguing with his childhood friend, who conducted the interview with Macdonald’s guidance. “Al Gashey was extremely worried and paranoid,” Macdonald recalls. “After struggling for so long to keep quiet, I think he got irrationally upset and irritated when confronted with the camera. And I wasn’t allowed to leave the studio or make any telephone calls. For the most part, I was in the dark, because the two men were speaking in Arabic. I didn’t know what I had until I returned to London and hired a translator.”
Meeting Al Gashey provoked mixed feelings in the director. “Emotionally, it was a very strange thing to be sitting in a room with somebody who had committed such terrible acts,” he says. “But I felt strongly that I wanted to present everyone in the film as a human being, and that I didn’t want to demonize anyone. I did not want to depict Al Gashey as evil. I wanted him to come across as someone who did what he did for reasons that were compelling. Whether or not we agree with him is a different matter.”
