Spielberg enters a crossfire he could not avoid

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 naive 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.”