The Hunt For Black September

Janusz Kaminski, ASC Exposes An Undercover Mission For Munich

By Bob Fisher

Munich re-visits a horrific chapter in human history. The film opens during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, where terrorists take 11 Israeli athletes hostage and murder them with millions of television viewers watching in every part of the world. The killers are members of Black September, a shadowy arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the aftermath of that stunning event, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier orders the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to track down and kill the assassins. That part of the real life drama happens behind the scenes.

Munich was produced by Dreamworks, SKG and Universal Pictures with Steven Spielberg at the helm. It is based on Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter Terrorist Team, a book written by Canadian journalist George Jonas. The film recounts the stories of the five Israelis selected for the deep-undercover mission as told by their leader, Avner, played by Eric Bana. He is surrounded by a large international cast.

In other hands, Munich could have been a traditional Hollywood thriller, where the good guys hunt down caricatured villains with a breathtaking but predictable conclusion. Spielberg chose to probe much deeper beneath the surface. He recruited Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner to write the screenplay. Kushner’s only previous film credit was for the award-winning HBO miniseries Angels in America.

Munich marks the 10th collaboration for Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski, ASC, which began with Schindler’s List in 1993. The cinematographer first heard about Spielberg’s plans for Munich about a year and a half before they began production.

The film was produced in about 16 weeks at practical locations in Malta, France, Hungary and New York. Some scenes were filmed on stages built in what was originally intended to be an ice skating rink in Budapest. They spent about seven weeks each in Malta and Budapest, and one each in Paris and New York City.

“We weren’t shooting overseas to save money,” Kaminski relates. “We scouted and found locations that provided the right backgrounds for the different cities in Europe and the Middle East where Avner and his team hunted the terrorists.”

Budapest provided locations resembling Paris, Rome, Munich and London, and they used urban landscapes with cobblestone streets and narrow old buildings in Malta for staging scenes set in Jerusalem, Beirut, Marseille, Nice, Barcelona and Rome.

“It was a privilege to work on this movie with one of the world’s greatest directors,” he says. “Steven was clear from the beginning that he wanted to use zoom lenses because that signified the 1970s for him. The zoom lens was invented and used on many of the great films that we remember from the 1970s.”

Kaminski thought about using the slightly more realistic lighting style that was also common in many classic 1970s movies, but decided it wasn’t necessary because the period is defined by makeup, hair, wardrobe, cars, production design and locations.

They framed the film in Super 35 format using spherical lenses. His camera package from ARRI Rental in Germany included two ARRICAM LT, ARRICAM ST, ARRIFLEX 435 and 235 bodies, a set of Cooke S4s, and the short and long Optimo lenses.

Spielberg and Kaminski also decided on a photochemical postproduction process. They used ENR on the entire film and bleach bypass on selected scenes to silently amplify emotions. ENR is a process that Technicolor developed when Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC was preparing to film Reds in 1981. It enables cinematographers to record deeper, more saturated black tones by retaining silver halide crystals in the print film when it is processed. It’s a quantifiable process with more or less silver retained.

Kaminski used a bleach bypass process on the negative in scenes where he wanted a substantially harsher look, including the opening scene at the Olympics and when Avner is having flashbacks. Kaminski shot the flashback scenes twice. The first take was for the original scene. Then, he shot the it again for the flashback sequence, using a little more light on the eyes and calling for a bleach bypass process.

“The flashbacks happen at times when Avner’s world is collapsing,” he explains. “We used contrast, color saturation and grain created both in the camera and lab to record harsher images, which are an external representation of his internal feelings.”

He cites a vivid example: Four different scenes were filmed on a set replicating a bank vault in Switzerland. Each of them takes place at a different time in the story when Avner visits the vault to pick up money deposited by the Israeli government. Kaminski shot all four scenes in a single day. He approached each one differently.

“Each scene reflects different emotions,” he explains. “There is a progressive deterioration of the images each time he walks into the vault. I shot his first visit to the vault with (Kodak) 5293 (film). It’s a crisp look that’s a bit warm. The second time, it’s a slightly paler look. The third time, I used a 500-speed emulsion (Kodak Vision 5279). It has a different feeling with more grain and contrast and desaturated colors. I shot his final visit to the vault with 5279 using a little more light and a bleach bypass.”

The camera work throughout the film is objective as though the audience is a witness to the unfolding drama. Kaminski explains that it’s a story about hunting humans, so the camera is almost always moving, motivated by the characters and what is happening in the scene. He used a crane at times for a more distant perspective.

Other times, he used a Steadicam when they wanted fluid camera movement. Sometimes Kaminski mounted a camera on cars, or he put it on a tripod on the floor of the backseat. There are also many handheld shots when Spielberg wanted to visually punctuate feelings of suspense or the confusion that the characters were feeling.

“We mainly shot with a single camera,” he says. “When you are shooting a close-up with a 75mm lens on the B camera and a wide angle lens on the main camera, the actors know what you are doing. They perform for the wide shot instead of the close-up. It was important for every shot to capture the actors’ best performances.”

Kaminski says Spielberg generally knew exactly how he wanted to cover scenes. They’d watch the actors rehearse, and then talk about how to cover and block the scene.

“There were no storyboards,” Kaminski says. “Steven did an amazing job blocking scenes to tell a story about people hunting other people in a very organic way. He used the zoom to choreograph feeling of suspense. The camera zooms in and you see reflections in a rear view mirror. It zooms out and pans to a character walking across the street. Anytime we weren’t zooming, I’d pull the lens out and switch to a prime.”
       
The opening scene is a powerful recreation of the murders at the Olympic Games. They prepared by studying documentary footage. It begins with a shot looking up to the balcony of a building in the Olympic Village. A man’s face is covered by a ski mask. He opens a sliding glass door, steps onto the balcony, looks around and goes back inside.
       
“We recreated that scene and what it might have been like inside the room where they were holding the hostages,” Kaminski says. “There were a couple of 1970 TV monitors running news and documentary footage that was shot in 1972. Half of the frame on the screen is the actual news and documentary film. The other half is the footage we shot of the hostages who are bound and reduced to a fearful state. A terrorist opens the sliding glass door and walks onto the balcony. The actor had to mimic the actual terrorist and synchronize his body language with the archival documentary footage.”

Kaminski describes the rendering of colors as though he were a painter talking about the palette he chose to create a work of art. Scenes filmed in the Middle East were very warm exuding an aura of sunshine. He slightly desaturated colors for shots in Paris. In an exterior scene, Kaminski wet the street down and used a softer quality of light for a more delicate look. In a building in Cypress, he used warm fluorescent lights combined with yellow gels on the lamps. In a Brooklyn scene near the end of the film, he used 5279 with a half Coral instead of an 85 filter on the lens to record a bluish, grainy tone.

Éclair Lab in France processed the negative and provided dailies for six of the seven weeks of production in Malta and the week in Paris. Technicolor in London processed the negative and provided dailies for the rest of the work done in Europe. Technicolor in Los Angeles processed the negative and provided dailies for New York.

The common denominator was Dale Grahn, a timer at Technicolor in Los Angeles. He spent several days at both Éclair and Technicolor in London helping the dailies timers zero-in on Kaminski’s intentions for the look. Grahn timed the film with Kaminski in Los Angeles. It was their 10th project since 1993.

 “I met Janusz when he was preparing to go to Poland to shoot Schindler’s List,” Grahn says. “He had seen something he liked in Dracula, which I had timed. Janusz brought me a work print of his film, The Adventures of Huck Finn. I sent him a timed print in Poland. We have been working together since Schindler’s List.”

Grahn has compiled nearly 200 credits since 1986, so he is speaking with the advantage of having broad experience with many cinematographers and directors.

“Bleach bypass makes some people nervous because it is irreversible once you process the negative,” he says, “but Janusz knows exactly what he is doing, and he’s working with a director who has complete trust in him. That’s how great films are made.”

Kaminski considers film dailies an integral part of the creative process. His camera crew, gaffer and key grip were generally at dailies along with producer Colin Wilson, the makeup artist, and producer Kathleen Kennedy was also frequently present.

“You can see performances on digital dailies, but you can’t feel the emotions the way you can on film,” he says. “Dailies are always a learning process for me. We saw and discussed opportunities to light in different ways every day. Some people say that doesn’t matter. The audience can’t see the difference, but I believe they can feel the emotions of the story and actors coming right off the screen.”

ABOUT JANUSZ KAMINSKI, ASC

Janusz Kaminski, ASC was a movie fan as a youth growing up in communist Poland. Films from Western countries were occasionally shown at local cinemas though they were usually six or seven years old. In 1981, he visited Greece with an amateur camera club that was participating in an event. He decided to defect and made his way to Vienna, Austria. About nine months later, he arrived in Chicago as a political refugee. His first job was operating a machine in a factory for $3.75 an hour. In 1983, Kaminski enrolled at Columbia College where he studied filmmaking, while supporting himself working at various part-time jobs. He met Mauro Fiore at the school and they became lifelong friends. In 1985, he was standing in a crowd watching John Alonzo, ASC shoot scenes for Nothing in Common on the streets of Chicago. A friend introduced him to Alonzo who took him on as an intern. In 1987, Kaminski was accepted into the graduate film program at the American Film Institute on a fellowship. He subsequently worked on a number of ultra-low budget films. In 1991, Kaminski shot a television movie called Wildflower. Steven Spielberg happened to see it. That led to an opportunity for Kaminski to shoot Class of ‘61, a television movie for Amblin. The rest is history. Munich is his 10th film with Spielberg. He earned Oscars for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan and a third nomination for Amistad. Their other films were Minority Report, The Terminal, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Artificial Intelligence: AI, Catch Me If You Can and War of the Worlds.

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