EXCLUSIVE: TIME Magazine FIRST to See ‘Munich’

New

York – “I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today,” director Steven Spielberg tells TIME in an exclusive cover-story interview. “But it’s certainly worth a try,” Spielberg says.

Spielberg gave TIME the first look at his new film “Munich” which opens Dec. 23. TIME’s coverlines are, “EXCLUSIVE: SPIELBERG’S SECRET MASTERPIECE. So sensitive it was kept under wraps, Munich is his boldest feat year—a story of terrorism at the Olympics and the cost of revenge. Plus: Spielberg on why his movies have changed.”

Since filming began I June, the movie (reported to cost around $70 million) “has been surrounded by rumors, criticism, and suggestions that Spielberg was too pro-Israel to make a fair movie,” according to TIME. When TIME’s Arts Editor Belinda Luscombe, movie reporter Desa Philadelphia and critic Richard Schickel screened Munich last week, neither studio execs nor star Eric Bana had yet seen it.

Spielberg tells TIME he is proud he and screenwriter Tony Kushner demonized anyone in the film, which depicts the Israeli government’s secret war of revenge against the murderers of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September.

“We don’t demonize our targets. They’re individuals. They have families. Although what happened in Munich, I condemn,” Spielberg tells TIME. The moviemakers would not reveal the identity of the character they call Avner Kauffman, the leader of the Israeli hit squad, who they interviewed at length. “There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating,” Spielberg says. “It’s bound to try a man’s soul.” Of the real Avner, Spielberg says, “I don’t think he will ever find peace.”

Spielberg is critical of the organizers of the IOC: “One of the reasons I wanted to tell this story is that every four years there’s an Olympics somewhere in the world, and there has never been an adequate tribute paid to the Israeli athletes,” Spielberg says. “The silence about them by the International Olympic Committee is getting louder for me.”

Spielberg will initiate a project next February to make “people understand that there aren’t that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians—not as human beings, anyway.” Spielberg tells TIME, “What I’m doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives—not dramas, 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—and then exchange the videos. That’s the kind of thing that can be effective.”

One scene in Munich “meant everything” to Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (author of Angels in America), TIME reports. Avner and his Palestinian opposite meet and the latter makes his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. “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.”

Though his producing partner Kathleen Kennedy calls the film a “thriller,” Spielberg calls it “historical fiction.” “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 who actually did what.”

TIME’s cover package on newsstands Mon., Dec. 5, also includes Richard Schickel’s review; an interview with Spielberg, and Lisa Beyer’s analysis of what is true, and not true, in Munich, with reporting from a new book.

REVIEW: “Munich” is “a very good movie,” according to TIME critic Richard Schickel, “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.”

SPIELBERG INTERVIEW: Spielberg also talks to Schickel, who collaborated with him on the TV documentary “Shooting War,” about other concerns: Why he doesn’t make more films like E.T. or Raiders: ‘I cannot tell you how many people come over to me on the street and repeat almost verbatim the line the Martians say to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories: “You know, we like your earlier, funnier films.’ This is not from young people but from older people, who I guess grew up with the movies I made when I was a kid and they were kids too. So I’m bewitched by Woody Allen in the sense that I keep hearing this scene from Stardust Memories played out in my real life. It’s very bedeviling.” Saying ‘no’ to Harry Potter and Spider-Man: “I keep looking around for things, but then when I get the opportunity, say, to direct Harry Potter, I say no. When I get the opportunity to do something like Spider-Man, I say no. The films that are offered me that have childlike souls, I tend to say, “I’ve done that.” I don’t know if that just means I’ve grown up for good or whether something’s going to come along that’s going to make me say, “O.K., whatever I said to you is full of hot air, and the child lives in all of us until we die.” Tom Hanks gave his best performance in Terminal: “It (Terminal) wasn’t a film that I’ll be remembered for, but it’s a film I’ll remember for the rest of my life, a sweet short story that gave me a chance to work with Tom Hanks—and people think I’m crazy for saying this—giving what I think was his best performance. Some people have said, “Why did you make that little movie when you could have been doing something important?” And I said, “Well, at the time it was important.” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln: “If I find something dark and historical—like this Doris Kearns Goodwin book (Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln) I’m working on now—I’ll do that. It’s just how things work out. It’s all about timing.”

NEW BOOK ON MYTHS SURROUNDING ISRAEL’S REVENGE: “The notion persists that the Israelis drew up a list of those responsible for Munich, then, one by one, knocked them off,” writes TIME’s Lisa Beyer who served as Jerusalem bureau chief for nine years. “But that’s largely a myth, according to an upcoming book by TIME reporter Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House, 272 pages). The Israelis, Klein writes, had to settle for smaller targets, killing activists who for the most part had nothing to do with the Munich massacre and leaving alive, to this day, some who were involved.” According to Klein, the assassination of the first Palestinian to die, Wael Zwaiter, “was a mistake.” Intelligence on him was “uncorroborated and improperly cross-referenced.”

Read the cover story