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For the Munich soundtrack, Williams has created some of the most powerful and enduring film music of our time. With his sweeping score, he puts forth a feeling of intense emotion that takes the listener on a thought-provoking journey. The overall theme of the soundtrack seems to be one of desperation and despair - a plea for world peace.
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Munich is directed by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner TONY KUSHNER (Angels in America), who makes his feature film debut as a screenwriter, and ERIC ROTH (Forrest Gump, The Insider), based on the book Vengeance by George Jonas. The producers are KATHLEEN KENNEDY, Steven Spielberg, BARRY MENDEL and COLIN WILSON.
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In September of 1972 an unprecedented terrorist attack unfolded live before 900 million television viewers across the globe and ushered in a brave new world of unpredictable violence.
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For the Munich soundtrack, Williams has created some of the most powerful and enduring film music of our time. With his sweeping score, he puts forth a feeling of intense emotion that takes the listener on a thought-provoking journey. The overall theme of the soundtrack seems to be one of desperation and despair - a plea for world peace. “The Tarmac at Munich”, which showcases Lisbeth Scott’s beautiful vocals, portrays the themes of desolation and loneliness. Many of the tracks feature authentic Palestinian sounds for which Williams employed the oud - a Middle Eastern lute, the cimbalom - a Hungarian zither, as well as clarinet and strings for the feel of the Orient.
With a career spanning over four decades, Williams has received 46 Oscar® nominations (more than any living person) and has won 5 Oscars®, 18 Grammy® Awards, 4 Golden Globes, 4 Emmy® Awards and 6 BAFTA Awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He earned his first Oscar® in 1971, for Fiddler on the Roof and his career reached a turning point when Steven Spielberg approached him to score his early movies. In quick succession, this led to Williams’ second Oscar®, for Jaws and his introduction to George Lucas, who then hired him to score the Star Wars saga, bringing him his third Oscar®. He later went on to compose music for a host of blockbusters, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, E.T. (winning Oscar® number 4), and the Indiana Jones movies. After his 5th Oscar® win for Schindler’s List, John maintained an extraordinary creative pace, composing scores for nine films in just four years, including Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot.
On 23rd June 2000, Williams became the first inductee into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. He also served as musical director for the 74th annual Academy Awards® in March of 2002, where he received his 40th and 41st nominations for his scores for the films Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Williams received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honour in December 2004 and most recently received 2 Grammy nominations for his Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith score and one nomination for War of the Worlds in the Best Instrumental Composition category.
Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures present an Amblin Entertainment-Kennedy/Marshall-Barry Mendel Production, a Steven Spielberg film, Munich. This dramatic exploration inspired by true events follows a secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and kill the eleven Palestinians suspected to have planned the Munich attack - and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.
www.munichmovie.com
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Munich is directed by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner TONY KUSHNER (Angels in America), who makes his feature film debut as a screenwriter, and ERIC ROTH (Forrest Gump, The Insider), based on the book Vengeance by George Jonas. The producers are KATHLEEN KENNEDY, Steven Spielberg, BARRY MENDEL and COLIN WILSON. The international cast includes Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down), Daniel Craig (Layer Cake), Geoffrey Rush (Shine), Mathieu Kassovitz (Birthday Girl), Hanns Zischler (Walk on Water) and Ciaran Hinds (The Phantom of the Opera.)
“Our worst fears have been realized tonight.” With those words, uttered on September 6, 1972, television announcer Jim McKay brought the overwhelming news that the 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and sporting officials taken hostage by Palestinian kidnappers in the Olympic Village at Munich were all dead, most of them killed on the tarmac of Furstenfeldbruck Airport on the outskirts of Munich in the midst of the German authorities’ final botched rescue attempt. A shock wave rippled across a world already engulfed by conflict. With turmoil raging in Vietnam, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, not to mention protest and unrest in the streets of America and Europe, these Olympics had been seen as a much-needed reminder of global unity and a brief oasis of peace.
But it was not to be. The world soon learned that the men who had broken into the Olympic Village wearing tracksuits, armed with Kaleshnikov rifles and bearing hand grenades were Palestinian fedayeen (literally “men of sacrifice”). Many of them had been recruited from refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon; their aim was to bring the Palestinian cause to worldwide attention and exchange their hostages for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners, as well as the notorious German terrorist leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.
From the beginning, the staunch Israeli government of Golda Meir refused any negotiations, and Germany refused to allow an Israeli special-forces team to operate in Munich. Instead, the German police launched their own series of ill-fated hostage rescues. It began pre-dawn on September 5 and continued for 21 hours—involving several hastily aborted plans and ultimately resulting in a chaotic shoot-out in which the hostages, five of their kidnappers and a German police officer died. German police took the remaining three kidnappers alive. Weeks later, in what many believe was a staged event based upon a deal struck between the Palestinians and the German government, the three surviving fedayeen would be released from German prison when hijackers of a Lufthansa plane demanded their release.
The Olympic games continued after a memorial service, despite the somber, stricken mood. In the media and around the world, there was an attempt to return to some pretense of normalcy.
What happened next never made the evening news. Publicly, Israel responded to the terrorist act on September 9 when its Air Force bombed PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Israeli cabinet’s top-secret “Committee X” authorized another mission that would never be spoken about. They devised a deep undercover effort designed to strike fear into the hearts of all terrorists threatening Israel—the elimination of 11 suspected Black September operatives by any means necessary.
This was “Operation Wrath of God,” the still controversial and heavily debated targeted assassination program that, according to several published sources, would ultimately kill at least 13 men without prosecution or trial. The international team of anonymous, but skilled, assassins that Israel created came to have a resounding impact that continues to echo today. Though neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli secret intelligence agency—the Mossad—have ever officially acknowledged the existence of these hit squads, a number of books and documentaries utilizing inside sources have since provided details of how and why “Wrath of God” carried out its aims. Two Israeli generals have also publicly confirmed that the targeted assassination squads did indeed exist: General Aharon Yariv in a 1993 BBC documentary and General Zvi Zamir in a 2001 60 Minutes interview.
The core of the casting lay in finding the hit squad itself—the five utterly diverse men who, in the wake of the hostage massacre at the 1972 Olympics, agree to upend their personal lives, give up their former identities and take on an unimaginably perilous undercover mission on behalf of Israel.
The making of Munich began with an exhaustive international search for actors to play the nearly 200 parts in the intricate screenplay, parts ranging from famous political figures to covert agents who work in the shadows. Armed with only a general description of the film’s story and the promise of working with Steven Spielberg, casting director Jina Jay traveled the globe looking for fresh and interesting faces. Throughout her search, the focus was on carving out viscerally real characters, rather than relying on star power to drive the film’s story.
Spielberg had a very complete vision of what he was looking for in each of them. “I felt it was very important not just to find different looks for each of the five men, but also to find five different acting styles, five different accents, five very unique personalities,” says the director.
The unlikely leader of the group, Avner, is also its youngest member and the only native Israeli. Avner is intensely devoted to his country, but has never had to kill someone before this mission. To play Avner, Spielberg always had in mind Eric Bana, whom he had seen in Ang Lee’s adaptation of The Hulk. “When I saw him in The Hulk, I saw a warmth and a strength and even a little trickle of fear behind his eyes, which I think makes him very human. I was very determined that I was going to humanize the character of Avner in this story, so Eric was my first choice from the outset,” states Spielberg.
The hit squad is only allowed official contact with their mysterious case officer Ephraim. To play Ephraim, the filmmakers chose Academy Award®-winner Geoffrey Rush, the acclaimed Australian actor who came to the fore with his vivid portrayal of Australian pianist David Helfgott in Shine and has gone on to diverse roles ranging from the infamous libertine the Marquis de Sade to comic genius Peter Sellers. The role of Ephraim was something quite different again for Rush, which he discovered while reading the screenplay.
Munich takes place on a truly international scale, darting across 14 European and Middle Eastern countries in the course of the story, from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, from Haifa to Paris, all during the early ’70s. Shot entirely on location, the film required the creation of more than 120 sets, so it was essential the filmmakers find a home base that could offer them a variety of looks and landscapes.
Spielberg and his Academy Award®-nominated production designer Rick Carter found nearly everything they needed within the borders of two of the newest members of the European Union: the elegant Eastern European nation of Hungary and the Mediterranean island of Malta. Malta provided locations that could accurately double for all the Mediterranean and Middle East locales, while Hungary provided an ideal setting for the more than half a dozen different Northern European cities where the story of Avner and his covert assassination unit unravels.
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In September of 1972 an unprecedented terrorist attack unfolded live before 900 million television viewers across the globe and ushered in a brave new world of unpredictable violence.
It was the second week of the Summer Olympics, and in Munich, West Germany, the games that had been dubbed “The Olympics of Peace and Joy” were off to a rousing start with swimmer Mark Spitz and gymnast Olga Korbut wowing the crowds. Suddenly, without warning, an extremist Palestinian group known as Black September invaded the Olympic Village, killing two members of the Israeli Olympic team and capturing nine as hostages. The tense stand-off and tragic massacre that ensued played out with stunning immediacy on television before an international populace and ended 21 hours later when anchorman Jim McKay spoke the haunting words, “They’re all gone.”
While the Munich terror was seen and felt around the world, the intensely secret aftermath of the event has remained largely unknown. Now, from director STEVEN SPIELBERG comes Munich, a gripping thriller based on the events of Munich 1972 and the highly charged mission of retribution that followed—by the covert hit squad known to Israeli intelligence as “Operation Wrath of God,” one of the boldest and most aggressive assassination plots in modern history. In taut, vivid and human detail, the film takes audiences into a hidden moment in history that resonates with many of the same emotions in our lives today.
At the center of the story is the young Israeli patriot and intelligence officer Avner (ERIC BANA). Still mourning the Munich massacre and infuriated by its savagery, Avner is approached by a Mossad officer named Ephraim (GEOFFREY RUSH) who presents him with an unprecedented mission in Israeli history. He asks Avner to leave behind his pregnant wife, relinquish his identity and go completely underground on a mission to hunt down and kill the 11 men accused by Israeli intelligence of masterminding the murders at Munich.
Despite his youth and inexperience, Avner soon becomes the leader of a team of four very diverse yet highly skilled recruits: the brash, tough, South African-born getaway driver, Steve (DANIEL CRAIG); the German Jew Hans (HANNS ZISCHLER), who has a flair for forging documents; the Belgian toymaker-turned-explosives-expert, Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz); and the quiet, methodical Carl (CIARAN HINDS), whose job is to “clean up” after the others.
From Geneva to Frankfurt, Rome, Paris, Cyprus, London and Beirut, Avner and his team circle the globe under a cloak of extreme secrecy, tracking down each man on a closely guarded list of targets and carrying out intricately plotted assassinations, one by one. Working outside the rubric of international law, adrift without home or family, their only connection to humanity becomes one another. But even that starts to fray as the four men begin to argue among themselves about the unsettling questions that just won’t go away: “Who exactly are we killing? Can it be justified? Will it stop the terror?”
Torn between their desire for justice and their own growing doubts, the mission begins to tear at the souls of Avner and his team, and it becomes increasingly clear that the longer they remain on the hunt, the more they are in danger of becoming the hunted.
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1 Munich, 1972
2 The Attack At Olympic Village
3 Hatikvah (The Hope)
4 Remembering Munich
5 Letter Bombs
6 A Prayer For Peace
7 Bearing The Burden
8 Avner And Daphna
9 The Tarmac At Munich
10 Avner's Theme
11 Stalking Carl
12 Bonding
13 Encounter In London And Bomb Malfunctions
14 Discovering Hans
15 The Raid In Tarifa
16 Thoughts Of Home
17 Hiding The Family
18 End Credits
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ERIC BANA (Avner)
DANIEL CRAIG (Steve)
CIARAN HINDS (Carl)
MATHIEU KASSOVITZ (Robert)
HANNS ZISCHLER (Hans)
GEOFFREY RUSH (Ephraim)
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