Amy SF
July 1st, 2005, 02:42 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/movies/01spie.html
July 1, 2005
Spielberg's Biggest Gamble
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, June 30 - On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg's apocalyptic
thriller "War of the Worlds" invaded movie theaters worldwide. But
the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg
quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet
attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to
assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Mr. Spielberg has taken risks before: he said he feared being seen as
trivializing the Holocaust when he directed "Schindler's List" in
1993, at a time when he was best known for blockbuster fantasies like
"E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." And with
"Saving Private Ryan," he gambled successfully on audiences'
tolerance for prolonged and bloody combat scenes.
But with the as-yet-untitled Munich film, already scheduled for
Oscar-season release by Universal Pictures on Dec. 23, Mr. Spielberg
is tackling material delicate enough that he and his advisers are
concerned about adverse effects on matters as weighty as the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process if his project is mishandled - or
misconstrued in the public mind.
Indeed, the movie's terrain is so packed with potential land mines
that, associates say, Mr. Spielberg has sought counsel from advisers
ranging from his own rabbi to the former American diplomat Dennis
Ross, who in turn has alerted Israeli government officials to the
film's thrust. Mr. Spielberg has also shown the script to Mr. Ross's
old boss, former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton's aides said Mr.
Spielberg reached out to him first more than a year ago and again as
recently as Tuesday. Mr. Spielberg is also being advised by Mike
McCurry, Mr. Clinton's White House spokesman, and Allan Mayer, a
Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications.
The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it
is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11
Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli
retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda
Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as
terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the
Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly
debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the
still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings -
Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both
in the United States and in Israel.
He earned that prestige largely for his treatment of the Holocaust in
"Schindler's List" and for his philanthropic efforts, through the
Shoah Foundation, to preserve testimonies of survivors of the
concentration camps. Until now, though, he has been relatively quiet
on Middle East politics compared with more vocal American supporters
of Israel.
Making matters more complicated, an important source for Mr.
Spielberg's narrative is a 1984 book by George Jonas, "Vengeance,"
based largely on the account of a purported member of the Mossad's
assassination team, whose veracity was later widely called into
question.
Friends of Mr. Spielberg said he was keenly aware that admirers of
his Holocaust work could misunderstand his new film and regard it as
hurtful to Israel. And they noted that he had never before courted
controversy so openly. "A lot of people around him never thought he'd
make the movie," said one associate, who asked not to be identified,
in keeping with Mr. Spielberg's preference for secrecy.
Typically, Mr. Spielberg keeps a tight lid on information about
coming projects, and he has been especially careful to do so this
time. He has revealed that the film will star Eric Bana as the lead
Israeli assassin, along with Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu
Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler and Ciaran Hinds. The director released a
short statement simultaneously this week to The New York Times, the
Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv and the Arab television network Al Arabiya,
but he turned down requests for an interview and declined through a
spokesman to answer written questions.
In the statement, Mr. Spielberg called the Munich attack - which was
carried out by Black September, an arm of the P.L.O.'s Fatah
organization - and the Israeli response "a defining moment in the
modern history of the Middle East."
Mr. Spielberg's interest in the question of a civilized nation's
proper response to terrorism deepened, aides said, after the 9/11
attacks, as Americans were grappling for the first time with similar
issues - for instance, in each new lethal strike on a suspected
terrorist leader by a C.I.A. Predator drone aircraft. In Mr.
Kushner's script, people who have read it say, the Israeli assassins
find themselves struggling to understand how their targets were
chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what,
if anything, their killing would accomplish.
"What comes through here is the human dimension," said Mr. Ross,
formerly the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton, who has advised the
filmmakers on the screenplay and helped Mr. Spielberg reach out to
officials in the region. "You're contending with an enormously
difficult set of challenges when you have to respond to a horrific
act of terror. Not to respond sends a signal that actions are
rewarded and the perpetrators can get away with it. But you have to
take into account that your response may not achieve what you wish to
achieve, and that it may have consequences for people in the mission."
Mr. Spielberg's statement indicated that, despite the implications
for other conflicts, his movie - to be shot in Malta, Budapest and
New York - was aimed squarely at the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who
were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific
episode that we usually think about only in political or military
terms," he said. "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these
men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts
about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important
about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today."
That Mr. Spielberg has a daunting task ahead - and the degree to
which his film will be scrutinized, interpreted and debated - can be
seen in the way a few prominent Israelis responded to the mere
mention of doubts on the part of the assassins.
"I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about
what they were doing," said Michael B. Oren, the historian and author
of "Six Days of War." "It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden
Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other
ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews. I don't see Dirty Harry
feeling guilt-ridden. It's the flip side of the rationally motivated
Palestinian terrorist: you can't have a Jew going to exact vengeance
and not feel guilt-ridden about it, and you can't have a Palestinian
who's operating out of pure evil - it's got to be the result of some
trauma."
And Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad agent who headed the
organization, Israel's intelligence agency, from 1998 to 2002, warned
against reading too much into the misgivings of Israel's hit men.
"I know some of the people who were involved," he said. "Maybe people
have doubts. If they have doubts, I think it's to their credit. It's
not an easy thing to do. But it doesn't mean it's wrong. I'd be very
happy to see the doubts on the other side, the fierce debates going
on about whether they should or should not do it."
Yet Mr. Spielberg's advisers say he is studiously avoiding the most
glaring potential trap: drawing a moral equivalency between the
Palestinian attack and the Israeli retaliation.
While people who have read various versions of the script praised Mr.
Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," for
humanizing the film's hunted Palestinians and giving a fuller sense
of their motivation, they said the terrorists would hold little claim
to the audience's sympathies. One scene added by Mr. Kushner, who was
commissioned last year to rework an earlier draft by the writer Eric
Roth, places an Israeli assassin, posing as a terrorist sympathizer,
at a safe house where he listens as Palestinians give voice to their
anger but also to their hatred of Jews, two people connected with the
film said.
Moreover, Mr. Spielberg is making sure to provide enough historical
context to explain what impelled Israel to make killers of its sons,
as Golda Meir was said to have lamented at the time. "It's easy to
look back at historic events with the benefit of hindsight," he said
in his statement. "What's not so easy is to try to see things as they
must have looked to people at the time."
continued...
July 1, 2005
Spielberg's Biggest Gamble
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, June 30 - On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg's apocalyptic
thriller "War of the Worlds" invaded movie theaters worldwide. But
the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg
quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet
attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to
assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Mr. Spielberg has taken risks before: he said he feared being seen as
trivializing the Holocaust when he directed "Schindler's List" in
1993, at a time when he was best known for blockbuster fantasies like
"E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." And with
"Saving Private Ryan," he gambled successfully on audiences'
tolerance for prolonged and bloody combat scenes.
But with the as-yet-untitled Munich film, already scheduled for
Oscar-season release by Universal Pictures on Dec. 23, Mr. Spielberg
is tackling material delicate enough that he and his advisers are
concerned about adverse effects on matters as weighty as the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process if his project is mishandled - or
misconstrued in the public mind.
Indeed, the movie's terrain is so packed with potential land mines
that, associates say, Mr. Spielberg has sought counsel from advisers
ranging from his own rabbi to the former American diplomat Dennis
Ross, who in turn has alerted Israeli government officials to the
film's thrust. Mr. Spielberg has also shown the script to Mr. Ross's
old boss, former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton's aides said Mr.
Spielberg reached out to him first more than a year ago and again as
recently as Tuesday. Mr. Spielberg is also being advised by Mike
McCurry, Mr. Clinton's White House spokesman, and Allan Mayer, a
Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications.
The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it
is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11
Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli
retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda
Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as
terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the
Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly
debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the
still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings -
Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both
in the United States and in Israel.
He earned that prestige largely for his treatment of the Holocaust in
"Schindler's List" and for his philanthropic efforts, through the
Shoah Foundation, to preserve testimonies of survivors of the
concentration camps. Until now, though, he has been relatively quiet
on Middle East politics compared with more vocal American supporters
of Israel.
Making matters more complicated, an important source for Mr.
Spielberg's narrative is a 1984 book by George Jonas, "Vengeance,"
based largely on the account of a purported member of the Mossad's
assassination team, whose veracity was later widely called into
question.
Friends of Mr. Spielberg said he was keenly aware that admirers of
his Holocaust work could misunderstand his new film and regard it as
hurtful to Israel. And they noted that he had never before courted
controversy so openly. "A lot of people around him never thought he'd
make the movie," said one associate, who asked not to be identified,
in keeping with Mr. Spielberg's preference for secrecy.
Typically, Mr. Spielberg keeps a tight lid on information about
coming projects, and he has been especially careful to do so this
time. He has revealed that the film will star Eric Bana as the lead
Israeli assassin, along with Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu
Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler and Ciaran Hinds. The director released a
short statement simultaneously this week to The New York Times, the
Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv and the Arab television network Al Arabiya,
but he turned down requests for an interview and declined through a
spokesman to answer written questions.
In the statement, Mr. Spielberg called the Munich attack - which was
carried out by Black September, an arm of the P.L.O.'s Fatah
organization - and the Israeli response "a defining moment in the
modern history of the Middle East."
Mr. Spielberg's interest in the question of a civilized nation's
proper response to terrorism deepened, aides said, after the 9/11
attacks, as Americans were grappling for the first time with similar
issues - for instance, in each new lethal strike on a suspected
terrorist leader by a C.I.A. Predator drone aircraft. In Mr.
Kushner's script, people who have read it say, the Israeli assassins
find themselves struggling to understand how their targets were
chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what,
if anything, their killing would accomplish.
"What comes through here is the human dimension," said Mr. Ross,
formerly the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton, who has advised the
filmmakers on the screenplay and helped Mr. Spielberg reach out to
officials in the region. "You're contending with an enormously
difficult set of challenges when you have to respond to a horrific
act of terror. Not to respond sends a signal that actions are
rewarded and the perpetrators can get away with it. But you have to
take into account that your response may not achieve what you wish to
achieve, and that it may have consequences for people in the mission."
Mr. Spielberg's statement indicated that, despite the implications
for other conflicts, his movie - to be shot in Malta, Budapest and
New York - was aimed squarely at the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who
were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific
episode that we usually think about only in political or military
terms," he said. "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these
men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts
about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important
about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today."
That Mr. Spielberg has a daunting task ahead - and the degree to
which his film will be scrutinized, interpreted and debated - can be
seen in the way a few prominent Israelis responded to the mere
mention of doubts on the part of the assassins.
"I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about
what they were doing," said Michael B. Oren, the historian and author
of "Six Days of War." "It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden
Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other
ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews. I don't see Dirty Harry
feeling guilt-ridden. It's the flip side of the rationally motivated
Palestinian terrorist: you can't have a Jew going to exact vengeance
and not feel guilt-ridden about it, and you can't have a Palestinian
who's operating out of pure evil - it's got to be the result of some
trauma."
And Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad agent who headed the
organization, Israel's intelligence agency, from 1998 to 2002, warned
against reading too much into the misgivings of Israel's hit men.
"I know some of the people who were involved," he said. "Maybe people
have doubts. If they have doubts, I think it's to their credit. It's
not an easy thing to do. But it doesn't mean it's wrong. I'd be very
happy to see the doubts on the other side, the fierce debates going
on about whether they should or should not do it."
Yet Mr. Spielberg's advisers say he is studiously avoiding the most
glaring potential trap: drawing a moral equivalency between the
Palestinian attack and the Israeli retaliation.
While people who have read various versions of the script praised Mr.
Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," for
humanizing the film's hunted Palestinians and giving a fuller sense
of their motivation, they said the terrorists would hold little claim
to the audience's sympathies. One scene added by Mr. Kushner, who was
commissioned last year to rework an earlier draft by the writer Eric
Roth, places an Israeli assassin, posing as a terrorist sympathizer,
at a safe house where he listens as Palestinians give voice to their
anger but also to their hatred of Jews, two people connected with the
film said.
Moreover, Mr. Spielberg is making sure to provide enough historical
context to explain what impelled Israel to make killers of its sons,
as Golda Meir was said to have lamented at the time. "It's easy to
look back at historic events with the benefit of hindsight," he said
in his statement. "What's not so easy is to try to see things as they
must have looked to people at the time."
continued...