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Designing Munich 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. A small island nation off the coast of Sicily, Malta stands at the crossroads between Southern Europe and Northern Africa, and despite its tiny size has found itself wrapped up in many grand historical events. From the wars of Rome to the battles of the Crusades to the Cold War, history has left its mark all over the island, making it an ideal resource and stand-in for multiple locales. For Munich, it was able to double for Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Palestine and Spain, with production designer Rick Carter building some 40 sets there. “Malta has this kind of Mediterranean hodgepodge of culture where we could find areas that look like southern European locations in one spot and areas that look like Israel or Beirut in another,” Carter explains. “It actually gave us a way to visually divide the movie between the look of the hot, sunny, southern landscapes and the very different palette of the Northern European locations.” Shooting in Malta began in Buggiba on the northeast coast. There, a small seaside café sported an Israeli flag underneath which extras dressed in the traditional garb of orthodox Jews crowded around a television set watching playback of the original 1972 Olympics newscast. From there the company moved around the corner to “the Olympic Hotel,” moving from Haifa to Cyprus within a few streets. Many practical locations were utilized on the island: the historic 17th century Fort Riscoli and its barracks were transformed into a Palestinian refugee camp outside of Bethlehem; a square in the capital of Malta, Valetta, became the café in Rome where Andreas introduces Avner to Tony; a dry dock was dressed as the cosmopolitan 1970s Beirut; and private homes on the island doubled for seven different safe houses, as well as the home Avner shares with his wife Daphna, Avner’s father’s home, Golda Meir’s apartment and the villa in Spain where Avner and Steve look for Salameh. Later, the production moved to Budapest, the beautiful, architecturally rich city on the river Danube. These environs provided Carter and his team with locations they could transform into a London street, a boulevard in Paris, a houseboat in Hoorn, a café in Rome and a small country shack in Belgium, to name but a few. While it takes hours to travel from Rome to Paris by car, Rick Carter was able to make a similar journey in only a few minutes in Budapest. “This one street in Budapest—Andrassy Boulevard, across from the Opera House— was the best Paris-looking location that we could find. What was interesting is that literally half a block away was the best Rome!” Carter muses. Not only did the two countries provide a variety of landscapes, they also provided a window back into time. As Carter explains, “The story takes place in the ’70s, which was still the post-WWII era, when there was a lot more grime and grit on the streets of Paris and London. Budapest is in its post-Communist state right now, so it shares some similarities with a Western Europe still coming back from the war in the early ’70s. In Budapest, we were able to find the look of 30 years ago.” To prepare for the shoot, Carter actually traveled to each of the cities where the assassinations took place, giving him a richer sense of what he was trying to re-create. A longtime collaborator of Steven Spielberg, Carter felt the subject matter of Munich seemed in keeping with the director’s strongest themes. “I think of this movie as part of a series of movies that Steven has done on the subject of war and its consequences,” he observes. “He’s always looking at the ways that we find ourselves in strife.” But Carter was acutely aware of a difference in Spielberg’s approach—one that was more stripped down to the characters’ deepest internal struggles. “All the attention in this film is on the drama, and everything starts with the five main characters and who they are,” he notes. “I think Steven found this approach very fresh and freeing. He seemed almost like he was a filmmaker in the ’70s.” In his designs Carter attempted to stay away from standard ’70s visual clichés and focus instead on reflecting each of the local cultures through which the team travels. “What we would try to do,” explains Carter, “is put something in each scene that would allow you to know not only where you were in terms of the country and the era, but also a sense of the state of the culture. Are you in a place that has been influenced by the politics of the time, especially the radical movements that existed throughout Europe, or is it a place that has remained largely unchanged, like a fishing village in Cyprus that’s always been that way? Reflecting the mood of these very different areas was our biggest concern.” In keeping with the film’s overall design themes, Carter’s color palette switched repeatedly, as scenes moved from one country to the next. However, he did have one consistent metaphorical color in mind: “There is the presence of red throughout the movie just as a reminder, subliminally, of the blood that runs through the movie on both sides of the equation,” he comments. In recreating Europe in the ’70s, Carter’s designs also pay homage to the prevalence of cinema—with posters for Fellini’s Roma, Robert Mulligan’s The Other, The Hot Rock starring Robert Redford and L’Assasinat de Trotsky starring Alain Delon appearing in scenes. Another nod to ’70s cinema comes during a scene with Avner and Louis as they walk along a Parisian vegetable market. The scene was shot below the apartment made famous by Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic Last Tango in Paris. While Malta and Hungary were the film’s primary locations, additional scenes were shot in the inimitable atmosphere of Paris. There was also another place for which Carter could find no double: New York City, the stirring skyline of which brings the film to a close and, in a sense, full circle. “In the quest to find a home, Avner eventually moves his wife and new baby to Brooklyn,” Carter explains, “which is like a new frontier, a place where he wants to start life over and leave everything he’s gone through behind him. We clearly couldn’t replicate that anywhere else—we had to go to New York.” Meanwhile, picture vehicle supervisor Graham Kelly, whose work was previously seen in the acclaimed thriller The Bourne Supremacy, had additional challenges. With a schedule that called for 1,500 cars throughout the production, Kelly had to find and organize taxis, buses, Vespas and vintage automobiles dating from the period. For just one short scene in which Avner takes a walk at night on a Paris street, Kelly had to round up 60 cars, five Parisian buses and several Parisian taxis—all in Budapest. “The ’70s are a particularly difficult period to do with cars,” explains Kelly. “Back then, manufacturers made cars of poor quality steel and most have rotted away or were far too collectable for our budget.” Kelly and his team purchased 60 cars from all over Europe, painting and repainting them as the scenes required. In sync with the overall visual theme, his team used bleached-out lighter colors on the vehicles for scenes in the southern countries and darker hues for northern locations. The biggest problem, however, could not be resolved with paint. Kelly recalls, “We needed cars for scenes in four different countries in Malta. Malta has a good stock of ’70s cars, but they are all right-hand drive, like the UK. And with the exception of Cyprus, the other three countries were left hand drive! When we got to Hungary, the opposite applied. Hungary is left-hand drive and we needed to be in London for some scenes, which is right-hand drive.” With just a bit of ingenuity, “false” steering wheels and an extra driver per car, Kelly and his team solved their problem. Costume designer Joanna Johnston also faced an intriguing challenge—crafting five different looks for each of the men on the hit squad that could reflect the individual background, personality and age of each character. “They each have their own mood,” says Johnston. “Carl, who is ordered, clear-thinking and practical wears sharp creases, straight-parted hair and bland colors; he has good presentation and never loses it. Robert, who is more poetic, artistic and sensitive, wears warm colors with soft patterns and textures and has a more rumpled look. Hans is the oldest of the group, and an antiques dealer, so he is more old-fashioned and traditional in his style. Steve is the coolest of the group, fashionable in a street sense and very considered and sexy in his dress with leather jackets and tight shirts. Steven Spielberg’s reference point for him was Steve McQueen.” The mood of Avner’s look, however, shifts as the story progresses. “To give a sense of Avner losing control, he starts the film dressing with an almost military precision with youthful, clean lines but then the sharp edges go, the warm colors of the country he hails from drop out,” Johnston explains. “He takes on the longer shadows of the north and an aura of suspicion. He eventually ends up in New York denim, the modern world, which he never would have taken on before.” In addition to creating individual palettes, Johnston also forged geographic palettes for each country, matching the work of Rick Carter. “I used a lot of patterns and warm tones in Tel Aviv but the further north we went, the cooler and plainer the clothing became,” she notes. “Every country and city had an identification regarding its style and color. It was all very tightly choreographed.” Creating about 85 percent of the costumes from scratch with her team in Munich, Johnston emphasized a more European and less clichéd ’70s fashion aesthetic. “The cliché ’70s are wild and crazy, but in Europe they were beautiful, elegant in a way. Steven said to me that I made it look ‘sophisticated with a twist,’” Johnston recalls. “The costumes that Joanna has made are remarkable,” says Munich star Ciaran Hinds, “because she’s not defined just who these men are, but somehow has given a sense of how they think as well.” Hinds’ more philosophical and reserved character, Carl, always wears a suit and tie, often with the addition of a pipe and a hat. Hans’ clothing echoes his cover as a German antique dealer, with tweed jacket, shirt and sweater vests—accompanied, sometimes to the actor Hanns Zischler’s dismay on some of the warmer days in Malta, by a thick undershirt. Steve, played by Daniel Craig, is the only one with a flair for the fashions of the time. “Joanna had an idea that he would be the one character to wear something ’70s,” says Craig. “And I thought, ‘Well let’s go for it.’ I have the collars and the jeans and the medallion, but it’s kept quite simple.” For producer and longtime Spielberg collaborator Kathleen Kennedy, the design of Munich was essential to accomplishing the film’s core mission: to bring to light secret events that raise a provocative and complex set of questions about the nature of vengeance and retribution. “Rick Carter and Joanna Johnston did an absolutely remarkable job capturing the time and setting for this movie,” Kennedy says. “Their work comes through in a very understated, authentic way that strongly emphasizes the realism that Steven wanted to bring to the story. More than anything, I think that much like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, Steven wanted to capture a sense that this isn’t just a movie, but a story that is based on something that really happened. If the film gets people around the world engaged in discussion, then I think we’ve succeeded.”
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