Tony Kushner Talks About Munich

Posted on January 9, 2006

First-time screenwriter Tony Kushner discusses writing the Steven Spielberg-directed film Munich. Kushner declares that he didn't have a political agenda when writing the screenplay, which has drawn fire from numerous quarters about its portrayal of terrorists and Israeli agents after the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

"If you start out with an ax to grind, then you write a bad play or movie," said Kushner, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for the landmark stage epic "Angels in America." "I prefer to have a much more exciting and rich conversation about politics and the meaning of violence.
"I start from a place of my own perplexity and then explore. Steven and I, we started out with some very strong feelings about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians -- not necessarily in the same place or for the same reasons -- and we surrendered our arrogance and assumptions."
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If Kushner and Spielberg had a point of view they wanted to guide their filmmaking, it was portraying everyone in the film as a human being, the playwright/screenwriter said.
"It's an uncomfortable movie for some, because we don't portray terrorists as bad' and nothing more," Kushner said. "All the terrorists of the world are not that simple, which doesn't mean that you approve of what they did, killing unarmed people. "But there is a [dramatic] law: Nothing human is alien to me," Kushner said, quoting the ancient Roman playwright Terence. "We dehumanize people so we don't have to trouble ourselves with the way we deal with them."

Munich is in theaters now.