Kevin Macdonald clearly wanted his Academy Award-winning documentary One Day in September to reach beyond the History Channel and arthouse crowds. As a result, says the director, "Not all traditional documentarians particularly like what we’ve done. We were hoping to attract a broader audience, and the people who have responded best to it are those who wouldn’t normally go and see a documentary on a big screen."

He’s speaking by phone from London (where he’s rebuilding his house) on the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of September. The film recounts 21 hours during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, when Palestinian guerrillas calling themselves Black September took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the Olympic Village. Macdonald says that he and his producing partners set out to make "a piece of entertainment… in the sense that we’re trying to tell what is a fantastically interesting story, in the strongest way possible, to keep the audience gripped by the story."

The result is a compelling film comprised of multiple points of view, but centrally organized around two: namely, the only surviving terrorist, Jamal Al Gashey, and the widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, the Dutch-born Ankie Spitzer. "We wanted," Macdonald says, "to create a sense of dread, almost, as you see two different people whose lives are being molded by two completely different sets of circumstances and social forces, and because of the misfortune of international politics and whatever else, their lives are coming closer and closer together."

And yet, Macdonald insists, "I didn’t want to make a political film, except from a broadly humanitarian point of view… I think most people bring enough background concerning what has gone on over the past 50 years or so, that they understand something of the two different perspectives."

Ironically, it was Ankie who first informed the filmmakers that Jamal was still alive, and they soon found him living with his family under strict security, somewhere in Africa. Macdonald recalls, "I asked Ankie if she knew that the Israelis were doing their revenge attacks — as was quite well-known — in the years after 1972. And she said yes, because they used to phone up and not say who they were, but just tell her, ‘Listen to the radio tonight and know that that’s for your husband.’ And she’d turn on the radio and hear an announcement about somebody being killed: pretty unpleasant. She was pretty keen to have him interviewed, to hear what he had to say, but when she saw the film, she had a pretty emotional response, seeing him, as she put it, ‘acting like he’s a hero.’"

Macdonald’s desire to reach a wide audience led to his decision to get a "big star" as narrator, yet the star he chose — Michael Douglas — also reflected his interest in giving the documentary a non-traditional edge. Douglas’ voice has "a sort of hardness, to the point of unsentimental," says the director, "not a usual voiceover voice, not the sort of windy Gregory Peck kind of voice."

Macdonald was also quite aware that he was dealing with what had been an early media-saturating event, with "millions of people around the world watching it unfold" in real time. In this context, he says, complete accuracy is a fiction, especially looking back some 28 years. "You can’t give a definitive version of events, and we played with that, to give the audience the idea that they didn’t know who to believe."

Still, Macdonald notes, many events were documented (for instance, what he terms "the police cock-ups"). Macdonald used these records to reconstruct what happened during the shootout at the airport — for example, that the police "didn’t know how many terrorists there were, they didn’t have helmets." As well, he used ABC News footage (apparently the only news company to keep its footage) to show the many ways that various efforts to maintain an "Olympic spirit" failed, due to arrogance, ignorance, exhaustion or self-involvement on the parts of authorities, athletes and news media representatives.

"It is shocking," says Macdonald, "and I find it quite interesting as an example of this relationship between sports and violence. We tried to push that idea a bit in the montage of the athletes competing, intercut with the hostage footage, under that rather violent Led Zep music [‘Immigrant Song’].