Munich - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Munich or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Munich

[kristen]

This film is based on George Jonas' book "Vengeance". It purports to tell the true story of vengeance taken against the Black September terrorists using a supposed former Mossad Agent named Yuval Aviv as Jonas' main source. The Israeli intelligence community has denied Aviv's claims, saying he is a fraud. Aviv counters their denial by saying that they would deny him anyway.

[edgar]

This is the first film directed by Steven Spielberg to be released by Universal Pictures since The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).

[albert]

Some details from the real mission were left out in this movie. One of them was when the group found one of the terrorists in Norway. The target was exiting a bus with a pregnant woman, and they killed him. The authorities tracked down the Agents' license plate number and arrested them, but it was later revealed that they had shot the wrong man. He wasn't even Palestinian, but a Moroccan waiter, and the pregnant woman was his wife. One detail that was included was another hit executed with two of the Agents dressed in drag, one of whom was Ehud Barak, who went on to become Prime Minister of Israel in 1999.

[charlie]

In the opening segment of the movie, there is a brief shot of two Israeli girls watching television appearing twice. The one on the left is Steven Spielberg's daughter Sasha Spielberg.

[bryan]

Mosko Alkalai filmed scenes as Avner's (Eric Bana) father.

[cameron]

Mathieu Amalric would once again appear with Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008).

[ava]

Guri Weinberg played his own father. He is the son of Moshe Weinberg, the Israeli wrestling referee and former champion, who died in the massacre when Guri was just one month old.

[oscar]

After getting the rights to George Jonas' book "Vengeance", Steven Spielberg commissioned three scripts: one from David Webb Peoples and Janet Peoples, one from Charles Randolph, and one from Eric Roth. Roth's script was chosen and subsequently revised by Tony Kushner, after Kushner first declined to co-write the screenplay. He felt it was too controversial and too complicated to be his first screenplay for a feature film.

[kim]

Even though the movie makes no mention of the events in Lillehammer, where a Moroccon waiter was falsely assassinated, the opening title shot features the names of cities all mentioned in the movie with Lillehammer also up there.

[jessie]

At the beginning, one of the Israeli players is cutting a piece of bread before the hostage situation began. At the end, Avner (Eric Bana ) tells Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush ) to come to his house to dinner and "break bread".

[jessie]

All of Avner's four visits to the bank vault were shot in a single day.

[maureen]

Two days before filming his final scene, Ossie Beck (Eliezaar Halfin) discovered that his grandfather had been in Mossad.

[tom]

Atlantic Productions, producers of BAFTA-nominated documentary Munich: Mossad's Revenge, listed several discrepancies between Spielberg's film and the information it obtained from interviews with Mossad agents involved in the operation. It noted that the film suggests one group carried out almost all the assassinations, whereas in reality it was a much larger team. Mossad did not work with a mysterious French underworld figure as portrayed in the book and the film. The assassination campaign did not end because agents lost their nerve but because of the Lillehammer affair in which an innocent Moroccan waiter was killed. This is not mentioned in the film. The targets were not all directly involved in Munich, which Spielberg only acknowledges in the last five minutes. The murder of a female Dutch assassin depicted in the film, as well as in George Jonas' book "Vengeance", went unacknowledged by the documentary, implying that it is completely fictional.

[kyle]

Steven Spielberg: [father] Avner's father is in jail, Avner himself is away from his wife and newborn child during the first year or so of her life.

[ruby]

Director Steven Spielberg decided to cast Eric Bana as Avner after he saw his performance on "Hulk" (2003).

[ken]

Steven Spielberg was going to direct this film for a 2003 or 2004 release, but shelved it when Tom Cruise became available, so the duo could work on War of the Worlds (2005) instead.

[jessie]

Avner holds up a $5,000 note and indicates the face on the bill is James Madison. The last issue of a $5,000 bill was in 1918. There is no way that anyone undertaking a clandestine mission would use a bill that would attract such an intense amount of attention. much less be accepted by anyone.

[addison]

The role of Ephraim was intended for Sir Ben Kingsley, but he backed out due to a change to the ending of The Terminal (2004). It caused the start of the production to be pushed back a few weeks later, thus conflicting with Kingsley's work schedule on Oliver Twist (2005).

[nicholas]

The ending of the movie conflicts with the real-life one, where the Mossad Agents successfully bombed the mastermind of the Munich killings, along with his four bodyguards and three innocent bystanders. They also injured sixteen innocent bystanders.