“September 5” feels as much like a time capsule as a pressure cooker of a film, as an ABC Sports crew doing cutting-edge live broadcasting of the 1972 Munich Olympics ends up covering much more than that.

In its most compelling moments, the Tim Fehlbaum film shows the audience the gulf between the journalists making decisions with imperfect information and the implications of those decisions — the characters’ goal may be “to follow the story,” but real life never abides by the rules of journalistic objectivity. To create this tension throughout the film, production designer Julian R. Wagner needed to craft sets that felt as grounded, authentic, and (sometimes) claustrophobic as possible.

So Wagner and his production design team made their lives a lot more difficult in service of giving “September 5” as honest a depiction as possible of what it would’ve been like to walk the halls of that Munich studio in the summer of ‘72. “Normally,...