Spielberg's Most Infamous Sex Scene Wasn't Even His Idea—And He Finally Explains Why

For nearly two decades, one of cinema’s most jarring moments has baffled audiences and critics alike. The scene in question lives in Steven Spielberg’s Munich—a crosscut between the intimate act of an exhausted Mossad operative and the cold-blooded massacre that haunts him. When it premiered in 2005, viewers couldn’t quite figure out what they’d witnessed. Some laughed nervously. Others recoiled. Most assumed it came from the mind of Tony Kushner, the Angels in America playwright who co-wrote the screenplay, because surely Spielberg—a director notoriously restrained about depicting sex on screen—wouldn’t dream up something this transgressive.

Except he did. And here’s the twist: Kushner himself was initially baffled by it.

In a recent rewatch of Munich with Spielberg while working on their collaboration The Fabelmans, Kushner experienced a complete change of perspective. The moment had haunted him for two decades as something puzzling, even off-putting. But this time around, he understood what the director was actually doing—and it wasn’t exploitation or shock value. It was moral architecture. By grafting the massacre onto Avner’s most intimate moment with his wife, Spielberg was illustrating a devastating truth: the violence that consumed the character had contaminated every fiber of his existence, infiltrating even the sanctuary of his own bedroom. There was no escape. There was no separation between killer and husband. The ugliness had seeped everywhere.

Kushner’s original script contained a sex scene, sure, but it was straightforward—a man and woman in bed, with hints that he was mentally fractured from his work. Spielberg and film editor Michael Kahn made the choice to intercut it with the airfield killings during the editing process, a decision that transformed a simple intimate moment into something profoundly disturbing. It’s the kind of bold, uncomfortable filmmaking that requires real artistic nerve. Making Munich itself in the mid-2000s, when Kushner had already faced criticism for his earlier skepticism of Israeli policy, took courage. But layering a sex act over a massacre? That demanded something else entirely: the conviction that art demands truth, even when that truth is ugly and transgressive.

Today, Munich stands reappraised as one of Spielberg’s finest works—a movie that gains rather than loses power with distance. That infamous scene, once relegated to“worst sex in cinema”lists, now reads as exactly what the film needed: a violation of the viewer’s comfort zone that mirrors Avner’s own spiritual devastation. Whether you find it brilliant or barbaric probably says something about how you feel about the film’s entire moral project. But there’s no denying Spielberg understood the assignment.