Oct 27, 2024
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Chairman of the Edit: Walter Murch
by Doniphan Blair
Dede Allen, the pioneering editor who sadly passed in April, at 83, once explained in an interview how editing evolved from scissors, when they lost an entire frame to each edit, to splicing blocks, where they were only loosing a sixteenth of a frame by the 1970s. This was due to a technique, called "N-vis-o," that used polyester-silicone tape, and which was developed by a young editor friend of hers, Walter Murch. Actually, it's one of Murch's inventions we didn't get to in our interview.
Murch: Notably friendly and funny for a genuis. Photo: courtesy W. Murch
Much-lauded as a sound designer, film editor, and visionary, as well as inventor, Murch is a renaissance man and jack-of-all trades, a classicist as well as a classy guy. Polite and precise, he is encyclopedically acquainted with the arts, in part because he grew up in Manhattan, son of Walter Murch, a painter of mysterious textures and romantic atmospheres, who remains a cult figure in the New York art scene.
After a year's study in Paris in 1963, Murch Jr transferred to California, where he fell in with George Lucas, then Francis Ford Coppola and a host of eventually famous writers and directors like Bob Zemeckis and John Milius, among others. With Lucas and Coppola, he formed the seminal San Francisco studio American Zoetrope, went on to edit their movies and invent five-point-one (usually written 5.1) sound, the theatrical standard common world-wide today (screen, front left and right, back left and right, plus subsonic woofers).
Nominated for nine Oscars, starting with"The Conversation" (1974), he took home three, starting with "Apocalypse Now," the sound design heard 'round the world (see the Ride of the Valhyries. Not only did it incorporate Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" and massive speakers as "practicals" (meaning right in there in the movie), it re-imagined our entire concept of film sound, both content and delivery, through 5.1 sound.
Murch went on to receive accolades for "Ghost" (1991) and "The Godfather: Part III" (1991), while also doing beautiful work on the "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), "K-19: The Widowmaker" (2002) and other films. Indeed, a simple review of his editorial work and work flow, with his neat rows of frame captures around the editing suite, is the only editorial master class you will ever need. No wonder he fell in with the creative and popular director Anthony Minghella, took home two more Oscars for BOTH picture editing and sound work on "The English Patient" (1996), and was nominated for editing on "Cold Mountain" (2004).
He also directed and co-wrote "Return to Oz" (1985)—an ambitious reworking of L. Frank Baum's later books—which later had trouble at Disney until Lucas rallied to his defense. Although not a big money maker, the moody, dark and romantic movie would probably have pleased his painter father and it did earn a substantial cult following (see waltdisneysreturntooz.com).
While raising a clutch of kids and leading the civilized art gentry life on Marin County's west coast, Murch keeps jetting around the world to speaking engagements as well as film projects, and to do ad hoc consulting on dozens more, undoubtedly for nothing, considering his courtly manner. Indeed, Murch mixed "Crumb" (1994) by local impoverished documentarian Terry Zwigoff for no fee.
American Zoetrope Post-Production Meeting for “Godfather II:” Coppola with hand up, on his left Barry Malkin, also an editor and long-time collaborator (not Murch, as mentioned in CS paper version). Photo: courtesy of America Zoetrope Murch also has written on the subject of editing, notably his short, poetic as well as technical book, "The Blink of an Eye" (1995), where on page 18 he reveals how to convert the art of editing into a science: "An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once:
1) it is true to the emotion of the moment;
2) it advances the story;
3) it occurs at the moment that is rhythmically interesting...
4) it acknowledges what you might call "eye-trace" - the concern with... the audience's focus of interest within the frame;
5) it respects "planarity"—the grammar of three dimensions... [i.e., not crossing the "eye-line" so that in a shot of two people talking, the one on the left is not suddenly on the right];
6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where the people are in the room and in relation to one an other)."
In fact, Murch appoints numerical values to these qualities, giving the preponderance to emotions at 51%, then story with 23%, rhythm 10%, eye-trace 7%, two-dimensional planarity 5%, and three-dimensional space 4%.
Murch did call these ratios "slightly tongue-in-cheek" in an email to me - but sometimes, in the dark night of the editorial soul, you need an approximate value to help weigh complex trade-offs. Emotions in fact takes the majority vote, because you can legitimately cut to absolutely anything that amplifies the character's feelings in that moment—a detail, a flashback, another scene entirely. Yes, overall narrative structure is key, in the long form feature format, but it remains secondary to emotions because story telling in film is better step by emotional step, not novelistically explained with exposition, narration or titles. Logically then, story and emotions represent almost 75% of the editorial vote, leaving rythym and space as window dressing. This makes Murch a proponent of experimental and emotional cinema as well as classical narrative.
No wonder Murch was invited back to the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 25 to present the prestigious "State of the Cinema" address. In it, he boldly outlined the aesthetic-technical evolution that led to film. In his view, it started with Beethoven, who introduced naturalistic dynamics, chaos and passion to music; continued with Flaubert, who developed the realism that film so easily captures; and culminated with Thomas Edison, the inventor of cinema who made the whole thing technically possible.
Murch with his two “English Patient” Oscars from 1997, and his wife, Aggie. Photo: courtesy of W. MurchAlong the way, Murch suggested the Egyptians could have invented the zoetrope, quoted from Maxim Gorky's first film review (1896), played his reconstruction of the first synch sound in history (Edison's assistant Dixon playing the violin, 1878) and tossed out a couple of gem-like quips: "All editors are feminine in that we are cooking what the guys brought back from the hunt," or his tribute to Ms. Allen: "I was inspired by 'The Hustler' (1961) to be a film editor," due to its "colliding of images, a kind of aggressiveness."
CineSource connected with Walter Murch in Argentina, with the help of Ashley Soares from the SFIFF, but we were only able to sit down and Skype an interview a few weeks later, when he was in England. I opened by remarking we both hail from the same Upper West Side of Manhattan neighborhood.
Walter Murch: My dad was a painter. He took over what used to be the dining room and that was where he did all his work. Fifty percent was gallery work—he showed at Betty Parsons on 57th [Street]—and he did illustrations for Scientific American and the like and print ads. Also, he did teach at Columbia. My mother worked at Riverside Church as the secretary to the minister. I went to Collegiate [the all boys high school] on 77th Street and West End.
CineSource: You went on to John Hopkins University in the 1960s and were involved in some 'happenings?' Is that how you got interested in theatrical matters?
We fell in with a group of people from the school of art in Baltimore. It was more of a collaborative thing I piggy-backed onto.
In my early teenage years, I had gotten really interested in the tape recorder. It was a completely solo venture. I just loved it. It was like your own little train set. You have to remember, back in the early 50s there was the Polaroid camera perhaps, but the idea that you could trap some part of reality and instantly play that reality back was intoxicating in itself. This was completely new in the middle of the 20th century, as interesting for me as the appeal of sound itself.
I discovered that could you record something and play it back and you could also cut it out and tape it in a different a place—so I discovered the whole process of editing in my early explorations with the tape recorder. But I thought that was just a hobby. I never thought that I would end up doing almost precisely that in my professional life.
So, on your career path, you were looking at some other stuff and suddenly the tape recorder re-emerged?
Strangely enough, I didn't put those two together until I went to film school. I went to Johns Hopkins to study Romance languages and French literature. I wound up studying a year in Paris in 1963, which was the height of the New Wave [film movement]. I think it would be hard to be 20 years old and in Paris at that moment and not get bitten by the film bug, which is what happened to me.
When I got back to the States I looked around and discovered there were such things as film schools, which amazed me. So I applied to a couple and got a scholarship to USC.
Philosophizing about editing with Michael Ondaatje, a filmmaker as well as the author of “English Patient.” Photo: courtesy of W. MurchIt wasn't until I got to school and realized that, of course, films are picture AND sound and that you do to film sound the kind of things I was doing with tape recorders when I was 11 and 12 years old. It was one of those moments when two big interests in your life crash together. It was very exhilarating.
I recently looked at 'The Conversation' where your sound design was fully developed. Were you also doing odd uses of sound in 'American Graffiti' and 'The Rain People?'
Yes, also on 'The Godfather,' which was before 'The Conversation.' The soundtrack for 'THX1138' was probably equally adventuresome as the soundtrack for 'The Conversation.' George [Lucas] and I were trying to create a [futuristic] society and one of the tools we were using was pushing sound in directions we hadn't heard sound go before.
'The Conversation'—I was also editing the picture on that film—is about a soundman, and strictly from his point of view - that was a place to also be adventuresome with sound. Gene Hackman [the actor] in that film hears the world as much as he sees the world. Francis and I were interested in using sound to push those limits. It's about him and it is also told from his point of view - you are with him every moment of the film.
He is kind of an odd character.
Francis said exactly that. If he appeared in another film, you would see him for, maybe, three minutes. He wanted to take a character like that and see what his life is like and also examine a who-dunnit mystery story about this possible murder. It is a mixture of character study, Hitchcock, and [Herman] Hesse. As unlikely as that is, that was the goal Francis was setting for himself.
There is a little '1984' which still resonates today.
Technology has far surpassed what we see on the screen, but the core of it resonates today, certainly.
From the first time I saw 'Apocalypse,' which happened to be in Brazil, I noticed the interesting focus on sound. It seemed like, whereas in 'The Conversation' the soundman takes over, in 'Apocalypse Now' the soundtrack takes over. 'Apocalypse' is almost entirely stitched together by the sound of the helicopters, the Doors' music—
Murch on the Boards for “Apocalypse:” The fading in and out of tracks was computerized, for the first time in history, but everything else had to be done by hand and the mix took about six months, including premixes. Photo: courtesy of W. MurchYeah, going in that direction seemed the logical next step. From the beginning of American Zoetrope [the studio founded by Lucas and Coppola in San Francisco in 1969] all of us, George, Francis and myself, were interested in pushing sound to be a greater contributor to the story. In 'Apocalypse Now,' we extended that into the format of the film itself.
'Apocalypse' was the first film in the format we call 5.1, which we originated for that film. We never expected that format to take off. Now it is the default standard of film sound. We created it just for the purposed of immersing the audience in this increasingly strange sound track.
At the beginning of the film, Francis said, 'There are three things I want. First of all, to be authentic. When we are looking at those weapons and motors, to be as real as they can be. But as the film goes on, I want the sound to get stranger and stranger and to add this other psychic dimension to what we are looking at on the screen. And, technically, I want the sound to swirl around the audience. For the explosions, I want the audience to feel those rather then hear.' It was out of those directives that the technical direction for the sound came.
When you did the new 'Apocalypse Redux,' did you fully you fully strip it down and re-tweak it?
No, no. As you know with 'Redux,' there are new scenes inserted, more in the order that the original script was written. We had to recreate the sound environment for those scenes. All of that took a tremendous amount of work but we also had to be very careful and stitch those new sounds into the fabric of the [old] sounds in the unaffected parts. In those areas, the sound is exactly as it was.
From your own personal opinion, how do you compare 'Redux' with the original?
It is an alternate way of looking at things. It is more indicative of the film Francis set out to make in 1976. But in 1979, all of us felt obliged to make a film that had a chance of making its money back because Francis had put all of his own money into the film. The 1978 film is something like two hours and 25 minutes but it is not three hours and 20 minutes long, which is how long 'Redux' is. They are both very good films but they are different ways of approaching it. I don't think 'Redux' is any more definitive then the original.
The original intention with 'Redux' was to make a navigable DVD so you could either see the film the way it was released in 1979 or you could choose which of the new scenes that you wanted to see. It was supposed to more interactive then it ended up because of the limitations at that time. I think it would be possible now.
I noticed the second film had a lot of female stories, particularly the love affair on the French plantation. But then looking at the original, it was very pared down and pugilistic and it hammered its points. As beautiful as the French plantation was, it was a side thing.
Which is why we cut it out of the original. It couldn't survive, you might say, the narrative irrelevance at that point in the story. If it were somehow possible to include it at an earlier part, it might have found a happier home, but there as no way to be true to the story and to include it earlier. In 1979, it got cut, but the intention we set out with 'Redux' was to show these extended scenes. Once we realized we couldn't do the branching DVD system, we put them in the film where they were originally designed.
When did you get involved in 'Apocalypse?'
I did go over to the Philippines while it was being shot. At that time, I was working with Fred Zinnemann in England on another film, so I didn't start working on 'Apocalypse Now' until the summer of 1977, still two years before it was finished. I was a relative newcomer at that point. There were already two editors working on the film.
Was there ever an impression that the sound department was going to have to save the film?
No, no, not at all. We knew that what we had in mind for the sound was very ambitious and we had to design a whole new format for it. We had to build the mixing theater for it because there was no way to retrofit a mixing theater. 'Apocalypse Now' was the first film ever to have an automated mix. There were a lot of developmental hurdles to go through before we got to doing any creative work.
We did a year and half of editing of the picture after the film was shot ['Apocalypse' had one and a quarter million feet of film, or 230 hours, twenty percent of which was the massive battle scene lead by 'Kilgore' Bobby Duvall]. There was a lot of experiment with how the film wanted to tell itself. The whole beginning of the film is very different than what it was in the screenplay—that evolved in the process of postproduction.
I don't know that sound ever has the ability [to save a film]. It can enhance a picture that is already good, but I don't think that a sound track alone can make people re-evaluate the nature of what a film is.
Francis' wife Eleanor did the fabulous documentary, 'Heart of Darkness,' but there is probably another documentary covering material that one didn't even touch on.
That film shows the end of shooting, and the next cut is the film premiering—there is a missing two years there. We editors did some interviews, but in the end they decided, probably correctly, to concentrate on the shooting not the postproduction—which, at any rate, is a lot less glamorous and interesting to look at.
There are a couple of really good bits in the extended DVD with Francis' voice-over. I particularly like when he pulls the opening scene out of the garbage.
Yeah, yeah. Francis looked at it and said, 'What's this?' They said 'Flowers wanted it.'
The munitions expert, A. D. Flowers, asked for that shot simply because he wanted to document this explosion, which was, until that point - perhaps even still - the largest practical explosion in the history of motion pictures—the most explosions and gasoline going off. That shot was the sixth camera. When that explosion went off, they had a lot of cameras because they knew they could only do it once. Francis got fascinated with the possibilities of this shot as being something to open the film with.
Any other totally serendipitous things that emerged?
That whole scene of Marty Sheen drunk in his hotel room was originally an acting exercise never intended to be in the film. Marty, as you may know, came into the film six weeks after the beginning of shooting to replace Harvey Keitel, who Francis felt finally was not right for the part. [Actually, this was just one of the record number of setbacks Coppola suffered: Sheen had a heart attack and had to be briefly replaced by his brother, the Filipino Army helicopters periodically left to fight guerillas, 90 rain days in a row, Brando doubled his fee, and Coppola stayed up nights trying to write a new ending, to what had begun an entirely new pciture—he finally narrowed it down to three.]
In order to bring Marty up to speed, they came up with this idea of improvising him as a frustrated soldier in his hotel room, just to see what would happen. All the footage of Marty drunk, which is intercut with this napalm explosion, was, as I said, never intended to be in the film. Yet the whole opening ten minutes of the film depends on these two central ideas: the explosion and the man going crazy in his hotel room. Once we knew that, yes, we were going to do this, more material was shot to blend these two things together.
Of course, you added the sound of the helicopter and shots of the rotors and fan, and it is just masterful. It also follows a theme that was in "Das Boot" and a couple of other war films, where one makes the narrator faulty from beginning. Rather than the hero going off to war, it is the flawed hero.
Very much, although 'Das Boot' was made after 'Apocalypse Now.'
Murch Editing ‘Tetro’ in Buenos Aires, 2009, his vaunted scene screen shot system on back wall. Photo: Beatrice Murch
Oh, right. So you ran into Lucas first at USC?
George was a fellow student at USC. There was something about the each of us—we liked what the other was doing. After he left school, he met Francis and they bonded. It was through George that I got brought into the axis of George and Francis.
Did you immediately feel like you were in a little film community?
Yeah, absolutely. At that time, the industry was in dire straights [the studio system was collapsing]. We had just graduated from school and there didn't seem to be many jobs. The hope was that we ex-film students—and there were a bunch more involved in Zoetrope, a core group of ten or eleven - we will see if we could have the same feeling as being at film school except we will try to make films professionally. It was an extension of the friendship, camaraderie and multitasking that we had done in film school.
Obviously, a lot of fun was had -
And a lot of uncertainty. It looked dire many times—but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
You all moved north and set out to create a pretty ambitious film scene in the Bay Area. Any reflections—the achievements are pretty obvious—but any mistakes made along the way?
There are great things about San Francisco, that's why we moved from Los Angeles. We were able to operate much more freely there. The union situation in San Francisco, in post-production, for example, allowed us to migrate freely from cutting picture to cutting sound to mixing, which wasn't the case in Los Angeles. We had a lot of new equipment, mostly from Europe, that depended on cutting-edge technology, which allowed it to be more portable. We were fascinated with the possibilities of using what we today might call pro-sumer [equipment] and seeing if we could push the envelope and use this professionally.
On the other hand, the difficulties of working in San Francisco are really just related to what you might call body size. If you are an elephant, it is easy to conserve your body's core temperature because you are so massive. But if you are mouse, you have to be continually eating because you radiate so much heat. San Francisco, relatively speaking, is a mouse compared to Los Angeles' elephant.
There just isn't the in-place infrastructure of the equipment, the actors and producers, and all of the ancillary support companies that you have in a place like Los Angeles, and to a certain extent in New York—although New York even suffers in comparison with LA.
San Francisco is constantly trying to keep from shivering to death. If you go too long without enough production coming into the city, people simply leave the city or leave the business. In LA, as bad things get sometimes, there is always something to keep things ticking over. As with everything, there is a mixture of very good things and things you just have to keep your eye on because they can bite you.
To benefit the local scene, should we focus on independent productions under a million dollars, or television series, like 'Trauma?'
Vancouver was very equivalent to San Francisco, and yet Vancouver put in place tax advantages that pulled a tremendous amount of production away from Los Angeles and possibly San Francisco. People started shooting in Vancouver just because it made economic sense. Water flows with gravity downhill - downhill, in this case, meaning places where there are economic advantages to shooting, although I think there are some [incentives] in place in San Francisco that weren't in place maybe five years ago.
There are really only three self-sufficient film industries in the world: China, India and the United States—the United States being Los Angeles, basically. Everywhere else has tax incentives, both to sustain local production and to bring in foreign production. I was just in Georgia, at the Savannah College of Art and Design. They were saying that Georgia has now put in tax incentives to attract production, and Robert Redford just shot a film [there].
The answer is really pretty simple: what everyone else in the world does to attract production is to create economic incentives for people to shoot there. Unfortunately, right now the amount of concessions in place in San Francisco aren't the equivalent of what is in place 1200 miles north up in Vancouver.
Hot Editing on ‘Cold Mountain:’ Murch and Minghella in the thick of it, London, 2003. Photo: courtesy of W. Murch Getting back to more artistic stuff, obviously 3D has been dominating people's interest, do you see anything similar with sound?
There was a Q and A with James Cameron at ILM [Industrial Light and Magic] a couple of months ago, which I went to, and this question came up. His answer was pretty much the answer I would give.
Sound had its dimensional revolution back in 1979—'Apocalypse' basically jump-started the whole idea of three-dimensional, expanded frequency range sound in theaters, and picture with three dimensions is only now catching up with sound - that was Jim's point of view.
There is one visible improvement that could happen. I don't quite know technically how to do it, but it is finding some way to make 'binaural' sound work in a theatrical setting. You can record binaurally, which is putting microphones at the same distance apart as our ears. If you wear headsets, the left mike is going to left headphone and right to your right - the equivalent of wearing 3D glasses. It creates phenomenally effective, truly magnificent spherical representation of sound all around you and very specific distances from you. It's kind of spooky to hear it.
But, there is, as yet, no effective way to make that work in a theatrical setting without everyone wearing headsets. If there is a technical revolution that some day lets us watch 3D without wearing glasses, maybe there is equivalent of that in sound to have binaural sound delivered to us in the theater without having to wear headsets.
Do you have any views on the future of editing, which has been getting more frenzied of late?
The quickest number of cuts per second is 'Man with a Movie Camera' [Dziga Vertov], which was made in the mid-20s in Russia [1929, actually]. These things go in cycles. If anything, with 3D film, although it is technically advanced, it is also something that will cut down the rates at which films are cut. The brain has to have time to process the degree of dimensionality of each shot, so it has to be on screen longer.
Are there any real rules to film editing or can you pretty much do anything? We recently had 'Memento,' (2000) which was cut backwards, as was the French film, 'Irreversible' (2002).
Filmmaking is barely 100 years old. If this were music, we would be back in Gregorian times. Who knows what possibilities are out there? We may not have had the equivalent of J. S. Bach, let alone Beethoven. Maybe those people are two hundred years in the future. We are doing pretty well with the grammar that has been evolved, [but] I would be last person to say we have explored all the possibilities of what can be communicated with film and what the rules of the grammar are.
The main thing to keep in mind is what emotion you are going for and how you want to evoke that. If you are telling a story, how clear is that storytelling? And what is the rhythm you want to tell the story with?
The musical equivalent to that would be rhythm, melody and harmonics. Music has to at least acknowledge the primacy of these three things and I think the same thing for film, in terms of story, rhythm and emotion.
Film generally begins with the director and the actors, since they provide the screen presence, but the editor is thought of as type of god who can cut out a whole scene -
[Laughing] It is nothing like that at all. The creation of film is a collaborative effort. By no means does the editor have god-like powers. In the US, it is the studio that is ultimately in control. The producer—usually - has control. The editor is in a position of some control, because the editor is the person who executes these ideas. The editor can suggest what would happen if we lost this character, what would happen if we move this scene to the beginning of the film. That happens all the time - lots of suggestions come from everywhere. The editor is just one of the voices on a film, but their relative power is low compared to the director or producer or, ultimately, the studio.
Can you recall any cases where they were way off track on the edit and you felt it had to be told in different way?
Umm, di-di-di... Certainly, a version of that happened on 'The Conversation.' I can't recall exactly what I did, but we reached a point [of blockage] on that film. Francis was already shooting 'The Godfather II' and we were still editing 'The Conversation.' It is a tricky film because of what we were talking about - the nature of the main character. He is not an immediately sympathetic or likeable guy. It seemed we were not making progress, and Francis thought, let's just shelve the project and wait until we're finished shooting 'The Godfather II.'
This affected me. I thought, let's try one more time. I made a list of things I wanted to try, in terms of telling the story, finding ways to balance the character study part and the murder mystery—what is on that tape?
As I recall it, the idea was to have Harry Call not initially discover that there was something funny with the tape but, to complete his work and hand it in. My idea was that Harrison Ford, the Martin Stet [corporate heavy] character, was too anxious to get the tape. This made Harry have second thoughts and want to re-listen to the tape. That was something that helped unlock a problem at the beginning of the film. I made a pitch we should do this and we did and the film got back on track. It got released the same year as 'The Godfather II,' which wouldn't have happened had that not happened.
You recently reworked 'A Touch of Evil.' That must have shown how sound design has changed incredibly through the years?
Well, yes, the technical quality. If you compare sound quality today to microphone quality in 50s, there has been a big shift mainly because of transistors, portable equipment and everything.
But, no—Wells was genius! The ideas of sound design and the creative use of sound in that film are just phenomenal and inspirational today. His use of live music! There is very little score in the film and a lot what we think of as music is coming from radios or speakers in the environment or musicians that we see.
A lot of the stuff we did years later in 'American Graffiti,' Wells was already doing in 'A Touch of Evil.' The whole denouement at the end of the film, and the death of both Wells and Menzes, his assistant, depend on a very subtle listening to of an echo. As you may remember, Charlton Heston is tracking the two of them with a portable radio recorder - very modern technology even today. He's trying to stay within range and he winds up walking underneath a bridge and he picks up echoes under the bridge. Quinlan, the Wells character, hears this echo and this tells him he is being recorded and his lieutenant is probably carrying a microphone - things you would be hard put to find in a film today, such a subtle shift as a plot element. But it works great.
Is that what attracted you to redoing the film? Or the overall tour-de-force?
No, I was just attracted by the idea of working on 'A Touch of Evil.' That there was a 58-page memo that Wells wrote that I could read and have the privilege of putting into practice. It was just fantastic. The subtleties of this stuff were things I realized only once I got into working on the film. I shouldn't be surprised, since Wells was such a genius, but I didn't know this in advance. I wasn't a great student of the film. I had seen it once or twice but the specifics hadn't sunk in.
I recently looked at 'Jarhead' (2005) again and I noticed the variety of the music is extreme and also played against type, or for irony. Does this point to the fact that there are no rules, guides or themes to musical choices and it is very much feel?
Sam Mendes, the director, was definitely respon-sible for all of those choices. To a certain extent, it evolved during the making of the film. There was a musical supervisor on the film who also made suggestions and I implemented those suggestions. But that ironic distance is very much a hallmark of Sam's sensibility, applied not only to this film but to other films he has done.
There was also that self-referential scene of 'Apocalypse' being shown in 'Jarhead.' Was that Mendes' idea or did that tie into you?
No, that was in the original book. It transposed into the screenplay. I responded to the fact that here I was the editor of that original film and now reworking it for another film. I thought that if anyone was going to do that it might as well be me.
Pretty serendipitous. Have you put much thought into the art-war relationship? Artists making art about war is sometimes considered a contradiction in terms, but it did start with Homer and it seems that artists have a certain responsibility to make movies about war.
Yes, I would agree. It is a major human preoccupation and it poses lots of dilemmas that have a moral as well as dramatic dimension. People change tremendously in the course of war and war affects the society at large. Those situations are very ripe for exploration as well as exploitation. As long as people are at war, there will be artistic statements made about that. Why are we doing this? What are we gaining by it? What are the ramifications of all of this? I think it is probably an endlessly fascinating topic.
You are going to be lecturing on Beethoven and Flaubert in a few weeks and you studied literature and have a classicist bent. Do you feel the entertainment nature of cinema has to be offset by that?
I'm fascinated by it myself: looking at the phenomenon of what we do in as wide context as possible. I don't know what the alternative is. If you reduced [filmmaking] to its minimum, it would be just a kind of sensationalism.
You once said, 'The editor is a musician of visual images.' Do you see those two roles as being the most similar in the filmic process?
Music and film are similarly based in terms of rhythm, development and resolution. You can't stretch the similarity too far, but it goes to explain this inherent affinity between film and music. The two really seem to love to rub up against each other in interesting ways, with sound effects providing the forum to unite these things.
You also worked on the documentaries, 'Crumb' and 'Gimme Shelter.' On the docs, did you hold back on the sound design?
On 'Gimme Shelter' I was very tangentially involved, I was one of many camermen. The Maysles Brothers just came into San Francisco and rounded up as many cameras and lenses as they could find. George Lucas and I went out with a Zoetrope camera and a 1000-millimeter lens that we had for 'THX1138.' We shot from as far away as we could, picking up audience details. I just worked for one day.
'Crumb' I mixed. I went to a number of screenings with Terry [Zwigoff]. I was very supportive of the film, because I felt it was fantastic. They ran out of money and he was under all kinds of pressure. I tried to reassured him it was a great film and volunteered to mix the film for nothing. We mixed the film in four or five days, if that. It was a quick mix.
If nothing else, in the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" there was a whole doc section where you seemed to change your tone.
That was a fascinating journey to go on. The film itself, but specifically the documentary section; it had this hugely resonant historical element. We were dealing with all this footage [taken during the Russian clamp-down on the 1968 Prague Spring] that had been shot - with out knowing the larger context - maybe it was the Russians moving through Czechoslovakia to conquer the rest of Europe. There were dozens and dozens of cameras - mostly film students documenting what was going on. Along with the other events of 1968, the Chicago Democratic Convention and the student revolution in Paris, these were among the first massively filmically-documented events in history.
Yeah, the whole approach of that section was we had to figure out how to make the transition from a fairly classically shot film to this section of found footage, to insert our actors into that environment and make it all convincing. It was a real challenge, but I think we did it.
It works beautifully. I read in an interview that you discussed keeping the light flares - to provide a deeper truth—but in a narrative film that would distract.
Well, we were automatically mixing genres, just by the nature of the fact that we went from a dramatic film, classically shot, to ten minutes of very active documentary. I don't know how to explain the degree to which I pushed that, but it seemed absolutely the correct thing to do, to include as many of these camera stops as possible, where the image flairs out, and to find the sound equivalent of that. In the mix of everything, those choices made the imagery as urgent and relevant as possible. I was surprised by that, because I didn't go in thinking that at all. Yet it did emerge out of the creative process that it would be a good thing to do. It's not overdone.
True. You have worked on pretty much every editing system ever made, from the upright moviolas to AVIDs and Final Cuts—do you ever look back with any nostalgia on the older, hands on systems? Or do you feel non-linear editing is just the coolest thing there is?
I look back and I am very happy I was involved in the old system. It gives breadth of experience that is unobtainable in any other way. But I think it is like a surgeon looking back on surgery before the invention of anaesthetic: 'I am happy to have done it, but I am also happy anaesthetic is with us.'
In any case, there is no alternative—we can't go back. Everything is moving in this direction and will continue to do that—and even accelerate. There are many, many positive things; the drawbacks are a few, but I think they are only felt by people like me who have experienced other ways of doing things.
You mentioned in your book 'The Blink of An Eye,' that you would sometimes find an unused frame, like in a bin -
The advantage of non-linear systems, like the Avid, is that they are very good at giving you exactly what you say you want. But they are not so good at giving you what you don't know is there. Everything is organized around specific things, [shot] at specific moments, labeled with specific file names. If you say, 'Give me the second close-up of the girl in this scene,' it will do it very quickly. It is not that you can't browse through material, but you have to set up that system very deliberately.
There is an inherent limitation of digital systems: With the old analog systems, if you asked them to go ten times normal speed, they would do that by showing you every frame at one tenth of normal exposure. For various technical reasons to do with scan rates, computers can't do that—it is almost quantum mechanics. They can't show you a frame in less time then it takes to scan the frame. Effectively, when you are going through a huge amount of material quickly on a computer, you are not seeing 90% of the material. So you can miss things very easily. With the analog you saw everything but it was cumbersome. The two things probably, in the end, balance each other out.
I don't know if you experienced this in film school in the 60s, I remember getting it in 70s: the proposition that film will become the ultimate LSD. It will lead us to a type of mystical transcendence by cutting, colorful animation, etc. It seems we achieved quite a bit but we are always looking for more. Is that the artist's quest: constantly looking to transcend the physicality of the medium for spiritual values?
Yeah. Whenever you have an established way of doing something, artists come along and push at the edges. People who are used to the old ways either kick against that and don't want to go into this new world, or they go into the new world but it's so new that it kicks them into this state of mind that you are talking about. But that doesn't last very long. Ultimately, the high that you get from that, if you look at the culture at large, it lasts maybe a year.
People get used to it and say, 'Now what?' Gravity starts making itself felt again and you return to -not so much the more conventional—but you integrate the leaps that you made into other ways of doing things and you move forward. There's an initial surge of real excitement every time rules get broken, but eventually that dissipates.
I read a quote of yours mentioning 'the occupational hazard of seeing things thousands of times, and by the 999th time a glaze comes over.' Is there any way to avoid that repetitive image syndrome?
First of all, you have to know that it is a danger and realize that it is probably going to happen. I think [the trick] is just finding ways to not overly obsess about what you are doing. If something seems to be leading you down one of these obsessional corridors, switch over and work on another part of the film, or just go out and walk around the block. There is no magic bullet.
You just have to do it, you just have to see this film, I don't know, a thousand times, in one form or another. A lot of people who might want to be film editors, when they know that is what they have to do, say, 'I think I am going to do something else.' Film editing attracts people who are a patient and willing to put up with that kind of repetition for the joy that ultimately will be the result. Once you start doing it, you learn how to approach the material and monitor yourself and not get overwhelmed.
People often find after they have shot a film, they can't make it work. There are good elements in there—but how to make the narrative work? Some people recommend showing it to get feedback.
Yes. Just the act of showing something that you have been working on, you see it different. You say 'Oh my god, now I see something good I can take advantage of,' or [if you see] something bad, you feel embarrassed about it. This happens all the time. Showing the work to other people - even if those people don't say anything—is bound to be a positive step.
But it is also looking as hard as you can, as much as you can, to see if there are elements in the film, framing elements, or scenes that might seem to be good but maybe they're destabilizing the work in some way. Well, let's just try cutting them out and see what we have without those things. If a film really needs a scene, it will almost automatically come back - it's very hard to keep out of a film something that the film really needs. You discover by taking it out: 'Oh, it really wants to be toward the beginning of the film, rather then the middle." We are constantly playing with these kind of things, both showing a film to other people and experimenting with the structure of the film, so that the film appears new to us.
It is a little equivalent to what artists sometimes do when they are locked on a painting. They have just gotten familiar with looking at it from the same perspective. But by looking at it in a mirror, or upside down, it is almost as if they have x-ray vision. They'll see deeply into what they are doing and, as a result, find a way to reframe the argument, so to speak.
When you are going to start a sound design, do you start with tracks of music that you know, or do you just start listening to the dialogue?
The sound design is the integration of dialogue, sound effects and music - to try to make all those things knit together. I get ideas for the sound from reading screenplay and, once the film is shot, there is another level of what we might take advantage of.
The really basic [question] is: Does the story have anything to do with sound at all? Does it utilize sound in someway? If it is completely indifferent to sound, yeah, you can add sound [design], but it isn't going to enhance the film in a really profound way.
To take 'A Touch of Evil:' Wells wrote that with sound in mind and he knew that a plot point would sit on the very specific change in the nature of a sound. We are encouraged to listen to the film right from the first frame. There is something very adventuresome about how the sound, both music and sound effects, are used in that film. The more that happens, the more good ideas will happen as a result.
One technique is to pay attention to the transitions between scenes and try to imagine sound as a texture, almost like a fabric. And, if you can follow me with this metaphor, run your hand across the shift in texture from one scene to another. Let's say in one scene, you might say, 'Let's give that sort of silky tonality and find sound effects that emphasize 'silkiness'—whatever that means. Then in the next scene, we want to have a warm roughness to it, the equivalent of rough tweed. Well, find sounds that emphasize that.
Let's say someone showed up with 300 hours of documentary footage of the recent rebellions in Iran, but the filmmaker had been killed and left no notes: how would you start?
I would start by watching all the footage, of course, and taking very detailed notes. You have to create a kind of chart, with longitude and latitude, as it were, using the time code, or edge numbers, and situate each shot on the overall chart.I would mark the notes with good, very good, superb, and then go over it with a highlighter and mark the scenes that I feel are very important to telling the story that the filmmaker had in mind. Then start building from there.
I would also take image captures of important moments or scenes and print them and put them on bulletin boards, which I put it up around my editing room. Then I kind of pickle myself in them. That is what you have to do, to wait until some themes show themselves.
Posted on May 10, 2010 - 11:52 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Dede Allen, the pioneering editor who sadly passed in April, at 83, once explained in an interview how editing evolved from scissors, when they lost an entire frame to each edit, to splicing blocks, where they were only loosing a sixteenth of a frame by the 1970s. This was due to a technique, called "N-vis-o," that used polyester-silicone tape, and which was developed by a young editor friend of hers, Walter Murch. Actually, it's one of Murch's inventions we didn't get to in our interview.
Murch: Notably friendly and funny for a genuis. Photo: courtesy W. Murch Much-lauded as a sound designer, film editor, and visionary, as well as inventor, Murch is a renaissance man and jack-of-all trades, a classicist as well as a classy guy. Polite and precise, he is encyclopedically acquainted with the arts, in part because he grew up in Manhattan, son of Walter Murch, a painter of mysterious textures and romantic atmospheres, who remains a cult figure in the New York art scene.
After a year's study in Paris in 1963, Murch Jr transferred to California, where he fell in with George Lucas, then Francis Ford Coppola and a host of eventually famous writers and directors like Bob Zemeckis and John Milius, among others. With Lucas and Coppola, he formed the seminal San Francisco studio American Zoetrope, went on to edit their movies and invent five-point-one (usually written 5.1) sound, the theatrical standard common world-wide today (screen, front left and right, back left and right, plus subsonic woofers).
Nominated for nine Oscars, starting with"The Conversation" (1974), he took home three, starting with "Apocalypse Now," the sound design heard 'round the world (see the Ride of the Valhyries. Not only did it incorporate Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" and massive speakers as "practicals" (meaning right in there in the movie), it re-imagined our entire concept of film sound, both content and delivery, through 5.1 sound.
Murch went on to receive accolades for "Ghost" (1991) and "The Godfather: Part III" (1991), while also doing beautiful work on the "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), "K-19: The Widowmaker" (2002) and other films. Indeed, a simple review of his editorial work and work flow, with his neat rows of frame captures around the editing suite, is the only editorial master class you will ever need. No wonder he fell in with the creative and popular director Anthony Minghella, took home two more Oscars for BOTH picture editing and sound work on "The English Patient" (1996), and was nominated for editing on "Cold Mountain" (2004).
He also directed and co-wrote "Return to Oz" (1985)—an ambitious reworking of L. Frank Baum's later books—which later had trouble at Disney until Lucas rallied to his defense. Although not a big money maker, the moody, dark and romantic movie would probably have pleased his painter father and it did earn a substantial cult following (see waltdisneysreturntooz.com).
While raising a clutch of kids and leading the civilized art gentry life on Marin County's west coast, Murch keeps jetting around the world to speaking engagements as well as film projects, and to do ad hoc consulting on dozens more, undoubtedly for nothing, considering his courtly manner. Indeed, Murch mixed "Crumb" (1994) by local impoverished documentarian Terry Zwigoff for no fee.
American Zoetrope Post-Production Meeting for “Godfather II:” Coppola with hand up, on his left Barry Malkin, also an editor and long-time collaborator (not Murch, as mentioned in CS paper version). Photo: courtesy of America Zoetrope 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment;
2) it advances the story;
3) it occurs at the moment that is rhythmically interesting...
4) it acknowledges what you might call "eye-trace" - the concern with... the audience's focus of interest within the frame;
5) it respects "planarity"—the grammar of three dimensions... [i.e., not crossing the "eye-line" so that in a shot of two people talking, the one on the left is not suddenly on the right];
6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where the people are in the room and in relation to one an other)."
In fact, Murch appoints numerical values to these qualities, giving the preponderance to emotions at 51%, then story with 23%, rhythm 10%, eye-trace 7%, two-dimensional planarity 5%, and three-dimensional space 4%.
Murch did call these ratios "slightly tongue-in-cheek" in an email to me - but sometimes, in the dark night of the editorial soul, you need an approximate value to help weigh complex trade-offs. Emotions in fact takes the majority vote, because you can legitimately cut to absolutely anything that amplifies the character's feelings in that moment—a detail, a flashback, another scene entirely. Yes, overall narrative structure is key, in the long form feature format, but it remains secondary to emotions because story telling in film is better step by emotional step, not novelistically explained with exposition, narration or titles. Logically then, story and emotions represent almost 75% of the editorial vote, leaving rythym and space as window dressing. This makes Murch a proponent of experimental and emotional cinema as well as classical narrative.
No wonder Murch was invited back to the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 25 to present the prestigious "State of the Cinema" address. In it, he boldly outlined the aesthetic-technical evolution that led to film. In his view, it started with Beethoven, who introduced naturalistic dynamics, chaos and passion to music; continued with Flaubert, who developed the realism that film so easily captures; and culminated with Thomas Edison, the inventor of cinema who made the whole thing technically possible.
Murch with his two “English Patient” Oscars from 1997, and his wife, Aggie. Photo: courtesy of W. MurchCineSource connected with Walter Murch in Argentina, with the help of Ashley Soares from the SFIFF, but we were only able to sit down and Skype an interview a few weeks later, when he was in England. I opened by remarking we both hail from the same Upper West Side of Manhattan neighborhood.
Walter Murch: My dad was a painter. He took over what used to be the dining room and that was where he did all his work. Fifty percent was gallery work—he showed at Betty Parsons on 57th [Street]—and he did illustrations for Scientific American and the like and print ads. Also, he did teach at Columbia. My mother worked at Riverside Church as the secretary to the minister. I went to Collegiate [the all boys high school] on 77th Street and West End.
CineSource: You went on to John Hopkins University in the 1960s and were involved in some 'happenings?' Is that how you got interested in theatrical matters?
We fell in with a group of people from the school of art in Baltimore. It was more of a collaborative thing I piggy-backed onto.
In my early teenage years, I had gotten really interested in the tape recorder. It was a completely solo venture. I just loved it. It was like your own little train set. You have to remember, back in the early 50s there was the Polaroid camera perhaps, but the idea that you could trap some part of reality and instantly play that reality back was intoxicating in itself. This was completely new in the middle of the 20th century, as interesting for me as the appeal of sound itself.
I discovered that could you record something and play it back and you could also cut it out and tape it in a different a place—so I discovered the whole process of editing in my early explorations with the tape recorder. But I thought that was just a hobby. I never thought that I would end up doing almost precisely that in my professional life.
So, on your career path, you were looking at some other stuff and suddenly the tape recorder re-emerged?
Strangely enough, I didn't put those two together until I went to film school. I went to Johns Hopkins to study Romance languages and French literature. I wound up studying a year in Paris in 1963, which was the height of the New Wave [film movement]. I think it would be hard to be 20 years old and in Paris at that moment and not get bitten by the film bug, which is what happened to me.
When I got back to the States I looked around and discovered there were such things as film schools, which amazed me. So I applied to a couple and got a scholarship to USC.
Philosophizing about editing with Michael Ondaatje, a filmmaker as well as the author of “English Patient.” Photo: courtesy of W. MurchI recently looked at 'The Conversation' where your sound design was fully developed. Were you also doing odd uses of sound in 'American Graffiti' and 'The Rain People?'
Yes, also on 'The Godfather,' which was before 'The Conversation.' The soundtrack for 'THX1138' was probably equally adventuresome as the soundtrack for 'The Conversation.' George [Lucas] and I were trying to create a [futuristic] society and one of the tools we were using was pushing sound in directions we hadn't heard sound go before.
'The Conversation'—I was also editing the picture on that film—is about a soundman, and strictly from his point of view - that was a place to also be adventuresome with sound. Gene Hackman [the actor] in that film hears the world as much as he sees the world. Francis and I were interested in using sound to push those limits. It's about him and it is also told from his point of view - you are with him every moment of the film.
He is kind of an odd character.
Francis said exactly that. If he appeared in another film, you would see him for, maybe, three minutes. He wanted to take a character like that and see what his life is like and also examine a who-dunnit mystery story about this possible murder. It is a mixture of character study, Hitchcock, and [Herman] Hesse. As unlikely as that is, that was the goal Francis was setting for himself.
There is a little '1984' which still resonates today.
Technology has far surpassed what we see on the screen, but the core of it resonates today, certainly.
From the first time I saw 'Apocalypse,' which happened to be in Brazil, I noticed the interesting focus on sound. It seemed like, whereas in 'The Conversation' the soundman takes over, in 'Apocalypse Now' the soundtrack takes over. 'Apocalypse' is almost entirely stitched together by the sound of the helicopters, the Doors' music—
Murch on the Boards for “Apocalypse:” The fading in and out of tracks was computerized, for the first time in history, but everything else had to be done by hand and the mix took about six months, including premixes. Photo: courtesy of W. Murch'Apocalypse' was the first film in the format we call 5.1, which we originated for that film. We never expected that format to take off. Now it is the default standard of film sound. We created it just for the purposed of immersing the audience in this increasingly strange sound track.
At the beginning of the film, Francis said, 'There are three things I want. First of all, to be authentic. When we are looking at those weapons and motors, to be as real as they can be. But as the film goes on, I want the sound to get stranger and stranger and to add this other psychic dimension to what we are looking at on the screen. And, technically, I want the sound to swirl around the audience. For the explosions, I want the audience to feel those rather then hear.' It was out of those directives that the technical direction for the sound came.
When you did the new 'Apocalypse Redux,' did you fully you fully strip it down and re-tweak it?
No, no. As you know with 'Redux,' there are new scenes inserted, more in the order that the original script was written. We had to recreate the sound environment for those scenes. All of that took a tremendous amount of work but we also had to be very careful and stitch those new sounds into the fabric of the [old] sounds in the unaffected parts. In those areas, the sound is exactly as it was.
From your own personal opinion, how do you compare 'Redux' with the original?
It is an alternate way of looking at things. It is more indicative of the film Francis set out to make in 1976. But in 1979, all of us felt obliged to make a film that had a chance of making its money back because Francis had put all of his own money into the film. The 1978 film is something like two hours and 25 minutes but it is not three hours and 20 minutes long, which is how long 'Redux' is. They are both very good films but they are different ways of approaching it. I don't think 'Redux' is any more definitive then the original.
The original intention with 'Redux' was to make a navigable DVD so you could either see the film the way it was released in 1979 or you could choose which of the new scenes that you wanted to see. It was supposed to more interactive then it ended up because of the limitations at that time. I think it would be possible now.
I noticed the second film had a lot of female stories, particularly the love affair on the French plantation. But then looking at the original, it was very pared down and pugilistic and it hammered its points. As beautiful as the French plantation was, it was a side thing.
Which is why we cut it out of the original. It couldn't survive, you might say, the narrative irrelevance at that point in the story. If it were somehow possible to include it at an earlier part, it might have found a happier home, but there as no way to be true to the story and to include it earlier. In 1979, it got cut, but the intention we set out with 'Redux' was to show these extended scenes. Once we realized we couldn't do the branching DVD system, we put them in the film where they were originally designed.
When did you get involved in 'Apocalypse?'
I did go over to the Philippines while it was being shot. At that time, I was working with Fred Zinnemann in England on another film, so I didn't start working on 'Apocalypse Now' until the summer of 1977, still two years before it was finished. I was a relative newcomer at that point. There were already two editors working on the film.
Was there ever an impression that the sound department was going to have to save the film?
No, no, not at all. We knew that what we had in mind for the sound was very ambitious and we had to design a whole new format for it. We had to build the mixing theater for it because there was no way to retrofit a mixing theater. 'Apocalypse Now' was the first film ever to have an automated mix. There were a lot of developmental hurdles to go through before we got to doing any creative work.
We did a year and half of editing of the picture after the film was shot ['Apocalypse' had one and a quarter million feet of film, or 230 hours, twenty percent of which was the massive battle scene lead by 'Kilgore' Bobby Duvall]. There was a lot of experiment with how the film wanted to tell itself. The whole beginning of the film is very different than what it was in the screenplay—that evolved in the process of postproduction.
I don't know that sound ever has the ability [to save a film]. It can enhance a picture that is already good, but I don't think that a sound track alone can make people re-evaluate the nature of what a film is.
Francis' wife Eleanor did the fabulous documentary, 'Heart of Darkness,' but there is probably another documentary covering material that one didn't even touch on.
That film shows the end of shooting, and the next cut is the film premiering—there is a missing two years there. We editors did some interviews, but in the end they decided, probably correctly, to concentrate on the shooting not the postproduction—which, at any rate, is a lot less glamorous and interesting to look at.
There are a couple of really good bits in the extended DVD with Francis' voice-over. I particularly like when he pulls the opening scene out of the garbage.
Yeah, yeah. Francis looked at it and said, 'What's this?' They said 'Flowers wanted it.'
The munitions expert, A. D. Flowers, asked for that shot simply because he wanted to document this explosion, which was, until that point - perhaps even still - the largest practical explosion in the history of motion pictures—the most explosions and gasoline going off. That shot was the sixth camera. When that explosion went off, they had a lot of cameras because they knew they could only do it once. Francis got fascinated with the possibilities of this shot as being something to open the film with.
Any other totally serendipitous things that emerged?
That whole scene of Marty Sheen drunk in his hotel room was originally an acting exercise never intended to be in the film. Marty, as you may know, came into the film six weeks after the beginning of shooting to replace Harvey Keitel, who Francis felt finally was not right for the part. [Actually, this was just one of the record number of setbacks Coppola suffered: Sheen had a heart attack and had to be briefly replaced by his brother, the Filipino Army helicopters periodically left to fight guerillas, 90 rain days in a row, Brando doubled his fee, and Coppola stayed up nights trying to write a new ending, to what had begun an entirely new pciture—he finally narrowed it down to three.]
In order to bring Marty up to speed, they came up with this idea of improvising him as a frustrated soldier in his hotel room, just to see what would happen. All the footage of Marty drunk, which is intercut with this napalm explosion, was, as I said, never intended to be in the film. Yet the whole opening ten minutes of the film depends on these two central ideas: the explosion and the man going crazy in his hotel room. Once we knew that, yes, we were going to do this, more material was shot to blend these two things together.
Of course, you added the sound of the helicopter and shots of the rotors and fan, and it is just masterful. It also follows a theme that was in "Das Boot" and a couple of other war films, where one makes the narrator faulty from beginning. Rather than the hero going off to war, it is the flawed hero.
Very much, although 'Das Boot' was made after 'Apocalypse Now.'
Murch Editing ‘Tetro’ in Buenos Aires, 2009, his vaunted scene screen shot system on back wall. Photo: Beatrice MurchOh, right. So you ran into Lucas first at USC?
George was a fellow student at USC. There was something about the each of us—we liked what the other was doing. After he left school, he met Francis and they bonded. It was through George that I got brought into the axis of George and Francis.
Did you immediately feel like you were in a little film community?
Yeah, absolutely. At that time, the industry was in dire straights [the studio system was collapsing]. We had just graduated from school and there didn't seem to be many jobs. The hope was that we ex-film students—and there were a bunch more involved in Zoetrope, a core group of ten or eleven - we will see if we could have the same feeling as being at film school except we will try to make films professionally. It was an extension of the friendship, camaraderie and multitasking that we had done in film school.
Obviously, a lot of fun was had -
And a lot of uncertainty. It looked dire many times—but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
You all moved north and set out to create a pretty ambitious film scene in the Bay Area. Any reflections—the achievements are pretty obvious—but any mistakes made along the way?
There are great things about San Francisco, that's why we moved from Los Angeles. We were able to operate much more freely there. The union situation in San Francisco, in post-production, for example, allowed us to migrate freely from cutting picture to cutting sound to mixing, which wasn't the case in Los Angeles. We had a lot of new equipment, mostly from Europe, that depended on cutting-edge technology, which allowed it to be more portable. We were fascinated with the possibilities of using what we today might call pro-sumer [equipment] and seeing if we could push the envelope and use this professionally.
On the other hand, the difficulties of working in San Francisco are really just related to what you might call body size. If you are an elephant, it is easy to conserve your body's core temperature because you are so massive. But if you are mouse, you have to be continually eating because you radiate so much heat. San Francisco, relatively speaking, is a mouse compared to Los Angeles' elephant.
There just isn't the in-place infrastructure of the equipment, the actors and producers, and all of the ancillary support companies that you have in a place like Los Angeles, and to a certain extent in New York—although New York even suffers in comparison with LA.
San Francisco is constantly trying to keep from shivering to death. If you go too long without enough production coming into the city, people simply leave the city or leave the business. In LA, as bad things get sometimes, there is always something to keep things ticking over. As with everything, there is a mixture of very good things and things you just have to keep your eye on because they can bite you.
To benefit the local scene, should we focus on independent productions under a million dollars, or television series, like 'Trauma?'
Vancouver was very equivalent to San Francisco, and yet Vancouver put in place tax advantages that pulled a tremendous amount of production away from Los Angeles and possibly San Francisco. People started shooting in Vancouver just because it made economic sense. Water flows with gravity downhill - downhill, in this case, meaning places where there are economic advantages to shooting, although I think there are some [incentives] in place in San Francisco that weren't in place maybe five years ago.
There are really only three self-sufficient film industries in the world: China, India and the United States—the United States being Los Angeles, basically. Everywhere else has tax incentives, both to sustain local production and to bring in foreign production. I was just in Georgia, at the Savannah College of Art and Design. They were saying that Georgia has now put in tax incentives to attract production, and Robert Redford just shot a film [there].
The answer is really pretty simple: what everyone else in the world does to attract production is to create economic incentives for people to shoot there. Unfortunately, right now the amount of concessions in place in San Francisco aren't the equivalent of what is in place 1200 miles north up in Vancouver.
Hot Editing on ‘Cold Mountain:’ Murch and Minghella in the thick of it, London, 2003. Photo: courtesy of W. Murch There was a Q and A with James Cameron at ILM [Industrial Light and Magic] a couple of months ago, which I went to, and this question came up. His answer was pretty much the answer I would give.
Sound had its dimensional revolution back in 1979—'Apocalypse' basically jump-started the whole idea of three-dimensional, expanded frequency range sound in theaters, and picture with three dimensions is only now catching up with sound - that was Jim's point of view.
There is one visible improvement that could happen. I don't quite know technically how to do it, but it is finding some way to make 'binaural' sound work in a theatrical setting. You can record binaurally, which is putting microphones at the same distance apart as our ears. If you wear headsets, the left mike is going to left headphone and right to your right - the equivalent of wearing 3D glasses. It creates phenomenally effective, truly magnificent spherical representation of sound all around you and very specific distances from you. It's kind of spooky to hear it.
But, there is, as yet, no effective way to make that work in a theatrical setting without everyone wearing headsets. If there is a technical revolution that some day lets us watch 3D without wearing glasses, maybe there is equivalent of that in sound to have binaural sound delivered to us in the theater without having to wear headsets.
Do you have any views on the future of editing, which has been getting more frenzied of late?
The quickest number of cuts per second is 'Man with a Movie Camera' [Dziga Vertov], which was made in the mid-20s in Russia [1929, actually]. These things go in cycles. If anything, with 3D film, although it is technically advanced, it is also something that will cut down the rates at which films are cut. The brain has to have time to process the degree of dimensionality of each shot, so it has to be on screen longer.
Are there any real rules to film editing or can you pretty much do anything? We recently had 'Memento,' (2000) which was cut backwards, as was the French film, 'Irreversible' (2002).
Filmmaking is barely 100 years old. If this were music, we would be back in Gregorian times. Who knows what possibilities are out there? We may not have had the equivalent of J. S. Bach, let alone Beethoven. Maybe those people are two hundred years in the future. We are doing pretty well with the grammar that has been evolved, [but] I would be last person to say we have explored all the possibilities of what can be communicated with film and what the rules of the grammar are.
The main thing to keep in mind is what emotion you are going for and how you want to evoke that. If you are telling a story, how clear is that storytelling? And what is the rhythm you want to tell the story with?
The musical equivalent to that would be rhythm, melody and harmonics. Music has to at least acknowledge the primacy of these three things and I think the same thing for film, in terms of story, rhythm and emotion.
Film generally begins with the director and the actors, since they provide the screen presence, but the editor is thought of as type of god who can cut out a whole scene -
[Laughing] It is nothing like that at all. The creation of film is a collaborative effort. By no means does the editor have god-like powers. In the US, it is the studio that is ultimately in control. The producer—usually - has control. The editor is in a position of some control, because the editor is the person who executes these ideas. The editor can suggest what would happen if we lost this character, what would happen if we move this scene to the beginning of the film. That happens all the time - lots of suggestions come from everywhere. The editor is just one of the voices on a film, but their relative power is low compared to the director or producer or, ultimately, the studio.
Can you recall any cases where they were way off track on the edit and you felt it had to be told in different way?
Umm, di-di-di... Certainly, a version of that happened on 'The Conversation.' I can't recall exactly what I did, but we reached a point [of blockage] on that film. Francis was already shooting 'The Godfather II' and we were still editing 'The Conversation.' It is a tricky film because of what we were talking about - the nature of the main character. He is not an immediately sympathetic or likeable guy. It seemed we were not making progress, and Francis thought, let's just shelve the project and wait until we're finished shooting 'The Godfather II.'
This affected me. I thought, let's try one more time. I made a list of things I wanted to try, in terms of telling the story, finding ways to balance the character study part and the murder mystery—what is on that tape?
As I recall it, the idea was to have Harry Call not initially discover that there was something funny with the tape but, to complete his work and hand it in. My idea was that Harrison Ford, the Martin Stet [corporate heavy] character, was too anxious to get the tape. This made Harry have second thoughts and want to re-listen to the tape. That was something that helped unlock a problem at the beginning of the film. I made a pitch we should do this and we did and the film got back on track. It got released the same year as 'The Godfather II,' which wouldn't have happened had that not happened.
You recently reworked 'A Touch of Evil.' That must have shown how sound design has changed incredibly through the years?
Well, yes, the technical quality. If you compare sound quality today to microphone quality in 50s, there has been a big shift mainly because of transistors, portable equipment and everything.
But, no—Wells was genius! The ideas of sound design and the creative use of sound in that film are just phenomenal and inspirational today. His use of live music! There is very little score in the film and a lot what we think of as music is coming from radios or speakers in the environment or musicians that we see.
A lot of the stuff we did years later in 'American Graffiti,' Wells was already doing in 'A Touch of Evil.' The whole denouement at the end of the film, and the death of both Wells and Menzes, his assistant, depend on a very subtle listening to of an echo. As you may remember, Charlton Heston is tracking the two of them with a portable radio recorder - very modern technology even today. He's trying to stay within range and he winds up walking underneath a bridge and he picks up echoes under the bridge. Quinlan, the Wells character, hears this echo and this tells him he is being recorded and his lieutenant is probably carrying a microphone - things you would be hard put to find in a film today, such a subtle shift as a plot element. But it works great.
Is that what attracted you to redoing the film? Or the overall tour-de-force?
No, I was just attracted by the idea of working on 'A Touch of Evil.' That there was a 58-page memo that Wells wrote that I could read and have the privilege of putting into practice. It was just fantastic. The subtleties of this stuff were things I realized only once I got into working on the film. I shouldn't be surprised, since Wells was such a genius, but I didn't know this in advance. I wasn't a great student of the film. I had seen it once or twice but the specifics hadn't sunk in.
I recently looked at 'Jarhead' (2005) again and I noticed the variety of the music is extreme and also played against type, or for irony. Does this point to the fact that there are no rules, guides or themes to musical choices and it is very much feel?
Sam Mendes, the director, was definitely respon-sible for all of those choices. To a certain extent, it evolved during the making of the film. There was a musical supervisor on the film who also made suggestions and I implemented those suggestions. But that ironic distance is very much a hallmark of Sam's sensibility, applied not only to this film but to other films he has done.
There was also that self-referential scene of 'Apocalypse' being shown in 'Jarhead.' Was that Mendes' idea or did that tie into you?
No, that was in the original book. It transposed into the screenplay. I responded to the fact that here I was the editor of that original film and now reworking it for another film. I thought that if anyone was going to do that it might as well be me.
Pretty serendipitous. Have you put much thought into the art-war relationship? Artists making art about war is sometimes considered a contradiction in terms, but it did start with Homer and it seems that artists have a certain responsibility to make movies about war.
Yes, I would agree. It is a major human preoccupation and it poses lots of dilemmas that have a moral as well as dramatic dimension. People change tremendously in the course of war and war affects the society at large. Those situations are very ripe for exploration as well as exploitation. As long as people are at war, there will be artistic statements made about that. Why are we doing this? What are we gaining by it? What are the ramifications of all of this? I think it is probably an endlessly fascinating topic.
You are going to be lecturing on Beethoven and Flaubert in a few weeks and you studied literature and have a classicist bent. Do you feel the entertainment nature of cinema has to be offset by that?
I'm fascinated by it myself: looking at the phenomenon of what we do in as wide context as possible. I don't know what the alternative is. If you reduced [filmmaking] to its minimum, it would be just a kind of sensationalism.
You once said, 'The editor is a musician of visual images.' Do you see those two roles as being the most similar in the filmic process?
Music and film are similarly based in terms of rhythm, development and resolution. You can't stretch the similarity too far, but it goes to explain this inherent affinity between film and music. The two really seem to love to rub up against each other in interesting ways, with sound effects providing the forum to unite these things.
You also worked on the documentaries, 'Crumb' and 'Gimme Shelter.' On the docs, did you hold back on the sound design?
On 'Gimme Shelter' I was very tangentially involved, I was one of many camermen. The Maysles Brothers just came into San Francisco and rounded up as many cameras and lenses as they could find. George Lucas and I went out with a Zoetrope camera and a 1000-millimeter lens that we had for 'THX1138.' We shot from as far away as we could, picking up audience details. I just worked for one day.
'Crumb' I mixed. I went to a number of screenings with Terry [Zwigoff]. I was very supportive of the film, because I felt it was fantastic. They ran out of money and he was under all kinds of pressure. I tried to reassured him it was a great film and volunteered to mix the film for nothing. We mixed the film in four or five days, if that. It was a quick mix.
If nothing else, in the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" there was a whole doc section where you seemed to change your tone.
That was a fascinating journey to go on. The film itself, but specifically the documentary section; it had this hugely resonant historical element. We were dealing with all this footage [taken during the Russian clamp-down on the 1968 Prague Spring] that had been shot - with out knowing the larger context - maybe it was the Russians moving through Czechoslovakia to conquer the rest of Europe. There were dozens and dozens of cameras - mostly film students documenting what was going on. Along with the other events of 1968, the Chicago Democratic Convention and the student revolution in Paris, these were among the first massively filmically-documented events in history.
Yeah, the whole approach of that section was we had to figure out how to make the transition from a fairly classically shot film to this section of found footage, to insert our actors into that environment and make it all convincing. It was a real challenge, but I think we did it.
It works beautifully. I read in an interview that you discussed keeping the light flares - to provide a deeper truth—but in a narrative film that would distract.
Well, we were automatically mixing genres, just by the nature of the fact that we went from a dramatic film, classically shot, to ten minutes of very active documentary. I don't know how to explain the degree to which I pushed that, but it seemed absolutely the correct thing to do, to include as many of these camera stops as possible, where the image flairs out, and to find the sound equivalent of that. In the mix of everything, those choices made the imagery as urgent and relevant as possible. I was surprised by that, because I didn't go in thinking that at all. Yet it did emerge out of the creative process that it would be a good thing to do. It's not overdone.
True. You have worked on pretty much every editing system ever made, from the upright moviolas to AVIDs and Final Cuts—do you ever look back with any nostalgia on the older, hands on systems? Or do you feel non-linear editing is just the coolest thing there is?
I look back and I am very happy I was involved in the old system. It gives breadth of experience that is unobtainable in any other way. But I think it is like a surgeon looking back on surgery before the invention of anaesthetic: 'I am happy to have done it, but I am also happy anaesthetic is with us.'
In any case, there is no alternative—we can't go back. Everything is moving in this direction and will continue to do that—and even accelerate. There are many, many positive things; the drawbacks are a few, but I think they are only felt by people like me who have experienced other ways of doing things.
You mentioned in your book 'The Blink of An Eye,' that you would sometimes find an unused frame, like in a bin -
The advantage of non-linear systems, like the Avid, is that they are very good at giving you exactly what you say you want. But they are not so good at giving you what you don't know is there. Everything is organized around specific things, [shot] at specific moments, labeled with specific file names. If you say, 'Give me the second close-up of the girl in this scene,' it will do it very quickly. It is not that you can't browse through material, but you have to set up that system very deliberately.
There is an inherent limitation of digital systems: With the old analog systems, if you asked them to go ten times normal speed, they would do that by showing you every frame at one tenth of normal exposure. For various technical reasons to do with scan rates, computers can't do that—it is almost quantum mechanics. They can't show you a frame in less time then it takes to scan the frame. Effectively, when you are going through a huge amount of material quickly on a computer, you are not seeing 90% of the material. So you can miss things very easily. With the analog you saw everything but it was cumbersome. The two things probably, in the end, balance each other out.
I don't know if you experienced this in film school in the 60s, I remember getting it in 70s: the proposition that film will become the ultimate LSD. It will lead us to a type of mystical transcendence by cutting, colorful animation, etc. It seems we achieved quite a bit but we are always looking for more. Is that the artist's quest: constantly looking to transcend the physicality of the medium for spiritual values?
Yeah. Whenever you have an established way of doing something, artists come along and push at the edges. People who are used to the old ways either kick against that and don't want to go into this new world, or they go into the new world but it's so new that it kicks them into this state of mind that you are talking about. But that doesn't last very long. Ultimately, the high that you get from that, if you look at the culture at large, it lasts maybe a year.
People get used to it and say, 'Now what?' Gravity starts making itself felt again and you return to -not so much the more conventional—but you integrate the leaps that you made into other ways of doing things and you move forward. There's an initial surge of real excitement every time rules get broken, but eventually that dissipates.
I read a quote of yours mentioning 'the occupational hazard of seeing things thousands of times, and by the 999th time a glaze comes over.' Is there any way to avoid that repetitive image syndrome?
First of all, you have to know that it is a danger and realize that it is probably going to happen. I think [the trick] is just finding ways to not overly obsess about what you are doing. If something seems to be leading you down one of these obsessional corridors, switch over and work on another part of the film, or just go out and walk around the block. There is no magic bullet.
You just have to do it, you just have to see this film, I don't know, a thousand times, in one form or another. A lot of people who might want to be film editors, when they know that is what they have to do, say, 'I think I am going to do something else.' Film editing attracts people who are a patient and willing to put up with that kind of repetition for the joy that ultimately will be the result. Once you start doing it, you learn how to approach the material and monitor yourself and not get overwhelmed.
People often find after they have shot a film, they can't make it work. There are good elements in there—but how to make the narrative work? Some people recommend showing it to get feedback.
Yes. Just the act of showing something that you have been working on, you see it different. You say 'Oh my god, now I see something good I can take advantage of,' or [if you see] something bad, you feel embarrassed about it. This happens all the time. Showing the work to other people - even if those people don't say anything—is bound to be a positive step.
But it is also looking as hard as you can, as much as you can, to see if there are elements in the film, framing elements, or scenes that might seem to be good but maybe they're destabilizing the work in some way. Well, let's just try cutting them out and see what we have without those things. If a film really needs a scene, it will almost automatically come back - it's very hard to keep out of a film something that the film really needs. You discover by taking it out: 'Oh, it really wants to be toward the beginning of the film, rather then the middle." We are constantly playing with these kind of things, both showing a film to other people and experimenting with the structure of the film, so that the film appears new to us.
It is a little equivalent to what artists sometimes do when they are locked on a painting. They have just gotten familiar with looking at it from the same perspective. But by looking at it in a mirror, or upside down, it is almost as if they have x-ray vision. They'll see deeply into what they are doing and, as a result, find a way to reframe the argument, so to speak.
When you are going to start a sound design, do you start with tracks of music that you know, or do you just start listening to the dialogue?
The sound design is the integration of dialogue, sound effects and music - to try to make all those things knit together. I get ideas for the sound from reading screenplay and, once the film is shot, there is another level of what we might take advantage of.
The really basic [question] is: Does the story have anything to do with sound at all? Does it utilize sound in someway? If it is completely indifferent to sound, yeah, you can add sound [design], but it isn't going to enhance the film in a really profound way.
To take 'A Touch of Evil:' Wells wrote that with sound in mind and he knew that a plot point would sit on the very specific change in the nature of a sound. We are encouraged to listen to the film right from the first frame. There is something very adventuresome about how the sound, both music and sound effects, are used in that film. The more that happens, the more good ideas will happen as a result.
One technique is to pay attention to the transitions between scenes and try to imagine sound as a texture, almost like a fabric. And, if you can follow me with this metaphor, run your hand across the shift in texture from one scene to another. Let's say in one scene, you might say, 'Let's give that sort of silky tonality and find sound effects that emphasize 'silkiness'—whatever that means. Then in the next scene, we want to have a warm roughness to it, the equivalent of rough tweed. Well, find sounds that emphasize that.
Let's say someone showed up with 300 hours of documentary footage of the recent rebellions in Iran, but the filmmaker had been killed and left no notes: how would you start?
I would start by watching all the footage, of course, and taking very detailed notes. You have to create a kind of chart, with longitude and latitude, as it were, using the time code, or edge numbers, and situate each shot on the overall chart.I would mark the notes with good, very good, superb, and then go over it with a highlighter and mark the scenes that I feel are very important to telling the story that the filmmaker had in mind. Then start building from there.
I would also take image captures of important moments or scenes and print them and put them on bulletin boards, which I put it up around my editing room. Then I kind of pickle myself in them. That is what you have to do, to wait until some themes show themselves.
Posted on May 10, 2010 - 11:52 PM
