The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film Page 6

  O: Marcel Duchamp insisted his last artwork, Étant donnés …, could only be seen by going up to an old door in a gallery wall in which there were tiny holes the viewer had to peek through to see the work that was constructed behind the wall. He wanted his last piece of art to reawaken an original private and childlike curiosity. So it's this shared secret, between two….

  THE DARK AGES

  O: Dai Vaughan's book Portrait of an Invisible Man, on the World War II documentary film editor, Stewart McAllister, has a beautiful epigraph by Ernst Toller: “What we call form is love.” And there's a lot in the book about McAllister's interest in mathematics and music and science and patterns—things central to your interests and work too. Perhaps all editors have this pattern-recognition ability.

  M: There are underlying mathematical influences that determine how a film gets put together, which are amazingly consistent, seemingly independent of the films themselves. Over the years, I've come to rely on these influences— navigation points—as I work on each film. For instance: 2.5—an audience can process only two and a half thematic elements at any moment; 14—a sustained action scene averages out to fourteen new camera positions a minute; 30—an assembly should be no more than thirty percent over the ideal running length of the film. But these are perhaps just islands above a larger submerged continent of theory that we have yet to discover.

  Actually, when you stop to think about it, it is amazing that film editing works at all. One moment we're at the top of Mauna Kea and—cut!—the next we're at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The instantaneous transition of the cut is nothing like what we experience as normal life, which seems to be one continuous shot from the moment we wake until we close our eyes at night. It wouldn't have been surprising if film editing had been tried and then abandoned when it was found to induce a kind of seasickness. But it doesn't: we happily endure, in fact even enjoy, these sudden transitions for which nothing in our evolutionary history seems to have prepared us.

  O: What do you think is going on?

  M: Well, many things—not least of which are the visual dislocations that happen all the time when we dream. I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvellous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a “cinematic” dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

  On the other hand, here's a wonderfully simple experiment which clearly shows that our visual cortex is also routinely editing our perceptions—while we are wide awake—without our ever being aware of it. Stand about eight to ten inches from a mirror and look at your left eye. Now look at your right eye, and then back at your left eye. Do this five or six times in quick succession. You will not notice any movement—your eyes will seem to be completely still. But this is in fact not the case, as an observant friend will immediately tell you: your eyes move quite a lot with each shift of focus.

  The blurred swish during the movement of the eye is somehow snipped from our conscious awareness, and we are left with just the significant images before and after the movement. Not only do we not see the blurred movement, we are unaware that anything has been removed. And this is happening all the time: with every movement of our eyes, an invisible editor is at work, cutting out the bad bits before we can ever see them.

  … I think cinema is perhaps now where music was before musical notation—writing music as a sequence of marks on paper—was invented. Music had been a crucial part of human culture for thousands of years, but there had been no way to write it down. Its perpetuation depended on an oral culture, the way literature's did in Homeric days. But when modern musical notation was invented, in the eleventh century, it opened up the underlying mathematics of music, and made that mathematics emotionally accessible. You could easily manipulate the musical structure on parchment and it would produce star-tlingly sophisticated emotional effects when it was played. And this in turn opened up the concept of polyphony—multiple musical lines playing at the same time. Then, with the general acceptance of the mathematically determined even-tempered scale in the mid–eighteenth century, music really took off. Complex and emotional changes of key became possible across the tonal spectrum. And that unleashed all the music of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler!

  I like to think cinema is stumbling around in the “pre-notation” phase of its history. We're still doing it all by the seat of our pants. Not that we haven't made wonderful things. But if you compare music in the twelfth century with music in the eighteenth century, you can clearly sense a difference of several orders of magnitude in technical and emotional development, and this was all made possible by the ability to write music on paper. Whether we will ever be able to write anything like cinematic notation, I don't know. But it's interesting to think about.

  One of those great ear-opening experiences happened to me when I was nineteen and working at a radio station, cataloguing its classical record collection. I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to teach myself music history, so I started with the oldest music first, listening to what I was cataloguing as I went. It was a summerlong project, and after three weeks I'd only reached the fifteenth century. I should mention that this was a lonely, one-person occupation—I didn't have much contact with anyone else at the station. But one day I had to go upstairs to the control booth for some reason, and the moment I opened the door my ears were assaulted with a cacophony of rhythmic and dissonant weirdness. This was a staid classical station, and I thought: We don't play this kind of music! What is this?

  Holding my ears, I asked the engineer, and he picked up the record jacket and showed me: J. S. Bach's Saint Matthew Passion. Suddenly this “chaotic” music began to transform itself, and in only a few seconds, my ears navigated the three-hundred-year distance between the fifteenth century, where I had been, and the eighteenth century, where I was now. I learned, viscerally, that what we think of as normal is largely a question of what we are most often exposed to.

  The rules of fifteenth-century music had been almost burned into my head after three weeks, so I could hear that Bach, whom we think of today as very “classical” and “formal,” was in fact radically advanced. The Saint Matthew Passion is one of the miracles….

  “I'm notgoing to mix the picture upside down!”by Francis Ford Coppola

  I met Walter when he was in his twenties. He had come from New York. He was very likeable, obviously extremely intelligent, kind of like the film world's one intellectual, in a way—he had concerns and interests on many levels. At first I thought of him only as a sound artist. Then, as I got to know him, I realized his interests were deeper. We'd have conversations about all kinds of strange things that he was interested in, and my respect for him as a fully dimensional thinker and person only increased. And he had his own impish, quixotic style.

  At that time Zoetrope was really more of a lifestyle than it was a film company. We were a group of friends, we had kids, and the kids would come around and play amongst us. We'd gone across the country and made The Rain People as a sort of self-contained movie studio—we had all our equipment in a special truck that George Lucas and I had figured out and built.

  In Europe I had seen all these young people making films. They had everything—all sorts of sound-mixing equipment—and I told George: we can have that too!

  And I spent all the money for the sound mix for The Rain People on equipment I bought in Germany! So we had no money left. I said to Walter, Look, we have this wonderful machine and you can do the mix! Of course, all the instructions were in German…. I thought it was something that you just plug in and use—but this was all very new, way beyond just plugging it in the wall.

  Meanwhile we'd gained entry for The Rain People in the San Sebastiän festival, so now we had to deliver it. Walter looked at the equipment and scratched his head. Fortunately we had a teletype machine, and we'd send questions to Germ
any: What do we do? How do we do this? The answers would come back in German and somebody would translate them. We were all sleeping in the place because we only had a week and a half to do it. Then the whole thing almost came to an abrupt, horrible end, when it turned out that we had to do the sound mix by watching the film on a television. And it turned out that this high-tech specially machined German video camera unit wouldn't work, so we couldn't see the picture.

  Everyone was discouraged. What were we going to do? We had no money. I couldn't take it to a studio to do it, so I had a brilliant idea—I went out and bought an amateur Sony camera. This is now getting late and Walter is ready to go—he's like a great pianist—he's ready to mix this picture. So I jam the television in and there's the film on the monitor, but the picture is upside down!

  Walter said, That's it! I'll work with this German equipment, but I'm not going to mix the picture upside down!

  We were really stuck…. Then I took the television set and turned it upside down. So Walter then started mixing The Rain People, in this room, and he mixed the film in three days and three nights. We got it to the festival. Walter saved us.

  …We wanted very much to credit Walter for his incredible contribution—not only for The Rain People, but for all the films he was doing. But because he wasn't in the union, the union forbade him getting the credit as sound editor—so Walter said, Well, since they won't give me that, will they let me be called “sound designer”? We said, We'll try it—you can be the sound designer …I always thought it was ironic that “Sound Designer” became this Tiffany title, yet it was created for that reason. We did it to dodge the union constriction.

  Later on, when I realized that my film The Conversation was going to be a sound composition, I thought of working with Walter again. Although the film was about privacy, sound would be the core element in it. So I suggested that he edit the picture as well, which he hadn't really done before and didn't think of as his specialty. He agreed. And that was when I got to know Walter as a filmmaker, because of his editing both the picture and the sound.

  Walter is a fabulous theorist about many things, and certainly about structure. I think he's one of the few film artists who really thinks in a broader context—in terms of literature or philosophy—rather than just zeroing in on the film. His approach is tempered by his interests in these other areas. In working with Walter, discussing things with Walter, he has his own slow style to arrive at things. It's because he thinks it out—for him structure is an aspect of plot or presentation—whereas I'm very haphazard and jump to this or that. He's like the slow gears that grind very carefully and arrive at a conclusion. I remember talking to him at great length about the structure of Apocalypse Now, when I came back for three weeks during a break in the shooting. He suggested I add a sequence, sort of a My Lai massacre scene. The sampan ambush at the beginning of the first act wasn't in the original script. That was his idea.

  … Normally an editor focusses on the immediate details of his craft— how to match the cutting so it seems smooth—but Walter's perspective starts more with the whole theme of the piece or the narrative goals of the work—rather than with specific dramatic moments.

  All editors vary. You consider whether you'll feel comfortable relying on them for the big overall narrative dramatic issues. Or do you just work with them on textural things, things more focussed on editing as a craft? It's like you're working with a tailor. There might be a tailor who can really cut cloth and sew it beautifully! Then another one who will also have an overall design concept. Walter is interested in the overall design concept, but is also a craftsman of the specifics. Whatever he does—even if it's sound—he always offers incredible perspective. He's sort of what a producer is like, or a collaborator who's helping you on the whole project.

  A post-production meeting at Francis Coppola's house, during the editing and mixing of Godfather II, October 1974. Murch is partially visible at the right edge of the frame.

  APOCALYPSE THEN AND NOW

  O: You've been working on re-editing Apocalypse Now for the last few months, and you're still in the midst of it. It seems to me to be changing in important ways. For instance, the gunboat crew is more linked to the people they meet in the landscape they go through, and they now react more to the situations they find themselves in: they don't just witness Kilgore's speeches, they talk back, mock him, and even steal his sacred surfboard. Looking back on the original version, I feel that though it had a powerful dramatic plot line—find Kurtz and kill him—the story seemed to insist on its episodic quality.

  M: It is episodic. It's the nature of this particular beast. But counterbalancing that, there's the river—the liquid track that keeps this story moving forwards despite those episodic interludes.

  Albert Finney, right, as Lawrence of Arabia; he left the film after four days, replaced by Peter O'Toole. Martin Sheen replaced Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard after a month of filming. Coppola, far right, directing a river scene in Apocalypse Now.

  O: Maybe its episodic feel is also the nature of the quest genre, where the central character—Willard, sent on a secret mission to kill an American colonel who has seemingly gone insane—simply responds to the events he travels through…. He's not an overtly dramatic central character!

  M: It's true, Willard—Martin Sheen—is almost entirely inactive until he kills Kurtz—Marlon Brando—at the end of the film. The one nonreactive thing he does is kill a wounded woman in the aftermath of a massacre. Otherwise, he's the eyes and ears through which the audience sees and hears this war. Incidentally, I think Willard's passivity was one of the reasons Francis, who started out with Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard, switched to Martin Sheen after a month of filming.

  O: Keitel tends to play extreme characters, he is certainly not Everyman.

  M: Marty has an openness to his face, a depth to his eyes, that allowed the audience to accept him as the lens through which they were able to watch this incredible war. Keitel is perhaps more believable as an assassin, but you tend to watch him rather than watch things through him. And if he doesn't do anything, it's a frustrating experience.

  O: Did you ever see the footage with Keitel as Willard?

  M: About five months into the editing of the original Apocalypse Now, I found myself stuck on some story point, so I got up and walked around, down a hallway … and there I found an entire rack of film!—hours of material!—that I had never been told about. I thought: Maybe there's something in here that can solve my problem. I asked my assistant, Steve Semel, but he shook his head and muttered, You don't want to see that! And of course that made me want to see it all the more. I said, Why? What is it? He finally confessed that it was all the original Harvey Keitel footage.

  I was now burning with curiosity. I grabbed a roll of film at random and threaded it up on my machine, hit the Play button, and within ten seconds knew Steve was absolutely right. I felt as if my mind was warping in some time-space experiment. There was nothing wrong with the material in itself, it was just profoundly different. Yet the same.

  After more than a year of production and many months of editing, the Marty Sheen Apocalypse had acquired its own unique immune system—its own blood type and genetic structure. And looking at this material I was suddenly confronted with that difference. It was like meeting a brother you never knew you had.

  If Francis had continued in that original Harvey Keitel direction, the film would have been very different. But he soon realized he had to make some very big changes. Not only did Keitel leave the film, but so did many other people associated with the production. It was a big change of regime. I forget how long the interruption was—a couple of weeks maybe—and then they started up again, with a new approach.

  O: Albert Finney was supposed to play the lead in Lawrence of Arabia, but left after four days. You also wonder what might have happened there. Did Keitel's leaving alter the script?

  M: Not so much the script as the attitude towards the material. At the end of
Godfather II—a big, intense production on all levels—I was talking to Francis about the experience, and he said words to the effect, “I know there are other ways to make films than what we've just gone through. It was like I was hauling my guts out and hacking away at them in full view of the public, and then stuffing them into the film. Why do I have to be so personally involved, and have all these resonances between my life and my films? Just once I'd like to experience what it's like to have a healthy distance from the material. I want my next film to be full of action and three or four bankable stars who will guarantee the financing. And then I can sit in a chair and raise my megaphone and say, ‘Action!' and these wonderful things will unroll in front of me. I'd like to do that—just once!”

  Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later Francis announced he was going to do Apocalypse Now. What was that line from the film? “I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one.”

  It seems strange now, in hindsight, but the spark of Francis's desire to do Apocalypse was an understandable attraction for a big, formulaic action film with bankable stars. So Apocalypse rumbled down that unlikely road for about a month, until Francis, to his regret but also his credit, must have realized: I can't pull off this distanced, formulaic kind of filmmaking, I have to get intimately involved in it.

  You can see that the dramatic dilemmas of the Godfather films, or even The Conversation, were close enough to his own life and family and work that whenever he got into a quandary about what to do next he could simply reach into his own experience: he could make such-and-such a character like his uncle Mike. Harry Caul's electronic eavesdropping in The Conversation was similar enough to making motion pictures that metaphors were readily at hand from a world he was completely familiar with. However, other than going to military school for a year, Francis had no combat experience—other than making motion pictures!