Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  The patterns of the exterior walls at Pixar represent pixel shapes.

  Pixar’s lobby rivals the atrium of any Hyatt Hotel. It’s a vast open area, its south wall made almost entirely of glass. A commissary, the Luxo Café, is tucked into one side and the tables spill out onto the main floor. The Pixar receptionist calls Torbin Bullock. “He’ll be right out,” she tells Murch.

  Murch and his wife, Aggie, first met Bullock as an embryo. While they were living on their houseboat in Sausalito, Aggie was one of the first Lamaze natural birth teachers in the area. Torbin’s mother was in her class. Coincidentally, Torbin’s father, Tom Bullock, was a film editor. Over the years the Bullocks and the Murches, along with their kids, crossed paths at social functions and film events. Torbin and Walter’s daughter, Beatrice, are good friends.

  Torbin Bullock, an editor at Pixar.

  Murch and Bullock collect their pasta from the Luxo Café and go sit at an outside table. Torbin, in his early 30s, is husky and Nordic-looking, with short, cropped blond hair.

  “You want to cut Cold Mountain in Final Cut Pro?” asks Torbin, incredulously. “In Romania?” He pauses, dramatically. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Before this get-together Murch reached out to Bullock by phone. “Walter told me, ‘We’re thinking about using Final Cut Pro on Anthony’s next picture. What can you tell me about it—good things, bad things.’ I thought he was crazy—or should I say, a braver man than I am. Especially since Final Cut Pro 3 had only just come out and hadn’t really been put through the wringer.”

  After having worked on a number of studio and independent films in the Bay Area, Bullock started working at Pixar in 1995 as second assistant editor on Toy Story. By 2003 he was promoted to associate editor on Cars. In high school Torbin worked in his father’s studio, synching up dailies and conforming sound tracks. He tried to imagine another path, spent a few years in college at San Francisco City College and at SUNY Purchase, but just couldn’t shake his genealogically stamped future. He was a “film kid,” as he puts it, like an Army offspring who refers to himself as an Army brat. And like other Bay Area film kids, Torbin attended “the Droid Olympics,” annual film parties at Murch’s Blackberry Farm. There Murch, Lucas, Tom Bullock, and dozens of other editors, directors, and film crew got together for a day of fun, frolic, and competitive post-production contests, such as the 1,000 foot picture and sound rewind event.

  * * *

  Torbin Bullock on Walter Murch

  “Unless you get him started on something, he’s not very effusive. He’s very intellectual, he’s goddamn smart! Whatever subject you bring up, if he knows about it, he tells you everything about it you don’t know. And if he doesn’t know about it he’s expecting the same amount of detail from you. If you say, ‘Hey, they have penguins in Antarctica,’ Walter will say, ‘Really? What’s the Latin name for penguins? What do they eat? I heard they eat herring. But they can’t eat just herring. They must eat other things, too, such as smelt.’ You’re like, just...uh... never mind.”

  * * *

  Over lunch, Torbin tells Walter what he’d be concerned about if he, Torbin, were Murch’s assistant. “Make sure you buy the most hot-shit computer you can, make sure you have two of them, load them up with as much RAM as you can, and bring backups of your secondary monitor boards and stuff like that.” He speaks to the issue of networking the computers so they can share media files: “Put together a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system so if you lose any of your data, or if one of your drives goes bad, and you’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, at least you can yank that drive out, hot-swap it, and shove in a new one that rebuilds the system on the fly. That’s the way you want to be in feature-land.” A feature film in post production should never grind to a halt because the equipment goes down.

  The Droid Olympics were held for many years at Murch’s house.

  The “Stacking Film Boxes In Order” event.

  Murch celebrates on winning film box stacking.

  Art Repola competes in the “1000 Foot Rewind Race.”

  Not having actually worked for Murch but knowing him outside the film world his whole life, Bullock is in a good position to make observations. “Walter does his research, but once he makes up his mind, he goes for it. I think he made up his mind when he first spoke to me. He just wanted to see if I could talk him out of it. Walter wanted someone to come up with a reason not to use Final Cut Pro. And really the only reason not to was a question of courage and a question of making sure everyone knew it was going to be a work-in-progress.”

  * * *

  “Sorry, Got to Go...”

  Bullock has never actually worked for Murch, though he came close on The Talented Mister Ripley, the previous Murch-Minghella collaboration. “Walter called and asked me to run the film conforming. I was very tempted—any assistant would be—but I’d been asked to be first assistant on Monsters, Inc. The choice between doing conforming and running my own ship as a first assistant, well, it was more challenging to stay at Pixar. If Murch had asked me to be a first assistant on Cold Mountain, to go to Romania and London, I’d have said, ‘Sorry, got to go!’ That would have been the opportunity of a lifetime. To be honest, I’m still a little envious.

  “I not only envy them their physical adventure, going off to another country. But I envy their adventure in doing this in FCP. I had been an assistant editor for 12 years, so it makes you a glutton for punishment. I couldn’t tell him not to use it—only the things to look out for.”

  * * *

  Murch and Bullock talk mostly about Final Cut’s problems from an assistant’s point of view. There are four big concerns, as Torbin describes them to Murch:

  1. Rendering time for effects—the length of time it will take the machine to permanently digest an effect, like a dissolve or fade, and save it into a cut.

  2. Media management for large amounts of digitized material: how to organize it and have it be easily and quickly accessible. His understated, prescient observation: “To get into these issues with third-party cards can be messy.”

  3. Having multiple users on multiple computers. Bullock says that up to now “sneaker net” has been the only reliable networking solution for FCP—that is, walking external hard drives around from one station to another.

  4. In general things are “a little flaky in Final Cut Pro 3,” as Torbin puts it. “Sometimes footage just disappears”—which Ramy Katrib had also told Murch.

  But the biggest concern for Torbin is Final Cut Pro’s change list functions. “The rest of it,” he says, “like the hardware issues, we can get around. Give it enough money and you can set up your infrastructure so risk is at a manageable level—down to 10 percent, which is just as good as anything else, including Avid. But the change list is a serious issue.”

  Murch is fully aware from his discussions with DigitalFilm Tree that the edit decision list (or “cut list”) function in Final Cut Pro 3 is untested for a film with the volume of footage he expects in Cold Mountain. And there is no change list function at all. “I warned him about the cut list factor,” Bullock says later. “No one had really run that much footage through. There was no way to know when it would fall apart. In theory it could handle any number of files, but even Avid has its upper limit. But Walter continually invites trouble. It isn’t that after 20 years he’ll just decide to try something different. It’s like his move to use flatbed editing tables from the old upright Moviola. He’s tried all the new editing systems that came along, because they were better or worse, not because they were simply different. He’s interested in new ways of technology. He gets bored. I’m convinced he gets bored. That’s why he willingly puts himself into positions of challenge.”

  As their lunch at Pixar wound down, Robert Grahamjones comes outside to join Murch and Bullock. Murch warmly greets his former assistant on The English Patient and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Like many others in this field, Robert, a sturdy, bantam-sized man with a ready laugh, g
ravitated to film from photography. One of his first film jobs was working as a driver on the locally produced animated feature, The Plague Dogs. In addition to shuttling animation cells from studio to lab and back, Robert took director Martin Rosen to and from the sound mix at the Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley.

  It wasn’t long before Grahamjones made contacts that led to apprentice editing on two of director Rob Nilsson’s locally made independent films, On The Edge and Signal 7. Soon Bay Area film editors were keeping Grahamjones busy working as an assistant. His first contact with Murch occurred in 1985 on George Lucas’s $20 million Michael Jackson video, Captain Eo, directed by Francis Coppola, that was installed at Disneyland. Grahamjones was already on the project when Murch came in to help Lucas finish the project, which stretched out well beyond its original budget and schedule. From there Murch hired Robert to be a film assistant on his next feature, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by another Bay Area director, Philip Kaufman.

  Robert Grahamjones, an editor at Pixar and Murch’s former assistant on Unbearable Lightness of Being and The English Patient.

  After lunch Robert leads Walter down the dimly lit halls at Pixar to his windowless edit room. The former assistant, now host to his mentor, will give Murch his first demonstration of Final Cut Pro. It’s as if the master bricklayer on that Pixar building turned to his hod carrier for a better method of laying bricks.

  * * *

  Using Final Cut Pro 6,000 Miles from Customer Support

  Torbin Bullock: “Say a piece of gear goes out. Let’s think about this: the closest shipping source is say, from London. That’s if they even have the part that works with American gear. So maybe you get it counter-to-counter in a day, or more likely it’s two or three, with customs and paperwork. So you have to tell your producer the video card went out, and you’re spending $400 and it will cost $200 for counter-to-counter. And what if the CPU blew? Or, God forbid, it’s something more serious?”

  * * *

  “I was surprised when we started going through things,” Robert says later. “He hadn’t touched Final Cut before—he really didn’t know how to move this thing to there, how to make a cut. He hadn’t messed with the machine. He was about to embark on Cold Mountain and he hadn’t really used it!”

  Murch heard about Final Cut Pro systems issues from Torbin Bullock. Now he was interested in learning interface and editing gestalt from Grahamjones, who straddles the film/video/digital worlds and knows Walter’s way of working. They share a special relationship, not unlike firemen in an engine company. The intense experience of working together on a major film is deep and mutually dependent. Robert could talk Walter’s language, using the kind of shorthand an assistant and an editor come to rely on.

  Each editor uses an identical system differently, just as novelists will use word processing software in their own ways. A good tool is adaptable. The Final Cut Pro system is flexible, allowing the same task to be performed in a multitude of ways. This is one of its attractions to Murch, who is all about customizing his tools and work environment to fit his style.

  “He’s had an Apple computer forever,” Grahamjones says later, “and he loves doing things on it. The prospect of being able to cut a film on his own desktop computer just really kind of tipped it. He was willing to go into unknown territory just for that fact alone. As far back as 1986, on Unbearable, we did lots of database things on FileMaker using Mac SEs. If Final Cut had been, say, a program only available on the PC platform, it wouldn’t have got his attention.”

  Going to work for Murch on The Unbearable Lightness of Being meant Grahamjones was pulled into all sorts of experiments with editing equipment and work flow. Unbearable was the first time Murch used his custom-made picture boards, for example; an alternate way of seeing the film in progress through still photos pasted onto large black foamcore boards. It’s a system he’s used on every film since, including Cold Mountain. Murch selects from one to eight representative frames from every set-up—“defining moments,” he calls them—that best represent the “story” of that particular shot, emotionally or visually. On Unbearable Grahamjones used a copy stand mounted with a 35mm single lens reflex camera to photograph each frame of film that Walter marked. Mounted side by side, in story order (or, as the story was written in the screenplay) these postcards from the movie create an imagistic, dream-like pattern. Walter uses the picture boards because it lets his eyes dance through the film and discover hidden patterns and rhythms, new ways of relating to the material. For Unbearable there were 4,000 stills and 40 boards to hold them. With computer-based digital editing Walter’s picture board images are captured with a keystroke—a screen shot.

  Grahamjones recalls that day at Pixar. “A lot of what he was coming to me for wasn’t the specifics of how to press button A, B, C, or D—mainly what he was looking for was to make sure it was flexible enough for him because he doesn’t want to get into a situation where there’s only one way to do certain things.”

  Grahamjones shows Murch how Final Cut allows editors to cut sound in “sub-frames,” or fractions of film frames. A 35mm film frame equals 1/24 of a second running at normal projection speed. On an Avid system at that time, soundtracks could only be cut right on the frame line. So, an editor gets stuck working in 1/24 second chunks. (When sound editors work in their native software programs, such as ProTools, they have much more latitude.) This may seem adequate, but a frame is a large block of time in the film continuum. For a breath, a beat of music, or a sound effect to be heard exactly where the Avid editor feels it belongs, he must build in tiny fades or dissolves to create the equivalent of sub-frame edits—again, a time-consuming process. “That was one of the exciting things to him,” Grahamjones reports later. “He said, ‘Oh, sub-frames! I like that!’”

  After three hours, Murch finishes his session with Grahamjones. “It was fairly inconclusive,” as Grahamjones describes it. But Murch didn’t come to Pixar to decide whether to sign on for Final Cut Pro. He was looking for reasons not to go forward. Murch saw the system’s ergonomics, the way it cuts footage, and that seems to work well for him. “The big unknown,” according to Grahamjones, “was how it was going to mesh into a system overall because the way I’m using it, I told him, I can’t help with that. That’s going to be the make or break thing. But he left feeling very Walter-like, I think. Mission accomplished.”

  From The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.

  Indeed there was still much to be figured out—issues Grahamjones didn’t have to manage in his own work, since he was cutting projects that were shorter than full-length features, without a huge volume of film dailies. Also, the end product for most of what Grahamjones worked on was videotape, not 35mm film. Final Cut was designed to work properly in video and had already been used extensively on commercials, documentaries, and major television shows. Could the application be nudged into the spotlight of big-time feature films before Apple’s design team believed it to be ready? Murch first considered using Final Cut Pro instead of Avid on Cold Mountain because the Apple system offered him economies of scale—more workstations at less cost. Some consequences of that choice appear to promise more elegant ways of working, like editing sound in sub-frames. But choosing Final Cut for such a big project may also cause difficulties and lead to troubling work-arounds to handle so much media, get reliable cut lists, and transfer sound editing information.

  Nearly six hours after finishing their lunch together, Murch walks into Torbin Bullock’s edit room. “What are you still doing here, Walter?”

  Mix Magazine’s 20th Anniversary’s edition with an excerpt of the article written by Walter Murch.

  “Is there any way we can look up something on the Internet and also check my email?” Walter asks.

  “Sure,” Bullock says, “but I’ve got to go then, Walter. You kinda came in on my ticket, and I can’t just leave you here by yourself if I’m not here!”

  Murch quickly checks his e
mail and researches an item for the Mix magazine article. Then he and Bullock walk out to the Pixar parking lot and say their good-byes.

  June 6, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Finish the article for Mix at 2am, send it off to Tom. It is a couple hundred words too long.

  After visiting Bullock and Grahamjones at Pixar, Walter spends time the following week reading the Cold Mountain script and making his notes for Minghella.

  June 8, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Finishing Cold Mountain. Whole middle section very moving. Harder at the beginning, like the book but in a different way. Tear sting a couple of times, around the murder of Esco, Maddy, etc. I wonder how it will end. A swallow: trapped (how?) in the east part of the office, flying around, chirping. I raise the blind, open the window, and it circles seven times and then, lowering its spiral, flies out to freedom. My heart leaps. Thank you.

  This won’t be the only time Murch deals with a trapped bird in the course of Cold Mountain. It’s one of those synchronicities that seem to insinuate themselves in and around Walter—one month hence Anthony Minghella will deliver a final version of the Cold Mountain screenplay, this one dated July 9, 2002, and marked, Shooting Script *Revised.* It contains a new scene, number 18, which is entirely without dialogue: