The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  WILL ARD'S GAZE

  O: I'm very aware, watching Apocalypse Now, how much the characters seem to look directly at us—directly into the camera. In the scene where Willard receives his order from the general to search out Kurtz and kill him, for instance, all the other characters—the general, the CIA agent, the aide-decamp—look directly into the camera.

  M: It's a rule, of course, that normally you never allow anyone to look into the camera unless you want to “break the frame” and have the characters directly address the audience, usually for laughs.

  Yet in Apocalypse Now, you're right, actors look into the camera quite often and it seems to integrate effortlessly into the flow of the film. The curious thing is that I've never read or heard anyone talk about it—it's never referred to in any studies about the film, even though it breaks one of the cardinal rules of filmmaking. In that briefing scene where Willard gets his mission, the characters are looking straight at the camera when they talk to Willard. If they are doing that, the mathematically correct thing would be to have Willard looking at the camera too. Instead he's looking to the left side of the lens, which is correct according to conventional film grammar. Yet you never feel the general is looking at the audience: you believe he's looking at Willard. But when Willard finally does look at the camera, at the end of the scene, you feel he's looking at us—at the audience—and thinking: Can you believe this?

  I guess it has to do with the intense subjectivity of the film: the fact that Willard is the eyes and ears through which we comprehend this war, and through whose sensibilities the war is going to be filtered. It's logical, all of that, but it's still amazing that it works as effortlessly as it does.

  O: How conscious were you of that, when you were cutting the film? Obviously you were conscious of it, but was it something that Coppola had worked out before shooting? Was that something the two of you discussed?

  M: It's funny, it was never discussed.

  O: Even during the editing process?

  M: No. That was the material. There was no alternative.

  O: That scene was shot in only that way?

  M: They didn't do alternate takes, looking to one side or the other. When the actors talked to Willard, they looked right into the camera.

  On Editing Actorsby Walter Murch

  The editor has a unique relationship with the actors. I try never to go on to the set to see the actors out of costume or out of character—and also just not to see the set. I only want to see what there is on the screen. Ultimately, that's all the audience is ever going to see. Everyone else working on the film at that stage is party to everything going on around the filmed scene: how cold it was when that scene was shot; who was mad at whom; who is in love with whom; how quickly something was done; what was standing just to the left of the frame. A director particularly has to be careful that those things don't exert a hidden influence on the construction of the film. But the editor, who also has an influence on the way the film is constructed, can (and should, in my view) remain ignorant of all that stuff—in order to find value where others might not see value, and on the other hand to diminish the value of certain things that other people see as too important. It's one of the crucial functions of the editor. To take, as far as it is possible to take, the view of the audience, who is seeing the film without any knowledge of all the things that went into its construction.

  In the course of editing, you look at all the material for the scene, over and over again. Your decisions about timing, about where to cut a certain shot and what shot to go to next, all those things, are dependent on an intuitive understanding of the actors. You have to have, and you do acquire, a deep, deep knowledge of the actors. On a very limited bandwidth, you know certain things about them better than they do, and probably better than anyone else on earth does. You see them forwards, backwards, at twenty-four frames per second, at forty-eight frames a second, over and over and over again. You are studying them the way a sculptor studies a piece of marble before deciding to chisel it—here. So I have to know all the hidden veins and strengths and weaknesses of the rock that I'm working with, in order to know where best to put the chisel.

  It's disconcerting for me to actually meet an actor in the flesh. For the most part, they have no idea who I am—I'm just a person who worked on the film. There's a vague kind of distraction that I detect in their gaze. On the other hand, I know them better than anyone! But it's only a very narrow spectrum; there are whole areas of their personality that I have absolutely no knowledge of. But, nonetheless, when I meet an actor, the current is flowing in one direction only. It's interesting up to a point, but it's so tricky for me after a while that I excuse myself….

  From a conversation between Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje, hosted by Muriel (Aggie) Murch, on the art of editing in film and literature broadcast on KPFA, Berkeley, California, 1997.

  THE NEW SCENES

  O: In re-editing the film, you're not just adding new sequences but moving some really well-known scenes to different locations in the plot. And from what I've seen, this is changing the emotional colouring in surprising ways. The water-skiing scene, for example, happened much earlier in the 1979 version. By moving it later, there's now an earned delirium and joy, so it's more powerful. It's earned R&R!

  M: Yes, it used to come before the Kilgore—Robert Duvall—sequences. Now we've moved it to where it was in the script, which is much later, after the Playboy Bunny show. In its original placement the scene said, in effect, “This boat, this crew is, already and always, kind of wild and crazy.” The audience is led to believe this sort of thing must happen all the time with these guys. In this new version you've survived the Kilgore madness, you've been through the Tiger in the Jungle, through the Playboy show and Hau Phat supply depot—where Clean buys the radio that plays “Satisfaction” and Chef buys his Playboy magazine with Miss December on the cover. And although we don't see it, somehow Kilgore's surfboard gets exchanged for the water skis. In this new version you see the progression of the crew from order to chaos. There's a smoother arc, which helps reduce the episodic feel of the film.

  O: What most alters everything for me, perhaps, is the scene we now have where Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard and gets into the boat, laughing like a kid. He's a teenager. It's his happiest moment in this story. So, suddenly, everything else in our portrait of him gets altered.

  M: How did they promote Ninotchka? “Garbo Laughs!” We could do the same thing here: “Willard Laughs!”

  O: What you're recutting on the Avid now is just before the new medevac scene … right?

  M: Yes. In this sequence Willard is on the boat reading Kurtz's letter to his son, while the boat passes a burning helicopter and trees with bodies hanging from them. And you hear Chief saying, very low, “Alpha Tango … Request dust-off. Three, maybe four KIAs [killed in action]. Over.” He wants somebody to come in and get the bodies out.

  What we're going to do now is add some extra dialogue, Chief repeating, “Alpha—do you read me? Over,” to give the idea that he's not getting through. Something's wrong upriver.

  We will dissolve from the burning helicopter to this new scene of the boat arriving at the medevac station in the rain. And in addition to the dialogue that was originally shot, there will be some extra lines referring to Chief's earlier request for a dust-off. But the soldiers he's talking to don't seem to give a damn. All this extra dialogue will have to be recorded, so we're going to have to find Albert Hall, the actor who played Chief, and bring him into the studio twenty-four years after he originally played the scene.

  In a new scene from Redux: in the Playboy helicopter, Fred Forrest as Chef gets to meet his dream centerfold, Colleen Camp.

  The burning helicopter—which before was just a passing event—is now the thing that causes the boat to stop at the medevac station, where we discover that the impresario Bill Graham—played by himself—and the three Playboy Bunnies are also stranded. Willard negotiates with Graham, who needs fuel for hi
s own helicopter. The problem was that the negotiation was never filmed—a typhoon hit with full strength on that day and they had to abandon filming for a month or so.

  Used in Redux: the typhoon beginning to hit the set of the medevac camp. Coppola filmed in the rain, creating a sense of dismal hopelessness that also affected the sex scene that follows.

  O: That missing scene with Bill Graham that was never shot, how do you deal with that?

  M: We're treating the moment elliptically. You see Willard wandering through the desolate camp, and we intercut his wandering with a fight that's beginning among the crew of the boat. Then Willard is beckoned into one of the tents by Bill Graham. The fight escalates, Willard returns, stops the fight, and tells them about the deal he's made: the crew can spend a couple of hours with the girls in exchange for fuel.

  O: That'll solve it?

  M: I hope so! The audience will see the results of the missing scene rather than the scene itself. Francis has just viewed this section and thinks it's worthwhile trying to put it in.

  THE DEAD FRENCH

  O: I find the addition of the French plantation scene in the new version the most remarkable. The audience is left wondering whether the characters there are real, or whether the gunboat is meeting ghosts. Why wasn't the scene included in the original film?

  M: Probably the trickiest thing in this version of Apocalypse Now has been the French plantation sequence and how to get into it—even trickier, how do we get out of it? It was something that completely foxed us back in 1978. Structurally, the scene always happened too late in the film: once the boat passed beyond the nightmare of the sampan massacre and Do Lung Bridge, it seemed to enter another world, and there wasn't the physical, temporal, or even psychic space for a dinner-table discussion about the French involvement in Vietnam in the early 1950s. The viewer needed to arrive at the Kurtz compound as quickly as possible.

  We tried many different approaches—shortening the scene, putting it earlier in the film—but nothing worked. An important element of the French plantation is the burial of Clean—Larry Fishburne—who has just been killed in a firefight, the first crew member to die. If the scene came earlier, the burial would have to be eliminated. But burying Clean is one of the reasons for the boat to come to shore. It was a dilemma.

  At any rate, the scene lingered in the film like an invalid, getting shorter and shorter, until finally we cut it out completely. The unavoidable side effect of this decision was that Clean's body just disappears. In the original version of the film you never know what happened to him, which is a little strange, and out of keeping with Chief's obvious grief at losing someone who was like a son to him.

  Frames of the French plantation from the original and later shoot; only the later, ghostly dock was used in Redux.

  Back in 1978, I had never seen any of the raw material for the French plantation since my responsibilities ended halfway through the film, with the sampan massacre. When I started looking at it, I discovered that Francis had shot the approach to the plantation in two different ways. In the original shoot, the French were very proper, and they came down to the dock, which was in immaculate condition, and formally introduced themselves to Willard and the crew.

  Later, Francis restaged the boat's approach with the dock in ruins, and with the French soldiers materializing, bedraggled, out of a swirling mist, as if they were ghosts. I believe Francis was responding, even at that stage of shooting, to the awkward problem that the French can't quite be real people, so far upriver, so late in the film. Where do they get supplies, how do they get in and out, how do they sell their rubber?

  All this was a revelation to me.

  So I screened the material for both versions of the approach, and it seemed that the ruined, ghostly version was probably the best path to take.

  But there was a problem waiting for me: the departure from the French plantation had been shot only once and showed the dock in its pre-ruined state. There was no departure with a ruined dock. You couldn't arrive in ruins and depart with the dock all fixed up! So if we used the ruined-dock material to get into the sequence, I couldn't get out.

  Then, in combing through the raw material, I found a shot with Martin Sheen—Willard—and Aurore Clément where she gets out of bed, undresses, and closes the mosquito netting all around the bed. There was something beautifully evocative about seeing her silhouetted against the mosquito netting, and I thought, She looks like a ghost, and the mosquito netting looks like fog.

  It was then that I made the connection. If we began the French plantation later, if we let Chief's grief for Clean's death take us into the fog that overwhelms the boat, when the fog begins to lift, there are the ruins of the plantation, as if Willard and the crew had gone back in time. Then the film could get into what Francis described as the Buñuel-like ghostliness of the dinner discussion, people stuck forever in the political passions of the early 1950s, which were a mirror image of the American involvement in Vietnam fifteen years later.

  In Redux at the plantation, Aurore Clément gets out of bed with Willard, closes the mosquito netting, and becomes a disembodied silhouette.

  O: And ghostliness is created at the end of the sequence by the simple physical barrier of that mosquito net between Aurore Clément's character and Willard. A startling moment.

  M: What originally happened next is that Willard grabbed her and pulled her through the mosquito netting, they made love, and—as in the script—you found them the next morning. But in this version the image of Aurore dissolves away and you're left with the disembodied silhouette of this woman, hovering against a milky-white background. Then you realize you're back on the boat, where you started.

  When I discovered that transition, which was not intended in the script, something unlocked for me. I felt that I was beginning to grasp the language of this new version.

  APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX

  O: At what stage will you be able to tell if all these additions blend into an organic whole?

  M: What I haven't done yet is look at all the additional scenes within the framework of the complete film, although I've done it in thirty-minute sections. But Francis and I haven't run the film from the beginning to the end to see what effect all this has. And to get a greater sense of how the themes of the film have been building up. When I watch a scene in the context of the whole work, it may appear just the opposite of how it seemed when I saw it in isolation. But it's already clear that this is the funny, sexy, political version of Apocalypse Now.Willard has a romantic interlude at the French plantation. Lance and Chef have theirs at the medevac station. There are political arguments about the French involvement in Vietnam, so similar to ours. And Kurtz questions the accuracy of how the war is being reported back home.

  With Apocalypse Now Redux, we're grafting these branches onto a tree that already had an organic, balanced structure. Knowing that we're changing the organism, we're trying not to do anything toxic to it, and to keep everything in some kind of balance. At this point, I don't know what the result will be. I have some intuitions, but my mind is completely open.

  O: What happens next?

  M: Once we have the sequence of scenes in something like the final order, we can begin to get the soundtrack prepared for the final mix. This alone is terrifying enough: we have to go back to the original masters and find a way to reweave the fabric of the sound—so not only will the transitions into and out of the new material be perfectly undetectable but also the quality of the sound of the new sections will coexist on friendly terms, both artistically and technically, with the work that we did twenty-one years ago, which is not being changed.

  Luckily, some of the crew who worked on the film back then are constructing the new soundtrack: Michael Kirchberger and George Berndt—and of course me—so there's enough of what you might call “tribal knowledge” to get us through some of the potentially difficult rapids.

  One peculiarity that we confronted almost immediately was that none of the original sound synced up
with the image. This was a problem back in 1977, and the “fix-it” solution then was to remove one frame every thirty seconds to keep the sound from drifting slowly ahead of the picture. On short takes, less than a minute, it would hardly be noticeable, but Francis shot many ten-minute takes. Fortunately, what we have now that we didn't have then is a digital tool-kit for such problems: we can dial in the amount of drift and compensate for it automatically. I don't know why the problem was never rectified—I think it had something to do with the humidity and the Technovision cameras that Vittorio Storaro had brought with him from Italy.

  We are also going to have to ask Marty Sheen, Robert Duvall, Albert Hall, and Sam Bottoms—who played Lance—to come back into the studio and re-record some of the dialogue from the scenes they shot back in 1976, twenty-four years ago. I don't think that's ever happened on a film before.

  O: How will the original footage and newly added footage live together?

  M: Vittorio Storaro hopes to print the new version using the Technicolor “three-strip” process. This is how all Technicolor films were made until the mid-1970s, when the process was abandoned because it was too labour-intensive. Now the old technology has been revived in a computer-controlled version. So the printing of the final film will actually be a dye-transfer process, somewhat similar to the way pictures are printed in magazines. Even though it's film, it's not a photographic process.