The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  The sound team, top right, accepting Academy Awards for Apocalypse Now. Left to right: Richard Beggs, Mark Berger, and Walter Murch, 1979. Rod Steiger looks on. Leaving the Palais de Festivals after presenting Apocalypse Now Redux out of competition for the 54th Cannes Film Festival, May 11, 2001. Left to right: production designer Dean Tavoularis, Aurore Clément, Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Murch, and Sam Bottoms.

  The advantages of this system are that there is less photographic grain, and Vittorio will have greater control over the individual colours and dens-ities—plus it will never degrade. A normal film colour negative, even if it's stored very carefully at the correct temperature and humidity, is slowly eating itself alive, chemically speaking. You can only slow that process down, you can't stop it from happening.

  The hair-raising thing, though, is that to go with this three-strip process we have to recut the old negative and integrate it with the negative of the added material, and once we do that, we can never go back to the original. But Vittorio feels that the only way to make the new version work is with the three-strip process, which gives him the ability to counteract the fading that's apparent in the negative of the original film.

  There's a very good fine-grain master copy of the 1979 negative, so it won't be completely destroyed, but it's a big, irrevocable step to take.

  O: Ingmar Bergman talks somewhere about how making a film, with a large group of people, is akin to a medieval community building a cathedral.

  M: We were talking earlier about having multiple editors on a film like Apocalypse Now. But it seems to happen throughout the filmmaking process. How do you get 150 temperamental artistic types to work together on the same project, and make something that not only comes in on schedule, on budget, but that has an artistic coherence. It's simply beyond the ability of a single person, a director or a producer, to cause that to happen by any series of direct commands. It's so complicated that it just can't be done. The question is: How does it happen?

  If you've ever remodelled a house, you'll know how difficult it is even to get four or five carpenters to agree on anything: billions of people have been building houses, for thousands of years—“houseness” should almost be encoded in our DNA. And yet when you remodel, it's very common to go double over budget and schedule.

  By comparison, we've only been making films for a hundred years, and a film crew is made up of sometimes hundreds of people, yet somehow, miraculously, at the end of “only” a year, there is, one hopes, a wonderful, mysterious, powerful, coherent, two-hour-long vision that has no precedent—and the more original the vision, the more the process is amazing. And yet studios are furious with us if we go ten percent over budget and schedule!

  We tend to accept this miracle because we're right in the middle of it—it seems somehow normal—but I think in the future, hundreds of years from now, people will look back on our period a bit the way we look back at Gothic cathedrals. How did they build those cathedrals, when they didn't have computers, when they didn't have the engineering knowledge and tools that we have? How did they know exactly how to build those gigantic creations, each more marvellous than the last? It would be a challenge for us today, despite all our power and knowledge, to duplicate Chartres cathedral. And yet it was done with human muscle and, literally, horsepower. How did they dare to dream and then accomplish such a thing? These fantastic buildings seemingly came out of nowhere. Suddenly Gothic architecture was happening all over Europe at the same time. It's phenomenal what went on, and it's mysterious to us today how it was actually accomplished. It's the same with the Egyptian pyramids. I think future generations with powers we can't even imagine will look back on film-making in the twentieth century and say, How did they do all that, back then, with their ridiculously limited resources?

  SECOND CONVERSATION

  LOS ANGELES

  Walter and I met up again in October 2000 in Los Angeles on the day when he was to be fêted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work as an editor and sound designer. Various friends and colleagues were to speak that night about his work, including Francis Coppola, Saul Zaentz, George Lucas, and Rick Schmidlin.

  The theatre was packed, and the mood was affectionate. The film community was celebrating a talent that was a secret to most of the public, but not to them. Film editors and sound editors, such as Randy Thom, who had worked with and learned from him in the past, were there, as well as many old friends like writer-director Matthew Robbins.

  Our second conversation once again ranged across large areas and included many subjects—from the influence of Beethoven and Flaubert on film; to the editing techniques handed down to the West by Eisenstein as well as Kurosawa and other Asians, to the essential quality of ambiguity in any art. For two long mornings we sat huddled over coffee in the empty café of an L.A. hotel after a breakfast with Walter's wife, Aggie, wandering into discussions of

  Walter recording the perfect wind to have for future projects during a sandstorm in Egypt, near Saqqara, 1980.

  opera or Jim Morrison, lost scenes in films, early “metaphorical sound” in King Kong and in the work of Renoir and Welles and Hitchcock, the difficult art of translating novels to film, and finally, Walter's new passion—translating Curzio Malaparte's work into poetry, which he has been doing in his spare time.

  THE RIGHT TIME FOR THE INVENTION OF THE WHEEL

  O: We talked once about the people you thought had influenced the direction and the form of cinema. I think among these were Edison, naturally, but also other more unlikely names.

  M: Yes, the three fathers of film: Edison, Beethoven, Flaubert! It's an attempt to answer a tantalizing question: Why did film develop as a storytelling medium so quickly after its invention? It seems natural to us today, but there were many people a century ago, including even the inventors of film—Edison and the Lumière brothers—who didn't foresee this development. Auguste Lumière went so far as to say that cinema was “an invention without a future.”

  He could have been right—there are frequently “inventions without a future,” inventions that are ahead of their time, or outside their appropriate culture. The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities. The Greeks did the same with the steam engine. So you have to look not only at the invention itself, but the social and cultural context that surrounds it. They all have to mesh.

  O: So what would have happened if somehow film had been invented in 1789 rather than 1889? Would we have known what to do with it? Or would this imaginary eighteenth-century cinema have remained a kind of “Aztec wheel”?

  M: I rather suspect the latter. Because there were cultural movements that matured in the nineteenth century—the ideas of realism (from literature and painting) and dynamics (from music)—that are actually as much a part of cinema as the technical nature of film itself. And in 1789, realism and dynamics had not yet been born.

  This is where my idea of the Three Fathers comes in. I'm using Edison to stand for all the technical geniuses of early film—people who invented the physical side of film, its mechanical, chemical nature. But almost fifty years earlier, writers like Flaubert—using him in the same shorthand way—had invented the idea of realism.

  There were many people in France writing realistic novels in the nineteenth century—Balzac comes to mind—but Flaubert was the most conscious of what he was doing, and agonized about it the most. Closely observed reality, for its own sake, had not really been a part of the tradition of literature in the eighteenth century. Flaubert will spend a whole page evoking tiny sounds and motes of dust in an empty room because he's getting at something. He's saying there's meaning to be got out of the very closely observed events of ordinary reality. In literary, scientific and photographic terms—the invention of photography happened when he was in his teens—the ninetee
nth century, to a much greater degree than the eighteenth, was concerned with the close observation of reality. All of science in the nineteenth century was about very close observation of small things…. The nineteenth century focussed and greatly expanded these concepts. It made them central to the novel, to the symphony, to painting.

  As often happens with revolutionary ideas, they were not easily accepted at first. To some readers realism must have seemed too ordinary to be literature: if the writer was just describing what the reader could see with his own eyes, why write at all? It probably seemed very drab.

  And thirty years before Flaubert, composers like Beethoven exploited the idea of dynamics—that by aggressively expanding, contracting, and transforming the rhythmic and orchestral structure of music you could extract great emotional resonance and power.

  Composers before Beethoven had, as a rule, composed in separate movements, but every movement both defined and then explored a unified musical space. If you listen to ten seconds of the first movement of any Haydn symphony and then to another ten seconds halfway through and another ten seconds later in the same movement, they resemble one another. When you listen to the whole piece, it's as if you were moving through different rooms of a palace, going in one room, looking around, and then, closing the door and, with the next movement, going into the next room.

  Beethoven—I think because he was so enormously influenced by nature rather than architecture—threw that away. The space of each movement has tremendous variety. He will take a huge sound, one that involves all the instruments of the orchestra, and suddenly reduce it to a single instrument. Everything will come down to a single flute for a while, and then a rhythm you haven't heard before will creep up in the background, and then you go off on another tangent again—all within one movement.

  Beethoven set the agenda for the entire nineteenth century, musically. By and large, the revolution he instigated was accepted quite quickly. He was deemed a genius of music in his own time. Young people got really excited about this, and old folks thought the world was coming to an end. Carl Maria von Weber said after listening to the Seventh Symphony, “If Beethoven wants his passport to the lunatic asylum, he's just written it!”

  If you're used to the old form, this new form sounds like somebody who can't stick to a topic. It's as if a very excited person comes to sit by you while you're having a nice conversation, and then starts talking about ten different things one after another. But music for the rest of the nineteenth century followed that form, and it's a form that film is naturally suited to.

  O: So even if Beethoven and film are separated by a century, the line of influence is there.

  M: When you listen to Beethoven's music now, and hear those sudden shifts in tonality, rhythm, and musical focus, it's as though you can hear the grammar of film—cuts, dissolves, fades, superimposures, long shots, close shots—being worked out in musical terms. His music didn't stick to the previous century's more ordered architectural model of composition: it substituted an organic, wild, natural—sometimes supernatural—model.

  In any case, by the end of the nineteenth century there had been almost a hundred years of Beethoven—this dynamic representation of form—and not quite a hundred years of Flaubert's closely observed reality. And the reason film blossomed into the form we know today—we didn't experiment very long with film, it evolved rapidly—is that it happened to be the right place for these two movements—realism and dynamism—to come together and find some sort of resolution. Given its photographic nature, film is very good at closely observing reality. Because you can move the camera and move the people—and because you can edit—it's very good at the dynamic representation of “reality.” Much better than theatre, for instance, which is not very good at, say, fight scenes: when you have a big fight, you're looking at relatively small people onstage fighting each other, whereas a fight scene in a film can be simply overwhelming.

  By the end of the nineteenth century these once revolutionary ideas of realism and dynamism had been thoroughly accepted into European culture. Generations of artists, writers, and composers—as well as society at large—had by 1889 completely internalized these ways of looking, thinking, listening. The whole nineteenth century was steeped in realism and dynamism!

  And then along came film: a medium ideally suited to the dynamic representation of closely observed reality. And so these two great rivers of nineteenth-century culture—realism from literature and painting, and dynamism from music—surged together within the physical framework of film to emerge, within a few decades, in the new artistic form of cinema.

  Within fourteen years of its invention, film grammar is being determined in The Great Train Robbery—the cut, the close-up, parallel action—even while social and economic changes are helping integrate cinema into the pattern of people's daily lives, and making the whole thing pay for itself. Within another dozen years, the feature film was almost as we know it today, thanks to D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation. And then synchronous sound was added twelve years later virtually completing the revolution.

  O: And we also had the influence of nineteenth-century painters. We were essentially handed the concept of those large screenlike canvasses.

  M: When Manet exhibited his painting Olympia, there was an outcry because she was just an ordinary woman, not a mythical creature. Mythical creatures could be painted in the nude, but not ordinary women you could see walking down the street.

  O: Do you remember John Berger's essay about Géricault and the portraits he did of people in mental hospitals? He talks about how these were the first portraits done of people who were not a part of high society. Film wasn't just the shock of an art form that dramatically thrilled you—it also recorded reality graphically. And also could be socially conscious, depicting real, unhistorical people.

  M: You sometimes get a situation in chemistry, where a solution is supersatu-rated: a vessel full of water and salt, and the salt is unable to crystallize. An unbalanced situation, where it's ready to react but not quite yet, because the vessel is so polished and perfect. But if you tap the vessel, you can shock the solution into crystallizing suddenly. I think film is one of those shocks, an invention that was unanticipated, in all its glory. And the shock of it caused certain things to crystallize within the supersaturated solution of nineteenth-century culture.

  O: Even the fast-changing demographics at the end of the nineteenth century, as people moved to the cities, helped create the audience for film.

  M: Exactly! The industrialization of Europe and North America concentrated people in cities and provided an audience that didn't exist at the end of the eighteenth century. Particularly in North America, there was a large immigrant urban audience from many different countries who had no common language: cinema provided that language. That providence is a cornerstone of American cinema. It's one of the reasons American cinema proved and is still proving to be so strong all over the world: the roots of American filmmaking were in finding the common denominator that unified people from different cultural backgrounds. This was not true in other countries.

  Thomas A. Edison with his micrograph, photographed by Edward M. Dickson, 1893.

  O: And then there's the technical influence—the other filmic influence you mentioned—of the inventor Thomas Edison.

  M: What's fascinating about Edison is that he was much more interested in the sound than the picture. Towards the end of his life, when he was asked what his favourite invention was, he unhesitatingly said, “Sound recording.”

  O: This from the man who invented the lightbulb and motion pictures and thousands of other things….

  M: I think it was because sound recording was completely unanticipated. It seemed doubly miraculous. People had been toying with the idea of motion pictures, in some form, all during the nineteenth century. Electric light as well. Sound, almost by definition, was uncapturable: sound imagery was used in many poems as the epitome of the evanescent—the flower that fades as soon as it blos
soms. So it was a fantastic surprise to people that Edison could record this most ephemeral thing.

  William Dickson, on the other hand, was a young man who had emigrated from England to the United States on an almost holy quest to invent motion pictures. He had seen the implications of Muybridge's experiments in England in the late 1870s.

  Dickson badgered Edison—you can imagine the number of people who wanted to work for the great inventor in those days—until Edison finally hired him and tested his mettle by putting him to work for five years on an oresmelting idea. So Dickson, who was about twenty-six, went through a five-year sorcerer's apprenticeship, finally devising a way to economically extract bismuth from raw ore.

  Eventually Edison relented, and they started to work on motion pictures—Edison's rationale was that people might be interested to see the faces of the people who sang on his records. Cinema began as a music video! That was about the extent of its appeal, as far as he was concerned. Whereas Dickson was clairvoyant about the potential of motion pictures. He wrote a book in 1895, which has been reprinted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it's astonishing how many of his predictions have come to pass.

  O: When I first saw you working on Apocalypse Now Redux, you were also working on an old piece of film by Edison and Dickson. The project reminded me of an archaeological dig, because I think you were reconstructing one of the earliest pieces of film that was married to sound.