The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  For instance, in Return to Oz, the identity of Ozma: Who is this ambiguous character you see at the beginning of the film, and who then presumably dies and goes to the heaven that is Oz? Is she a real person? Or is she an abstract Oz creature, who projected herself into the dimension of the real, in order to influence certain events?

  Well, right at the beginning of writing the script, my notes say, Who is Ozma? How am I going to seize on to that character? Because a lot of things depended on that: the casting and how I would choose to shoot it, the directing, everything. Years later, I was talking to David Shire, who was composing the music, about the themes—what about the theme for Ozma? And he said, Who is she? I felt myself stuck. Even though I'd answered the question in many guises, I hadn't answered it in musical terms. So here was the problem restating itself.

  Princess Ozma of Oz, a key figure in the later books of L. Frank Baum, whom Dorothy restores as ruler of the Emerald City.

  I went back to my notebooks, and sure enough, the very first note was: Who is Ozma? I felt my heart sink, thinking, Oh my God! I've gone through this whole process, and the very first question I asked, I can't answer! But then I read the next paragraph, which was a laying out of the issues that were present in the book, in which Ozma was not a girl but a boy who turned into a girl, which was something I'd decided not to follow. I suddenly realized how far I had come. In fact, I had solved, had answered, the persistent question at each stage. But it was restating itself.

  So probably, for that film, that question—Who is Ozma?—is given to the audience to answer. The film doesn't answer it. It doesn't say she is a real person who died and went to heaven; nor does it say she's a person from another dimension, who came into this dimension in order to bring Dorothy back with her to save Oz. The music perhaps suggests the latter, because Ozma's theme is a sort of musical inversion on Dorothy's theme. The music says maybe she's a projection of some aspect of Dorothy. But maybe it's the opposite.

  O: Some years ago I was reading an article by Donald Richie, about the difference between Eastern and Western film, or art. He was distinguishing between Eisenstein and, say, Kurosawa, and how they work, and how when Eisenstein edits he builds the scene, while Kurosawa erases and removes. The scene is revealed in a Kurosawa film, whereas in Eisenstein or in the Western tradition you're building a scene. Richie points out that the master shot—the shot that shows us the choreography of the whole scene—is traditionally the essential Western setup, the base, whereas in Japanese film, you can pick a small fragment of the corner of a table and that particular fragment can be used to suggest the whole scene…. As an editor, do you feel this is a real distinction? Do we, in the West, tend to work only with the Eisenstein method?

  M: First of all, remember that film is just over one hundred years old. The discovery of editing was in 1903. It has not yet reached its century mark. And this early on in the development of a new art form you would expect national or regional characteristics to influence the grammar of film, especially in Russia. There was a huge dialectical influence, from Kant to Hegel and Marx, and then Eisenstein and others found a way to show Marxian dialectics—opposition and synthesis—in cinema. In the Soviet Union, cinema was seen to be the art that most clearly showed the superiority of Marxian dialectics in its very essence. The Communists naturally pushed that aspect of it, the editing, very hard.

  We who are not Marxian always worked with those elements but didn't push them so hard. Yet as time has gone on, over the last three or four generations of filmmakers, there's inevitably been a coming together of regional characteristics. We are hungry to find out whatever works.

  Akira Kurosawa directing: a small fragment had to suggest a whole scene. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein adjusting a knight's robe during the filming of the 1938 classic Alexander Nevsky.

  I think Richie's idea about Eastern and Western film is true. Maybe in the West—because we have a long tradition of the master scene, ever since the invention of three-dimensional perspective at the beginning of the Renaissance—we do tend to think the idea of figures in three-dimensional space is tremendously important. So it's natural that in cinema we would go in that direction first. While in Japan and China, the idea of relatively flat figures in a two-dimensional frame, and an emphasis on details within that frame until they have a huge power, is natural to the way their art has developed. In certain Chinese paintings, the canvas is left bare where there is supposed to be sky….

  TWO RUMOURS

  O: I heard a rumour that you set up some carillon bell sounds in Times Square, coming out of the covered sewer grates. Is this true?

  M: Fascinating! I wish it were. But no.

  O: Perhaps you should do it….

  M: I did think of an experiment which would be fascinating to do. To record the bell tone—the carillon, in fact—of San Francisco Bay. Every body of water—it doesn't matter whether it's a puddle or Lake Superior—has what they call a seiche tone. Even if you can't see it, the water is vibrating, undulating at a resonant frequency that is keyed to the size of the body of water. San Francisco Bay I think has a seiche tone of one hour and forty-three minutes. A wave will cross the bay and then come back in that time period. These are very large waves, undetectable by our normal senses.

  On top of that are the waves—the chop—that we can see, and then little micro-waves that are just part of the texture of the water. If you set up a pole at some point in the bay, and had a laser beam that reflected off the surface of the water and continuously measured the distance between the tip of the beam and the surface of the water, you would be plotting a series of curves. You could print that out as a long series of wave forms, like the record of an earthquake seismograph. One of the wave forms would be this big seiche tone, which would vary over a long period of time, hours. Others would be quicker and more obvious.

  Now you can take that wave form and speed it up and render it audible as a series of tones. I don't know what it would sound like, but the bay would have a (hums) tone. Then superimposed on that would be all these other tones of the smaller and smaller waves. It would be some kind of music.

  O: That's something you could do for the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

  M: Actually, the Exploratorium in San Francisco would be a good place….

  O: The other odd story I remember about you was that you once imitated a dog in a film's soundtrack.

  M: (Laughs) It happened in Return to Oz. I was shooting the scene where Dorothy is rescued, at the very end of the film. She was caught in a flood earlier in the film, and at the end is still alive in the willows by the side of the river. Of course, she has really just come back from Oz. And you hear in the distance a dog bark. When I was shooting that, I was directing Fairuza Balk, who was playing Dorothy, and to cue her to wake up, I barked like her dog, Toto.

  O: And that's in the film now?

  M: (Barks!) Later, when we were assembling the film, that was one of the sounds the editors used in the track simply because it was there and it sounded okay. But it was still there when we were doing the mix for the previews. I asked, Aren't we going to change this dog-bark? The editors said, What do you mean? I said, Well, that's me! And they said, What? We thought it was the dog! So then they began a search for dog-barks. We tried many different versions, but in the end nothing sounded better, in some mysterious way, than that impromptu dog-bark.

  O: I remember that while I was writing The English Patient, I needed to have a drawing of a dovecote in a letter that Hana writes. I'd once seen a dovecote in France, so I did a quick, five-second drawing, assuming I'd get somebody else to do a proper drawing later. The manuscript went off to Knopf, and they insisted on using my drawing, saying, Actually, that's just the kind of thing you'd find in a letter! I was shocked, because it was quite childish. And it's a bit embarrassing to see it still there in foreign editions.

  DEVIL'S WORK

  O: One of the things you claim is that it was cartoons, as well as stop-motion films such as King
Kong, that caused a sudden leap in the creative use of sound in the 1930s. How did that happen, and why?

  M: Well, it was a practical problem. Since animation is shot frame by frame, whether drawings like Mickey Mouse or sculpted animals like King Kong, it's impossible to have any sound that comes with them. You have to create the soundtrack, which both completes and creates them as three-dimensional beings, since they are not dimensional beings in themselves. One of the things that helps the audience in the suspension of disbelief is that the animated characters do make sound—therefore they must be real, in some way.

  O: And this leads to a fictionalizing of sound….

  M: Exactly. Because there is no sound to begin with, you, the creator, are free to imagine anything. If we're filming a staged play, people speak, they move about, they pick up glasses, they put them down, they close doors, so they automatically have a physical presence and also generate their own sounds. With live-action films it was not immediately obvious that you had to do anything other than simply capture those very sounds. With animated films you have to create something that gives a sound where none was present. With fantasy films like The Wizard of Oz you have to do the opposite, remove what feels like the wrong sound and put something else in its place. I think those early cartoons, which were seen as not very serious things, planted a seed that sound could be used in metaphorical ways.

  O: Who were the early filmmakers who picked up on this?

  M: Jean Renoir and René Clair in France. Cecil B. deMille in the United States. Fritz Lang in Germany. Renoir in particular was extremely interested in realisticsound. He went so far in one direction that he almost came around the other side. There's a wonderful quote by him where he says that dubbing—replacing the original sound with something else—is an invention of the devil and that if such a thing had been possible in the thirteenth century, the practitioners would have been burned at the stake for preaching the duality of the soul!

  Renoir felt that a person's voice was an expression of that person's soul, and that to fool around with it in any way was to do the devil's work. The devil is frequently represented as having a voice at odds with what you see. In The Exorcist, the voice that the young girl speaks with is not her own voice. This idea of devilry and duality and dubbing, there's something to be explored there….

  King Kong was a stage in the great creative leap in sound in the 1930s.

  Renoir was also the first person, by his own account, to record the sound of a toilet flushing and put it in a film by taking a microphone and cable from the sound department, going down the hall to the toilet, and recording the flush. This was something no one had thought of before. It was for a film called On purge bébé—that's “Let's give baby an enema”—which was originally a stage farce, and Renoir's first commercial hit.

  O: There's some organization in North America that gives an award for the best nature recording every year. One year there was a wonderful winner—a man won the award for recording flies buzzing within a piece of cowshit.

  M: Hmmm …

  O: You said Hitchcock also was someone who used sound in a new, imaginative way—something I'm not very conscious of when I see one of his films. I'm much more aware of his visual inventiveness.

  M: There is a tremendous use of sound in Hitchcock.

  There's the famous moment—I think it's in The 39 Steps—when a woman is about to scream and the film cuts to a tunnel, matching the woman's open mouth, and a train emerges with a screaming whistle. At the moment when you would expect one thing, something else is put in its place.

  There's also the great use of dialogue distortion in his early film Blackmail, where the heroine, who the night before has killed someone with a knife, comes down to breakfast with her parents and all the words are muffled except for “knife”—as when her father says something like, “Please pass the butter knife.”It's one of the first uses of sound to get at an inner state of mind.

  Orson Welles during one of his famous War of the Worldsbroadcasts.

  O: And then there was Orson Welles….

  M: He came from a highly developed theatre and radio background, where he had pushed sound as far as it could go at that time. Think of the famous use of silence in his dramatization of The War of the Worlds. So when he came to film, in the early forties, he brought with him his whole bag of tricks to simulate space with sound. Generally, in Hollywood, such things had not seemed necessary, because you already have the visual representation: simply by turning the camera on a scene, you are representing a spatial reality. In radio, you have to evoke everything through sound. Welles found that his radio techniques transposed quite well to film, and that he could combine the aesthetics of the radio play and the cinema. That's one of the signal contributions of his first film, Citizen Kane.

  O: So, coming from radio—where he had had to invent terror, invent that imaginary visual landscape of a rainy street or an empty echoing stadium to create an essential atmosphere for the listener—he was using sound differently. He knew he could manipulate and exaggerate it to have an effect. The soundtrack didn't have to be just a “recording.” When the dying Kane whispers, “Rosebud,” you feel and witness the emotion of that word going through the whole house….

  M: Yes. Exactly.

  O: I haven't seen the film for a while, but is that a very conscious thing all the way through the film, that selective extravagance of sound?

  M: Yes.

  O: The focussing on sound as a kind of light.

  M: It's very much like light. One of the fascinating things for me in mixing is that what we do with the palette of sound—what sounds we choose to emphasize, how we put a spatial ambience around those sounds, what we choose to eliminate—is very much equivalent to what the director of photography does with light. By highlighting the planes of a face, then making the background go darker and slightly out of focus, and then putting a light over there to pick out the ring that's on the table, which otherwise you wouldn't see, the director of photography is directing the eye, in a painterly way, emphasizing certain things, de-emphasizing certain others. But that is fixed at the time of shooting, there's not much you can do later to change it.

  Who knows, now that we're entering this new age of digital manipulation, these kinds of things may become more and more possible—to change the lighting of a scene later on, depending on how the scene functions in the film.

  We already have that ability in sound—by the placement of sound or by regulating how loud it is, we can change the “lighting” of a scene. Well, through sound, we can make the scene “darker,” for instance, so that the atmosphere behind the scene will have the same emotional effect on an audience as if it had been shot in a darker light.

  What is most present in my mind when I'm mixing is that concept of lighting, both physically—picking things out in the frame that are important or that give you a greater sense of actually being there with the characters—and emotionally, to emphasize certain story elements.

  The more you get into the emotional end of things, the more you draw upon the metaphoric use of sound. Reality can only go so far and then you have to go beyond reality, beyond the frame. I've always found that I've underestimated how far I can push. It's rare that I put a sound to a film and it says, “Oops, no, that goes too far!” Usually it says, “No, do more!”

  O: Have you done that to specific scenes in a film? Given them that darkness?

  M: Yes … I'm trying to think of a good example. It's actually easier to darken things than it is to lighten them.

  O: I suppose something like The Talented Mr. Ripley—which begins as a sundappled film….

  M: The sound designer Randy Thom has written some interesting things about exactly this subject, how sound can easily disorient, can depress, can darken, can render more edgy. Alan Splet's ominous and crushing industrial atmospheres in Eraserhead are probably the most outstanding example. On the other hand, it's not immediately obvious how sound can lighten things. Birdsong sometimes does
. But that's a cliché.

  It may have something to do with the fact that the dreams we have are not evenly divided between happy and sad. Most dreams are neutral, or mysterious and enigmatic, or frightening. Only rarely do you wake up thinking, What a happy dream that was! It says something about the function of a dreaming mind that it's there not to render you happy but to unsettle, reexamining or foreshadowing events in a strange, talismanic way. I don't know whether the two things are related at all, but there is enough similarity between films and dreams that there might be something to it….

  O: I recall you talking about how you created the sound of the desert in The English Patient. You said the real desert does not give good soundtrack.

  M: The desert is a vast space. When you're there, the feeling it evokes is psychic as well as physical. The problem is that if you record the actual sound that goes with that space, it has nothing to do with the emotion of being there. In fact it's a very empty, sterile sound. You hear people's voices, clearly, but there's nothing else, unless there is a wind of some kind. So the trick in The English Patient was to evoke, with sound, a space that is silent. We did it by adding insectlike sounds that, realistically, would probably not be there. There was a whole palette of little clicks and presences that came from insects.

  Also tiny sounds—as tiny as we could get—of grains of sand rubbing against each other, little things that would not record even if you had a microphone there—like those flies buzzing in the manure. We took those tiny things and made a fabric out of them.