The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  M: Nothing. Nothing. That was the remarkable thing. The studio had allowed him to see it only once, without stopping. His fifty-eight-page memo is the result of that one screening of the film, when he saw new scenes he'd never written and never shot that had been added to the film.

  Put yourself in his place—being forced to look at even one new scene written by somebody else and directed by somebody else, inserted into your film— it would be so devastating. But there were four new long scenes, so it was amazing that he was able to suppress that disorientation and keep writing, and that night generate a fifty-eight-page memo.

  When I started working on the project, I never expected that we could do everything he wanted. In my experience even if you have all the necessary resources, you're lucky if seventy-five percent of the ideas pan out—a good rate of success for anybody's notes about a film. But in this case every single one made the film better. Although there were some notes that mystified me, initially. It was only after I'd completed the work, and seen them within the context of the whole film, that I realized what Welles was after.

  O: Like what?

  M: The best example of this is the seemingly trivial removal of a close-up of Quinlan's sidekick, Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia. In the memo, Welles says that he wanted it removed “because of a mistaken use of the wide angle lens which distorts Menzies's face grotesquely. There is no use upsetting the audience this way. The scene played all right without this weird close-up.” As I read that, I thought, What is he up to here? Welles used that same lens quite often in the film! But at that point my job was just to try to do what he said.

  The close-up in question occurs in a scene between Vargas and Menzies, at the crucial moment where Vargas has confronted Menzies with evidence of Quinlan's duplicity. Menzies, who has been standing, collapses, and his agony is revealed in this close-up. Almost instantly, he jumps back to his feet and defends Quinlan, but the damage has been done: Vargas has seen him acknowledge the truth, and—just as important—Menzies has seen Vargas see this. As a result, everything that Menzies does in the last half-hour of the film is done under duress: not authentically, because he believes it to be best, but because he must, having revealed his weakness to Vargas. Menzies has a metaphorical leash around his neck.

  Another section of Welles's memo discussing the studio's editing.

  By cutting out this close-up, we also cut the leash. He never collapses in the scene with Vargas, continuing to defend his boss to the end. But we—not Vargas—see the doubt and anguish on his face. Vargas does not see it because of the staging of the scene.

  Everything that Menzies does from that moment on—and he plays a crucial role in the undoing of his boss—is done authentically: he chooses to do it, rather than being coerced. This increases the standing of Menzies's character in the film, raising it to a level of equality with Vargas and Quinlan. Welles has elsewhere described Touch of Evil as a story of love and betrayal between two men, Menzies and his boss Quinlan. The removal of Menzies's close-up plays a significant part in realizing this vision for the film.

  It's interesting that in the memo Welles doesn't get into any of the underlying reasons for making this change. Remember, he was writing to his enemy, the head of the studio. If he were to admit that he made a mistake in the conception of the scene, it would have given the studio more power over him. So he hides his real reason in a technical fog, blaming it on the use of the wrong lens.

  There are frequently moments like these in the making of films, where huge issues of character and story are decided by the inclusion—or not—of a single shot that reverberates throughout the film.

  Well, at the time the memo didn't achieve its ends. Welles didn't get what he wanted. But forty years later we were able to do everything that he asked. It's not a completely different film, it's a more fully realized version of itself, which is what a good film should be.

  O: One likes to think he would be very pleased right now.

  M: I hope so. He once said in an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma: “For my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect: it's the aspect. The notion of ‘directing' a film is the invention of critics like you [Cahiers du Cinéma]. It isn't an art, or at best it's an art only one minute a day. That minute is terribly crucial, but it occurs very rarely. The only time one is able to exercise control over the film is in the editing. The images themselves are not sufficient. They're very important, but they're only images. What's essential is the duration of each image and that which follows each image: the whole eloquence of cinema is that it's achieved in the editing room.”

  THE WRONG ECHO

  O: The climax of Touch of Evil, using a microphone instead of a rifle to hunt down the guilty, is also ingenious….

  M: Kind of like the opening of The Conversation …

  O: The microphone as a potent weapon.

  M: In that denouement of Touch of Evil, Welles worked out something that's very close to my heart because it's so similar to the beginning of The Conversation—namely, to make the resolution of the story depend on different shadings and perspectives of sound.

  Quinlan and Menzies are walking through this maze of oil derricks, at night, and—unknown to Quinlan—Menzies is wired for sound with a radio mike hidden under his jacket. Some distance away, Vargas is following them with a radio receiver, picking up their conversation, hoping that Quinlan will incriminate himself.

  In Touch of Evil, Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan and Joseph Calleia as Sgt. Pete Menzies walk on the bridge. Charlton Heston, as Mike Vargas, center, stalks them underneath; right, Vargas with his tape recorder, using “a microphone instead of a gun to hunt down the guilty … ”; far right,Vargas finds his wife, Susie, in jail, drugged and accused of murder.

  When you're close to Quinlan and Menzies, they sound normal. When you're with Vargas and his tape recorder, they sound distorted, like voices over a telephone. And when you are far away from both the hunter and the hunted, you hear the voices in a sort of echoey field of sound. It's all very dynamic, with no musical accompaniment.

  This attention to detail pays off fantastically well when Quinlan and Menzies walk over a bridge and Vargas is forced to go under one of the archways of the bridge to stay close to them. And now Quinlan's recorded voice, heard over the tape recorder, echoes within the archway. Quinlan suddenly stops, suspicious—he hears his own voice with the wrong echo on it. And he begins to work out what's happening—that his buddy Menzies is carrying a hidden microphone and his enemy Vargas must be under the bridge with a recorder.

  So that echo—that particular quality of sound—causes the plot to unravel: Quinlan accuses Menzies, there is a struggle, Menzies is shot, then Quinlan goes after Vargas, and then is shot himself by the dying Menzies. Welles hung the whole ending of the film on the ability of the people in it, and the audience, to understand a subtle nuance with the sound. That it's the wrong echo. It's fantastic!

  O: Did you talk to people like Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston, or anyone else who worked with Welles?

  M: We talked to them afterwards, when the work was done, and we screened the film for them. Janet Leigh was very emotional—it brought everything back to her, what they had all set out to do so idealistically at the beginning.

  During the editing we did talk to Ernie Nims, who was the head of post-production at Universal in 1958. He had been an editor for Welles on a film called The Stranger, made in 1946, and had a good relationship with him.

  The studio had told us that everyone associated with the film was dead, but Rick Schmidlin, very much the detective, had a hunch and called up Information in Los Angeles, asking for Ernie Nims. Nothing in the 213 area code, or 818, but he struck gold in 310. “Is this Ernie Nims?” “Yes.” “Are you the Ernie Nims who was head of postproduction at Universal?” “That's me!” “Did you work with Orson Welles?”“Orson Welles! The only genius I ever worked for. He was twenty years ahead of his time!”

  For Ernie, all the trouble t
hat Welles got into came from that: His thinking was too advanced for the times.

  Ernie was eighty-nine years old when we talked to him, and it turned out he had stashed away in his attic a number of documents relating to the film that were a great help to us: Welles's notes on the use of sound, which weren't part of the fifty-eight-page memo. Also memos that Welles had written to Ernie about their strategy for the film, how to outwit the studio. I have a suspicion that it was thanks to Ernie's intervention that the original version of Touch of Evil was as good as it was. Given the animosity with Ed Muhl, the old studio head, things could have been much worse.

  On another hunch, Rick looked up Ed Muhl and found him alive and kicking in the 818 area code. He was over ninety and completely unrepentant. He felt that Welles was a poseur who never made a film that earned any money.

  O: In a way Welles is a touchstone not just for great originality but an example of how and where a young director can go wrong.

  M: Absolutely. His life says, Even if you're only twenty-five you can do this, because I made Citizen Kane when I was twenty-five. It is possible. That's a great encouragement to young people. On the other hand, his life was so starcrossed, the struggle so played out in public view for so long, that you can read it as a cautionary tale: Here's how to succeed, but here are the traps to avoid.

  In the end, I'd say his presence as an iconic figure is due not only to his successes but also to his failures—and to the particular kinds of successes and failures they were.

  THE MOST CHARACTERISTIC ANGLE

  O: You tell the story about Orson Welles pretending the wrong lens had been used in Touch of Evil. As an editor, when you receive footage, how much of an issue is the choice of lens used during filming? Does the director discuss such technical matters with you? Or are these the kinds of considerations you become aware of only when you cut the film?

  M: The choice of lens is crucial. There's a chemistry between each actor and a certain lens. That's a reason for shooting makeup and costume tests with the principal actors before you start the actual production. One of the things we're doing is studying the chemistry between the angle of the lens and the planarity of the actor's face.

  Certain actors will look most themselves if they're photographed with a certain lens at a certain distance. It has something to do with the translation of a three-dimensional object—the human face—into a two-dimensional photograph. We've all known people who look better in person than they do in photographs, and vice versa: people who look ordinary in real life and intriguing in photographs. This is the same kind of thing.

  A telephoto lens tends to flatten out its subject, and a wide-angle lens does the opposite: it will curve out a flat subject.

  Robert Duvall in THX 1138: “There's a chemistry between each actor and a certain lens.”

  I remember George Lucas being fascinated by the depth of Robert Duvall's features, his deep-set eyes and rounded forehead. It was one of the reasons he cast Duvall in THX 1138—apart from the fact that Duvall is a wonderful actor.

  Welles on the set of Touch of Evil.

  The nine-year-old Fairuza Balk, who played Dorothy in Return to Oz, had a beautiful face that just leapt off the screen if you photographed her with a 45-millimetre lens at four and a half feet. I remember that because of the poetry of “forty-five at four and a half”—which is what I would call out frequently when we were doing a close-up of her.

  O: Do you ever make suggestions about lenses to the director?

  M: That's usually a discussion between the director and the camera department. It's the editor's job then simply to receive the material and make it work in the best way possible. When I assemble the scene and discover, for example, that there's one place where I'm using the B camera and the actor does not look so good with that lens, I may write a note to the director and suggest, If you ever have a half-day where you're doing some pick-up shots, it might be good to reshoot this line with this actor as just a prime close-up.

  We look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may find it slightly comic, but what the Egyptians were trying to do with the figure was reveal the various aspects of the person's body in the most characteristic aspect. The face is in profile because that reveals the most about the person's face, but the shoulders are not in profile, they're facing the viewer, because that's the most revealing angle for the shoulders. The hips are not in profile, but the feet are. It gives a strange, twisted effect, but it was natural to the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to paint an essence you have to paint it from its most characteristic angle. So they would simply combine the various characteristic essences of the human body. This was a piece of spiritual art. It wasn't trying to reproduce photographic reality, it was trying to reproduce and combine all the essential features of a person within one figure.

  That's exactly what we do in film, except that instead of the body of the person, it's the work itself. The director chooses the most characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every situation and every line of dialogue and every scene. He then overshoots that material and gives the editor an additional range of choices. We're doing the same kind of shifting between angles. It may be, five hundred years from now, when people see films from our era, they'll seem “Egyptian” in a strange way. Here we are, cutting between different angles to achieve the most interesting, characteristic, revealing lens and camera angle for every situation. That seems perfectly normal to us, but people five hundred years from now may find it strange or comic.

  FOURTH CONVERSATION

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Our fourth conversation took place over a few days in California in January 2001—our first meeting in downtown San Francisco, the second in the small town on the coast where Walter lives with his family.

  We began by comparing influences and how we are influenced. Walter discussed two essentially different kinds of filmmakers, symbolized by Coppola and Hitchcock, before slipping into a memory of one of the key moments of his career—as a young editor on Julia for the master director Fred Zinnemann—a time he spoke of with great affection. (After Zinnemann died, he was to create a short film about him, called As I See It.) Walter spoke too about his father—the painter Walter Murch—and how his father's work and career left a firm impression on his own life and work. As we talked about this and that, we realized it was Inauguration Day for Americans. In a nearby lobby a sparse, disgruntled crowd watched a television that showed the rainy proceedings taking place three thousand miles away.

  On the second day, in Walter's house, we returned to explore more intricate instances of sound and film editing. The complexity and carefulness of his mind, and his immense passion for the work, were clear as he spoke about

  Murch in a grave on the set of Julia, 1976.

  divergent and convergent plots in films, and the constantly shifting relationship between directors and editors. When we broke for lunch, he sat down at the piano in his living room and played what he said was “the music of the spheres,” based on his theory that the distances between planets can be patterned on or related to the spacing between the keys on a piano. This was strange and wonderful music.

  Leaving that evening, I commented on the beautiful post-dusk grey light. Walter responded, “And this is the exact level of light that is broad daylight on Saturn.”

  INFLUENCES

  O: There's a general question I was going to ask you. I'd like to get back to what influences you in other people's work. You haven't referred much to other film-makers or editors save for the European New Wave, early in your life. And I suppose I too would be hard-pressed to say who influences me among my contemporaries. I can say a book like Derek Walcott's Another Life opened a door for me, or a book of poems by Robert Creeley or Adrienne Rich, but usually if I read my contemporaries I read them to enjoy them and get lost in the work, to be moved or not, but I never feel consciously influenced by them. What tends to influence me more is the specific project at hand—all the existing problems and i
ssues that surround the book I'm trying to write—these influence me. Is this something that you feel?

  M: Yes. It's very difficult for me to see films when I'm working. I get too easily depressed. If they're bad, I begin to despair for filmmaking in general. It seems proof that it's impossible to make a film. You're always plagued by the question: Can we do this? So to watch a film that doesn't work is dispiriting, in a large sense.

  O: For the editing of it or the whole film?

  M: The whole film. Also, when I watch a bad film, I often see it doing things that the film I'm working on is doing. It's like being a hypochondriac listening to medical discussions on the radio: Yes! I've got a rash right there too! That cough I had two days ago, it's proof! But this is a kind of madness, and it leads me to make wrong equations: Since such-and-such a technique is in a film that doesn't work, it means that if we're using a similar technique, our film won't work either. Of course that's not true. Something that's used in a good way in one film can be used to poor effect in another, and vice versa.

  On the other hand, if I see a film that I love, I think: I can use those techniques—and I become like a magpie. It's like that crazy period in Victorian architecture when they ransacked the world—These pineapples from southern India are marvellous, let's put them here! So when I'm working on a film, I like to see documentaries, and I like to see theatre. I'm excited by the fact that in theatre things can go wrong at any moment.

  O: It's unedited.

  M: Yeah, it's unedited! People can forget their lines, they can fall offstage, or something miraculously wonderful can happen that was not prepared in advance. And may not happen again. Whereas film—it's always the same. You don't have to worry that on the third showing of the film the actors are going to forget their lines.