The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  I transferred the Leinsdorf recording to film, put it up against the picture, ran them both together, and within ten seconds knew that it wasn't going to work. Not because of any metric problem—in fact it was quite close to Solti's rhythms—but because of the colouration Leinsdorf had chosen. At this point he had decided to highlight the strings … whereas Solti had chosen to highlight the brasses…. At that moment in the film you're looking down out of a helicopter, past a soldier, onto the waters of the Philippine gulf. There was a peculiarly wonderful acidity to the blue of the ocean that synergized with the metallic brass of Solti's recording. With Leinsdorf, the strings had none of that brassiness—they were soft and pillowy—and as a result the blue looked dead. It was no longer the same blue. So I abandoned the search. It was impossible.

  Luckily Francis eventually got through to Solti himself. He explained the situation, and Solti said, Of course, dear boy, why didn't you ask me in the first place? Solti called the people at Decca and we got the rights to use the music— though it happened so late in the process that we were unable to get hold of the original tapes. What's in the film is simply a lift off a disc, off the 33 1/3 LP.

  Anyway, you can't predict what's going to work. We don't know enough about the physics of it yet, or the psycho-acoustic physics of it—how the mind works in its perceptions. It has something to do with mass and frequency and edges, the way a painting has to do with colour and light and line. The interaction of those three things.

  A WRONG READING

  O: In a film where there's one point of view, or even more than one point of view, is it possible to get a different perspective through the soundtrack—not just from what we're watching, but through sound as well? From how we might suddenly hear differently? Or does sound, because by its nature most of us hear it, have to be very democratic?

  M: No! In fact, sound is so malleable. Films told from a single point of view, if they didn't have the malleability of sound to mollify that, would be almost unendurable.

  O: Okay. That's what I was wondering. We talked earlier about how the style of “leaping poetry” is mirrored in the subliminal connections and surprising juxtapositions you can forge in film. We read an episode in The English Patientfrom Hana's point of view, but earlier we've been in Kip's head when he's going to defuse a bomb. This is not something we're very conscious of when we read—shifting over from one to the other—but it's happening all the time, activating and creating that thickness. I think sound is very close to that kind of leaping style in a book.

  The long zoom down into Union Square in The Conversation.

  M: Yes. And in complex ways. As in The Conversation, where you don't know what the point of view is at the opening. It's clear only that you are high up, looking down on Union Square in San Francisco, hearing those soft, billowy sounds of the city at lunchtime. Then, like a jagged red line right across the view, comes this distorted—you don't know what it is—this digital racket, @#@*&%…. You will learn what it is soon enough, and you will learn that what you assumed was a neutral God's-eye point of view is in fact the point of view of a secret tape recorder that is recording all of this, picking up these distorted sounds that are the imperfectly recorded voices of the targets, the young couple's conversation sometimes muffled by the sounds of the square. But this is a shell game, a little mystery that progresses over the course of the film until you finally put the pieces together and realize what it is.

  O: It's interesting because that abstract sound then gets cleaned up and interpreted and therefore becomes Harry's point of view, but in the end he totally misinterprets the one important sentence he's recorded.

  M: Yes. He hears it in all kinds of different acoustic situations during the film— when he's working on the tape at the lab, when it's being replayed through the wall of the hotel, and just before the murder you hear a muffled version of it. When the tape is stolen from him by the Director—Robert Duvall—you hear it echoing down the corridors of the office building. You don't know what that sound is until finally it coalesces into the sound of the line itself, “He'd kill us if he got the chance.”

  Then, most unexpectedly, we discover that Harry has—all along—mentally altered the cadence of the line, which is hypersubjectivity, because of what happened in the past, where people were killed as a result of his actions. So he chooses which of the characters are likely to be innocent victims—the attractive young couple, particularly the girl. He doesn't want her to be hurt the way the previous people had been hurt, so once he finally decodes and clarifies the line—“He'd kill us if he got the chance”—it becomes a mantra that in every situation reinforces the message he needs to hear: These people are the victims.

  At the end, when it's the Director who is murdered, we hear the line again. Now it's, “He'd kill us if he got the chance,” implying: If he's going to kill us, we need to kill him. A line that has an innocent meaning at one time has a non-innocent meaning at the end. Harry has used all his technical filters to clarify the line. What sabotages him is the mental filter, the subjective filter that chooses to hear an inflection that isn't really there, because of his own past history.

  DIVERGENT/CONVERGENT

  O: How sound represents a point of view is fascinating in the way it can complicate the narrative stance. It's the way the tone of voice or a point of view in a novel represents the state of mind of a character, without authorial intrusion. It infuriates me when lines from a book are quoted to show the style of the writer, when they really represent the personality or voice of the character. In Anthony Minghella's film Ripley you have the scene where Freddie comes into Ripley's apartment and starts playing the piano, perversely, boorishly, and we witness it totally with Ripley's sensitive hearing. In a scene in a book, the moment quoted may not represent the author's style at all. It represents simply the state of mind of whoever holds the narrative ball at that moment.

  M: Exactly.

  O: I was wondering whether in film you can also have many points of view, or is there a limit? I'll give you an example. When Anthony first talked about doing The English Patient, he said you couldn't have more than one person having a flashback. If all four of the characters start having flashbacks, as they do in the book, it will get too confusing.

  M: Yes, you have to be careful about it. I'm thinking of the film Election,which has four narrators. The teacher, Matthew Broderick, narrates it; the girl, Reese Witherspoon, narrates it; then someone else, the class jock; then a fourth person, the renegade lesbian sister. One would say in advance that something like that wouldn't work. But it does, brilliantly. The filmmakers managed to pull it off.

  O: Can the point of view move around in film?

  M: My rule of thumb is that there are two ways to deal with multiple points of view in a film: divergent or convergent.

  O: Can you explain?

  M: What I call the divergent method is when you start with all the characters in the same time and space—an Aristotelian structure. After that you can follow them individually wherever they go—as long as you've seen them all together at one point, right at the beginning. That allows you to pungently characterize these people in relationship to one another in time and space: physically, we get to see them standing next to each other and judge how they carry themselves, but also emotionally, how they relate to one another. Once the audience has that imprint, if it's well done, then the film is free to have different points of view.

  The beginning of The Godfather is a good example of a divergent structure, where all the key players are assembled at the wedding that starts the film; also the beginning of American Graffiti, where all the key players are at Mel's Drive-in, so each of them is introduced as dramatically, efficiently, and interestingly as possible, and you see them relative to one another. It's like a convention where people come up to you wearing little name tags that say: Hello, my name is Kurt, I'm the artist, I don't know whether I want to accept the future that is laid out in front of me. Hello, I'm John, I'm the hot-rod racer wh
o is afraid of the future. Hello, I'm Toad, I wanna get laid. So you get telegraphic, quick, not very complex, but true characterizations of those people.

  Diane Keaton as Kay and Al Pacino as Michael in The Godfather.

  The first time you see Fredo in The Godfather, he's drunk. Fredo is the weakling of the family. Michael, by contrast, never drinks alcohol. What doe that say about him, as a person and as an Italian, as a member of this family? Fredo, well, he's amusing, he's funny, but he's ineffectual. That's clear from the start, and it becomes clearer not only over the course of Godfather I, but in Godfather II as well.

  But if somebody new is then introduced, a third of the way through the film—someone with his own point of view—you'll begin to wonder, Who is this? Why should I care about this person? If that person was not part of that Aristotelian beginning, the danger is that the late introduction will seem awkward or intrusive.

  O: So if Kay—Diane Keaton—hadn't been in the first scene of The Godfather,that would have been a problem?

  M: Yes—you discover right away who she is. She's obviously the naive outsider: “Who's that? … Look at that person over there! Michael, my God!” You quickly get a sense first of all that she's not Italian, and second that this is all unbelievably outrageous to her. And then Michael says to her, “It's my family, Kay. It's not me.” And we know fate will grab him.

  Ron Howard, Candy Clark, and Charles Martin Smith from American Graffiti.

  The opposite approach is convergent: two or three stories that start separately and then flow together. The English Patient is a good example. It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert. The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then—cut—you're on a train, with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation: bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together. You follow Hana and her story, then you cut back to the Patient, going through the desert on the back of a camel; then you cut to Hana again. And you reach a point where almost accidentally these two stories fuse—it just happens that when the Patient is being interrogated as a possible spy, Hana is the nurse who gives him a glass of water. Later their stories merge even more closely: she takes him out of the convoy into the monastery, and they spend the rest of the film together.

  O: What about Caravaggio?

  M: Hmm … He comes into the film after perhaps half an hour. But he doesn't have any scenes to himself, he is always tied to Hana or the Patient. It's not that you can't introduce new characters into the body of the work—though it might be risky to do so past the halfway point. It's just that they shouldn't have scenes to themselves, where we have to see things from their point of view.

  O: What about the scene where Caravaggio loses his thumbs?

  M: … You're right. And it's a flashback. Hmm … Well, rules are there to be broken. (Laughs)

  Godfather II is probably the most extreme form of convergent structure. The point of convergence, the eventual confluence of the “story rivers,” happens at the very end—actually lies outside the body of the film.

  O: That last scene, with the Don, where they sit down to a meal—

  M: Without the Don, actually. It seems like he is there, but he isn't.

  At the beginning you're following the story of how the young Vito Cor-leone came to America at the turn of the century. And then you cut to his son, Michael, at the height of his powers in 1958. And the film alternates between

  Breaking the rules: Willem Dafoe, above left, as Caravaggio in The English Patient being tortured—minor characters don't normally have their own flashbacks. Convergent structure: the end of Godfather II—it's Christmas after Pearl Harbor—Michael Corleone, above, has been left alone at the table.

  the two stories seven times during its course. You enjoy thematic parallels between the lives of Vito and Michael, but they're in completely different time frames. The only place their two stories come together is Christmas 1941. And the character who unites them—Don Vito—arrives at the house, but you never see him: he remains off screen. “Dad's here!” says Connie, and everyone runs off and leaves Michael sitting alone at the table. And you just hear the group sing: Hey! He's a jolly good fellow!

  Francis had wanted Brando—as Don Vito—in that scene. But Brando wouldn't do it, for whatever reason. Because Francis's plan was to unite the two Godfather films, he had wanted the point of juncture within the film itself. Instead, the two stories in Godfather II are like two parallel lines that go just off the table. So what Francis did—which was brilliant—was to focus on Michael, and leave Michael sitting alone at the table, thinking about his destiny: it's Christmas right after Pearl Harbor and he has just told Sonny that he has joined the Marines.

  At the end of Godfather II, we know what his destiny is. But this was the point at which he made his first strike away from the family: I've joined the Marines. Inexplicable, as far as the rest of the family is concerned.

  O: The Mafia chief Hyman Roth—who eventually gets shot in the airport—hisarrival is very late in the film, and then he plays such an important part. Talk about convergence—his arrival comes totally out of the blue and then snakes into the film.

  M: You're right. But he is foreshadowed quite early. His messenger, Johnny Ola, comes to the party at Lake Tahoe, and starts to talk about a deal. Physically, it's true, he does come late. But after the assassination attempt, the immediate suspicion is that Hyman Roth was responsible. In that sense, he's a little like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, a character who is foreshadowed by events quite early on, but who doesn't appear until near the end.

  O: Foreshadowing is such a central device in literature to build up the worth or the danger of a character who hasn't arrived yet. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, of course. Or even Othello in the first act of the play, before we see him.

  M: In film characters can be introduced later in a story, but it's unusual to give them their own point of view—scenes that feature them separate from the established main characters. Hyman Roth, for instance, does not have a separate scene with his wife, talking about Michael Corleone after Michael has left. The one scene Roth has to himself is when he's killed at the airport.

  When I talk about divergence and convergence as being rules, they are really rules of approximation. You can change them or break them, but it's good to know the rules you're breaking. And breaking them is always somewhat problematic. It can be interesting—like Caravaggio's thumbs scene—but it throws the audience a curve, and to pull it off successfully you have to be fully aware of what you're doing. Probably the most extreme, and the most successful, film to shift points of view unexpectedly is Hitchcock's Psycho. Janet Leigh, the heroine, is killed dramatically and unexpectedly twenty-five minutes into the story, and then the point of view switches—for the rest of the film—to a new character, the detective, played by Martin Balsam.

  THE DISAPPEARING BROTHER

  O: You eventually edited the Godfather films into a trilogy. And in a way the divergent/convergent structure of the individual films now lies perhaps a bit awkwardly in this larger structure. I prefer them as individual projects rather than as a unified whole. How do you feel they hold together as a trilogy?

  M: I prefer them as separate films myself, though there are many who prefer the story in chronological order.

  Even as a triptych, as three separate panels, there is an imbalance with the third film, which is weaker than the other two. It should be said that the first two films are a tremendously hard act to follow—they are regularly at the top of those “greatest films of all time” lists.

  I think there was a fundamental problem that surfaced during preproduction. Francis's original intention was to make the story revolve around the death of the fourth Corleone brother, Tom Hagen—Robert Duvall's part. He got the script to a certain stage and in this preliminary form sent it to Duvall with words to the effect: “I'm still working on i
t, but they've only given me six weeks to get to this point. I ask you to have faith in me and come along for the ride.” And Duvall agreed. But he wanted financial parity with Al Pacino, who played Michael, and Paramount wouldn't go along. It became a real battleground, which Francis wasn't able to solve so Duvall was not in the film.

  It kind of knocked the legs out from what Francis wanted to accomplish, which was to make each of the three Godfather films about the death of a brother: Sonny in the first, Fredo in the second, and Tom in the third—a beautiful symmetry, like a fairy tale. Once upon a time there were four brothers … and the one who didn't want to be part of the family at the beginning is the one who survives in the end. And yet at what cost.

  It meant that in Godfather III, Al Pacino—Michael—had to carry the entire film on his shoulders, both as an actor and as a character: King Lear. Because there was no actor or character in the film who could stare him down from the same level. He was so much bigger than everybody else.

  So Tom Hagen just disappeared somewhere between Godfather II and Godfather III. It was one of those missed opportunities. And it meant that the balance Francis wanted to achieve for the trilogy could not be achieved. It's back to our Negative Twenty Questions: the character who would satisfy all the logical and emotional requirements lay outside the “room” of the film.

  PRELUDES

  O: You said once, talking about the prelude to Touch of Evil, that it settles you into your chair and presents you, in miniature, with all the themes and ideas that the rest of the piece is going to investigate. And the prelude to the new version of Touch of Evil really does suggest everything that follows. Are there other examples where you've restructured and built the beginning of a film in order to keep that directional sense you desire in a prelude?