The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  It's a completely unnatural state of being—for me, anyway. The closest is probably what a general goes through in organizing troops in the middle of combat. You as a writer and I as an editor are allowed, in fact obliged, to sometimes step away. It's not an indulgence, it's an absolute necessity. But a director cannot step away.

  O: There's that great story about Chaplin shutting down a film to work out an aesthetic problem….

  M: He was a master at that kind of force majeure, and probably did that more often than anyone else in the history of film. Because of who he was, he had unprecedented control over the process, as writer and director and actor. He wrote as he shot. His scripts were not scripts that we would recognize as such. He would stage things and take a lot of time to figure out what was funniest, then look at it later and say, No, it doesn't work, we're going to do it over again.

  He probably, for the first and last time, had the kind of freedom as a director that you and I are used to as writer and editor. Because of how incredibly wealthy he was, in terms of both money and power. There really has been nobody like him, before or since.

  O: I think it was City Lights where he had to solve the problem of how the blind girl could mistake the tramp for a millionaire. And he eventually worked it out that the tramp would cross a crowded street by comically climbing through the cars, in one side and out the other, until he reached the other pavement. The last car he goes through is a limousine, and the blind girl hears that door-slam and misinterprets the tramp's status. So everything hinges on a sound. And yet the film is silent!

  M: Even though it's a silent film, it's asking you to listen to how the blind girl would hear it and what the implications are. It was a masterstroke.

  O: For me the idea of directing seems like hell: composing, in finite time, on Wimbledon's Centre Court!

  M: I remember, in London in 1984, when we'd finished principal photography on Return to Oz, Jim Henson threw a July Fourth party in Regent's Park for Americans working on films in the city. While we were eating our hot dogs and watching baseball, Jim asked, Are you happy? I was momentarily taken aback. I thought it was an odd question for one director to ask another. Of course I understood that what he meant was, How are you doing? He didn't mean happy in the deeper, literal sense of the word. So I answered, Oh yeah, I'm very happy. Things are great! But later that evening I kept mulling over that question, thinking, What I said was the right social response, but what's the real response to that question—from one director to another? The closest I came was, No, I'm not happy, but I would be absolutely miserable if I were prevented from doing what I'm doing now. Don't stop me—I'm miserable, but don't stop me. I'm miserable in the amazing, cosmic way that a director is miserable.

  There's a phrase from something Martha Graham once said about that process. She calls it “blessed unrest.” If I were back at that party now, I would say to Jim, Hmm, yes, I'm experiencing blessed unrest.

  WRITINGRETURN TO OZ

  O: Let's talk about you as a writer!—and writing for film. You wrote THX 1138with George Lucas, the sampan scene in Apocalypse Now, and Return to Oz with Gill Dennis.

  M: I've always collaborated on what I've written. THX with George, and then the original Black Stallion screenplay with Carroll Ballard and Gill Dennis. Then Return to Oz, with Gill. Then he and I wrote a screenplay called “Intrusive Burials,” which has never been made. We just enjoy working together.

  O: I was talking to him the other day, and he said the process of Return to Ozwas very long. Writing it took about three or four years. Is that right?

  M: We wrote the treatment in 1981 and the screenplay a number of months after that. Then, as you know, you go through several drafts. Preproduction started in the spring of 1983 and filming began in the spring of 1984. We were writing throughout that period.

  O: Was this a project that you two dreamed up and then approached a studio with? Or did they approach you and say, Are you interested—

  M: No. It was a call out of the blue from Tom Wilhite, who was then an executive at Disney. The studio had received a number of shocks to the system, in the mid-to-late 1970s. Mainly in the form of Star Wars and The Black Stallion. The studio recognized these were exactly the kinds of films they should be making,

  but were not. Disney was an almost hermetically sealed studio at that time. You could forget that it was part of Hollywood. If you worked at Disney, you worked only there. And vice versa—they didn't bring people in from the outside. I think that was part of Walt's character, vis-à-vis Hollywood—something that he had fostered and that continued even after his death.

  So they looked at Star Wars and Black Stallion and thought, Hmm, there's something happening out there. It's time to open the doors of the monastery and bring in other people. I was on a list that a film critic for the L.A. Times had compiled at Wilhite's behest—a list of people who were not directors now but who might soon be. I guess the Disney people worked their way down to the M's, and I got a call.

  They asked what kind of film I'd be interested in that they would also be interested in. And I said, right away, a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. For three reasons. I had loved L. Frank Baum's Oz series when I was a child. I also loved the daring of trying to make a sequel. A little like saying, Let's make a sequel to Gone With the Wind. It's a classic film. In fact, when Return to Oz came out, one of the sticks it was beaten with was, How dare you make a sequel to The Wizard of Oz? And how dare you make it in the way you made it? I knew in advance that it was risky.

  O: I remember David Cronenberg mentioning—when he was remaking The Fly—that everyone cried, Oh my God! How can you do that to such a well-known movie! And he replied, Listen, it's The Fly, it's not Citizen Kane. But in a way you were dealing with a Citizen Kane.

  M: Certainly as a cultural artifact. The Wizard of Oz has a huge cultural sophistication, and there are innumerable points of reference between that film and American society. So I was taking on something pretty heavy-duty.

  And the third reason was that after my son, Walter, was born I began watching Sesame Street, with the Muppets. I recognized in the Muppets a sensibility and a technical simplicity and sophistication that reminded me of Oz.

  Dorothy, Billina, and Tik-Tok from Return to Oz.

  O: Do you remember when you first read the Oz books?

  M: Ozma of Oz and The Land of Oz—the books that Return to Oz were based on—were the very first books I read. I was five years old and I said, I'm going to read a grown-up book all by myself! Meaning a book that had many more words than pictures. My mother had already read me some of the other Oz books. As a girl growing up in Ceylon at the turn of the century, she had been overwhelmed by them. They were the cultural equivalent of Harry Potter now.

  My mother was the daughter of two Canadian missionary doctors who had gone to Ceylon in the 1880s to establish a clinic. Her parents would talk about “going home to Canada,” and she knew that one day she would go there. And so the Oz books struck a particular nerve, with their journeys back and forth between ordinary and exotic worlds, and their strong but ambiguous evocation of “home.” It was as if my mother was a Dorothy who had been born in Oz and knew she had to go someday to Kansas.

  O: Frank Baum was very much a social radical, wasn't he? His books were banned from public libraries in Kansas, I believe.

  In an illustration by John R. Neill, Mombi, far left, turns the boy Tip back into Princess Ozma, who was supposed to rule the Emerald City. Jean Marsh as Mombi in Return to Oz.

  M: And they still are removed from certain libraries, because they deal with witches—the existence of witches being seen as anti-Christian—not an idea children should deal with. But how many witches are there in the Grimm stories? And they aren't removed. There is something about Baum being quintessentially American, and yet dealing with witches, that unnerves people. Witches are not American. They're European. In Europe, in the Land of Toads and Goblins, that's okay. But don't mix Americana with witches. There's a wonderful di
ssonance there. It even appealed to me as a four-year-old, when my mother read the books to me. Also, Baum deals with marvellous metaphysical questions. He doesn't wink at you from behind these things, or think they are too much for children.

  A good example is in The Tin Woodman of Oz. The Tin Woodman began as a real human being, who kept losing parts of his body by accident. He chopped off an arm and replaced it with a tin one. Then he chopped off the other arm, again by accident, and replaced that with another tin arm. Then a leg, then the other leg—and he replaced each with a tin version. And finally his head got chopped off, and he put a tin one on. So he ended up being all tin.

  The metaphysical question is: Where is the Self? Can the Self survive the dismemberment of the body? A profound question, which people have been debating for many years. If I lose the tip of my finger, am I less myself?

  But in The Tin Woodman of Oz, Baum adds a twist to the question: The Tin Woodman, in the course of the story, meets his old head, which has been kept in a box, and they have a conversation. The head is understandably angry and complains, You're out there running around, and I'm here in a box! Take me back! And the Tin Woodman replies that he's perfectly happy being all tin. He has to watch out for rust, but he has none of the troubles of the flesh. He doesn't have to eat anything. Clearly what Baum is dealing with is all the bedevilments that the flesh is heir to but the Tin Woodman is now liberated from. In The Wizard of Oz, the one human thing he wanted was a heart. He regretted only lacking the ability to feel. In this book, however, the Tin Woodman shuts the box on his old head and walks away. But you have to think, Where is the Self?

  Murch with the Tin Woodman and Jack Pumpkinhead on location in England for Return to Oz.

  There's an ambivalence about the fact that in Oz nothing ever dies. That's why the Tin Woodman's head can survive in a box. It's a world in which there is dismemberment but no death. Yet think of living forever as a conscious head locked in a box. Hellish! Young as I was the point was not lost on me when I first read that book.

  So from a certain point of view—what you might call a traditional, American, optimistic, Christian, hierarchical point of view—Baum's message is anarchic. It's also feminist. All the really creative, interesting people in his books are women. The men, for the most part, are charlatans and fools—the soldiers, the Wizard himself, the demons, the Nome King. The really intelligent, benevolent people are Ozma and Dorothy and Glinda the Good, those wonderful beings who are sensible, and see the truth.

  The men who are real men, and caring, are artificial creations: Jack Pump-kinhead, the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, Tik-Tok. They're all metaphors for wounded people who have dismembered and re-created themselves, or people like Jack Pumpkinhead, whose head is always rotting and needing replacement. Think about the metaphysical implications of that! He's a creature brought to life by a magical powder, but every two weeks he has to carve himself a new head and put it on.

  For all these reasons, Baum's books have had their adherents and their violent opponents. Because Return to Oz was trying to explore those same issues head on—without the relief of songs and the more openly artificial, vaudevillian approach of the 1939 Wizard—I think it suffered at the box office. I was tapping into the same kind of opposition Baum himself had encountered. Popular as certain books were, they absolutely were not popular with a part of the American public.

  O: Gill Dennis said I should ask you about Wisconsin Death Trip. That's a remarkable book, but how does it link up with this?

  M: I think it's another reason Return to Oz was disturbing to people. Gill had a copy of the book, which was written by Michael Lesy. It's a collage of photographs and newspaper stories from Wisconsin, around 1890, and occasionally a poem from Spoon River Anthology. It's a realistic look at what life was like in that part of the world, just before the turn of the century, very much the world into which a hypothetically real Dorothy would have been born. Once things have passed and become irretrievable, we tend to see them with a hazy, golden glow. If only life could be simple, like it was in the old days! Or, If only people could live on farms and grow their own food!

  Above: “There is a beautiful picture I have from Wisconsin Death Trip of a girl standing by a river, with her back to us. I always thought of her as the real Dorothy.”—Walter Murch

  The reality was very different. There was a lot of insanity, disease, barn-burning, and revenge. The human condition at the time. It made me ask: What if the first story, The Wizard of Oz, had really happened, reported by a local newspaper? That a tornado came and blew an old couple's house away, destroyed it—which happened all the time—and a girl, the niece of the couple, survived and when she was finally found, miraculously alive, she had a story to tell about where she'd been. What would her aunt and uncle think? What would be the real conditions for that family? What if they had to build a new house, take out a second mortgage? And the uncle had broken his leg in the tornado, and was trying to survive as a farmer? And their niece kept talking about this magical place she'd been. They'd say, Don't talk like that, there isn't a place like that! What should she do? Should she deny that it had happened to her? That's Dorothy's dilemma at the beginning of our film. Return to Oz is a fusion of the reality of Wisconsin Death Trip and the fantasy of Ozma of Oz.

  And another big influence was Willa Cather's My Antonia. I even went to visit her house in Red Cloud, Nebraska….

  O: When you and Gill wrote the script together, did you work on it as a pair constantly, or separately?

  M: Separately. We'd develop the outline together then divide it in half and write each half separately. Then we'd meet, read it together and give each other notes, and switch. I would rewrite his part and he would rewrite mine. It was literary musical chairs. We're very congenial to each other's sensibilities.

  O: The claymation in the film was wonderful.

  M: At the time I was wondering how I was going to cope with the Nome King and his army of Nomes—in the book, they're all two-foot-high round creatures who run around in grey costumes, with little beards and pickaxes. I was horrified at the thought of finding myself on the shooting stage with a hundred dwarves—I didn't want to do that, I wanted something else, something more magical. Luckily I saw Will Vinton's claymation at a film festival. I sent him a copy of the script, along with my idea that the Nomes were spirits living in rock, should be rock, and capable of emerging from it in sometimes human form. He thought it was a great idea. His studio had been struggling with the nature of clay—trying to make it seem like flesh. And here was a chance for them to let it be what it really is: a malleable form of rock.

  O: What about characters like Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead? Did you use the illustrations in Baum's book as a model?

  M: I tried to make all the art direction and the characters—with the exception of the Nomes—as close to the original illustrations as possible. My mother had especially loved the sequel books, which were illustrated by John Rea Neill. He had a very different style from that of W. W. Denslow, the illustrator of the original Wizard of Oz. Baum and Denslow had a creative and financial falling out, so Baum hired Neill, a young illustrator from Philadelphia. From the beginning, my association with the world of Oz was inspired by Neill.

  Clockwise: The Nome king from Return to Oz, whose army of Nomes were created as claymation by Will Vinton; a scene with the Gump from the film. Dorothy, Tik-Tok, the Scarecrow, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Tin Woodman fly in the Gump in an original illustration by John R. Neill.

  O: The talent to edit and the talent to conceive or write a film, how distinct are they?

  M: Pretty distinct. Everyone creative has elements of both. The editorial part of me is fairly muscular, but the other part—the generative part—is weaker, more undernourished. Or becomes frightened of the muscularity of the editorial part.

  So when I'm writing I have to find a way to let these two parts work safely with each other. Born writers—well, they're people who, by some fluke, have those two aspects of thei
r mind in perfect harmony. Without even being conscious of it, they are generating and editing at the same time, in perfect modulation. It's like those double-barrelled tubes of epoxy glue, which dole out the resin and the hardener in equal amounts.

  In my case, I realized the danger was that I would come up with an idea and then, immediately, the editorial part of me would begin to attack it. And you never get anywhere that way. On the other hand, if the generative part of you is very strong and the editorial part weak, you wind up with lots of words but a lack of structure and precision to the ideas.

  When I write a script, I lie down—because that's the opposite of standing up. I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and, without being aware of it, go into a light hypnotic trance. I pretend the film is finished and I'm simply describing what was happening. I start out chronologically but then skip around. Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I'm lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I'm not looking at anything, and the ideas are being captured only by this silent scribe—the tape recorder—there's nothing for me to criticize. It's just coming out.

  That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is as opposite as possible to how I edit—both physically and mentally. To encourage those ideas to come out of the woods like little animals and drink at the pool safely, without feeling that the falcon is going to come down and tear them apart.

  O: It's a bloodthirsty profession!

  JUST BELOW THE SURFACE

  O: I know you're interested in the idea of a theory of notation for the staging of scenes in film.