The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  M: Well, I've a hunch that some systematic approach to cinematic notation is possible but has yet to be developed.

  As we discussed earlier, I think filmmakers are somewhat like those cathedral builders in the Middle Ages, who had a hands-on yet mystically intuitive sense of the dynamics and physics of supporting such a vast structure on such slender columns. The buildings are still standing. But if they'd been asked to write down the rules for doing it, I don't know that they could have done so.

  Music was in that state in the tenth century—there was no modern system of notation. The music somehow evolved and then it was passed on by imitation. Somebody would sing it, and then everyone would imitate that, and it would progress. Then, early in the eleventh century, Guido d'Arezzo had this fabulous insight that you could actually write down the music.

  The fact that these sounds, which were ethereal, religious tones, could somehow be captured by dots is remarkable. It's just as remarkable as the invention of writing words or of recording sound.

  The ability to write music clearly began to influence the kind of music that was written, just as the invention of writing changed the nature of the stories that were told.

  The eleventh-century Benedictine monk Guido d'Arezzo (990–1050) devised a system of musical notation using the Guidonian hand.

  O: And what was told or recited originally depended on how much you could remember. When it's written, you can splinter that tale much more, refer back or leap forwards….

  M: Right. It becomes much more synaptic. There are more detailed connections that can be made. That's what happened to music. Before notation, there was no polyphony. People didn't sing two or three different harmonic lines at the same time. It was just too much for the mind to deal with—aside from the fact that it was considered irreligious. Nonetheless, once it was on the page, you could write another line that would be harmonic with the first and have somebody else sing that line. Then have the other instrument do something else. They would all flow together in a complex pattern. Western music of the last eight hundred years is a continuous elaboration of Guido's insight.

  So here we are, making films for a hundred years, and we haven't got our Guido d'Arezzo yet. But perhaps one way to imagine a notational system for film is to look at something like the I Ching, the ancient Chinese system for forecasting the future.

  O: How would the I Ching relate to film?

  M: Well, more profoundly, the I Ching is an attempt to grapple with the complexity of the human condition by breaking it down to sixty-four different states, symbolized by patterns called hexagrams. (Sixty-four being a significant number, by the way—large, but not overwhelmingly so. Think of the chess-board with its optimal sixty-four squares. Or the fact that the DNA code of life is written in sixty-four possible three-letter words.) The relevant hexagram is chosen by chance, by six tosses of three coins. Each hexagram has a name corresponding to a state of being: The Creative, The Receptive, Difficulty at the Beginning, Youthful Folly, et cetera. And with each name there's an accompanying Judgement and explanation.

  Despite its surface, film drama is also an attempt to deal with the complexity of the human condition in a fundamentally structured way. A number of years ago, I began to wonder if there was a connection, as unlikely as it might seem, between the structure of the I Ching's hexagrams and the staging of scenes in motion pictures. The film that triggered this question was Absence of Malice, directed by Sydney Pollack, and the scene in particular was a secret meeting between a businessman under investigation, played by Paul Newman, and the district attorney of Miami.

  Newman was momentarily the weaker character—he wanted something that the DA was reluctant to give—and the camera put him on the right side of the frame, looking off screen left at the DA.

  But the DA, surprisingly, was placed on the same side of the frame as Newman, so at the point of the cut his image landed on Newman's with a thump, as if to say “No!” To intensify the rejection implicit in the framing, the DA was mostly facing away and his body was turned away from Newman who was thus being triply rejected.

  The scene ran around in my head for a couple of days and then it suddenly came together into a system of organization. A kind of miniature Guido d'Arezzo idea, that you could write down the staging of a scene in a very simple code, a code based on two binary triads: for each character there are three questions, and each question has a Yes or No answer.

  For Newman the three questions were: (1) Is he looking at the DA? (2) Is his body facing the DA? And (3) Does the way he is framed accommodate or reject the DA? For Newman the answers are: Yes, Yes, Yes.

  The equivalent three questions about the publisher would be answered: No, No, No.

  I suddenly made the connection with the I Ching: that's exactly how it's organized—two Yes/No trigrams. The I Ching has Yin and Yang where I had Yes and No, and writes Yin with a broken line and Yang with a solid line.

  In any film scene there's a petitioner and a grantor, a weaker character and a stronger. Otherwise you don't have a scene. It may be obvious what the power relationship is, or it may be hidden from one or even both of the characters themselves. So at each moment in every scene there is a dynamic between two people that can be expressed in many ways.

  In Absence of Malice we have the powerful DA as grantor and Newman, the hero, as petitioner. The DA's three lines are: No, No, No.

  _____________

  _____________

  _____________

  And Newman's three lines are: Yes, Yes, Yes.

  _____ _____

  _____ _____

  _____ _____

  In the I Ching the more powerful trigram is placed on top, and the weaker trigram on the bottom, so in its complete form, the scene in Absence of Malicewould look like this—the twelfth hexagram, Standstill:

  _____________

  _____________

  _____________

  _____ _____

  _____ _____

  _____ _____

  The judgement for the hexagram Standstill reads: The evil will not prosper. Through perseverance, the superior person will attain his goals. The strong depart; the weak approach.

  There are obviously many shadings to something as oracular as this, but it might be interpreted: The DA will not prosper, and Newman, through perseverance, will attain his goals. Which is very close, in fact, to the underlying truth of the scene.

  It would be an interesting exercise to take a script, throw the I Ching for every scene, and read what the hexagrams have to suggest about the potential stagings of those scenes and the accompanying human condition. At the very least, it would be provocative!

  O: It's interesting in terms of the opening of The Godfather. Vito Corleone, Brando's character, at first appears so worried and hesitant, though he holds the power, while the “petitioner” pleads clearly and efficiently.

  M: Exactly. Sometimes the objectively weaker character appears stronger, and vice versa—then as the scene progresses there is a surprising reversal. There are many examples of the creative manipulation of these fundamental staging elements in both Godfather I and Godfather II. There's that scene in Godfather Ibetween Kay and Michael, at the hotel.

  O: With Kay at the left edge of the frame and Michael having all the space behind him to the right.

  M: In that scene Kay is a petitioner—she's asking to be allowed to go with Michael when he visits his father in the hospital, and Michael is reluctant to let her. He is trying to be nice and not hurt her feelings, particularly in the first half of the scene. He is looking at her, facing her, and the framing of his shots accommodates her. Yes, Yes, Yes. She is also Yes, Yes, Yes to him.

  But she keeps asking to tag along, until he has to take a more definite position. He gets up for his coat—he's still nice to her, still facing her, but when he sits down, his framing has changed: it is now short-sided. He is still looking at her, still facing her, but his framing is rejecting her: Yes, Yes, No. When the two shots are cut together, his imag
e lands right on top of her, and there is a big empty space to the right of frame, the space into which Michael is going to turn when he leaves the room to go see his father. With that empty space, the family has made an invisible entrance into the room and is making its presence felt.

  The wonderful thing is that as far as Kay is concerned, Michael is still looking at her and facing her. Nothing has changed, apparently. Deeper down, though, invisible but more powerful, something has changed. We all know the feeling. The use and orchestration of this kind of framing gives filmmakers a powerful tool to comment on, undercut, or amplify what is being said or communicated overtly between the characters.

  O: It's a chess game.

  M: It's exactly that. One of the greatest practitioners of this is Sidney Lumet. If you look at his breakthrough film, 12 Angry Men, it's all about orchestrating the staging of twelve people—twelve jurors—in a room, and having that staging reflect what is being said on the surface and the hidden meanings and tensions just below the surface.

  O: Twelve men in a room, unable to leave, could at first suggest very limited dramatic possibilities.

  M: It would obviously be unwatchable if everyone simply sat around the table, facing each other, and said their lines of dialogue. But what makes it a fascinating, classic film is that you see Lumet fully developing the relationship between the people and then the relationship between the people and the camera. The task of the camera in his films is not only to record but to reveal the hidden agenda, the hidden psychology—psychology that may even be hidden from the characters themselves, but which he's revealing to us.

  Henry Fonda in, far left, 12 Angry Men:director Sidney Lumet had to stage the twelve jurors in the room to reflect barely disguised tensions. Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine and Ralph Fiennes as Almásy have their first dance in The English Patient.Garbo, center, dancing the Chica-choca in George Cukor's Two-Faced Woman, 1941.

  O: What about something like the seemingly formal dance sequence in The English Patient—with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes? These two people are hanging on to each other … but there's a continual battle and change in the relationship happening there.

  M: Formal dance is a wonderfully special case. The custom of the dance forces you to move in a certain way—social convention forces your body to face the other person. That's the nature of it, even if you don't like your dancing partner. But your head—and specifically your eyes—can avoid or confront. And the framing also—how people are framed within the context of the larger dance—can reveal a great deal.

  O: When Anthony filmed that dance sequence, was it one shot? It felt like one intense shot.

  M: No, it was four or five.

  O: So what were the subliminal issues in that scene when you cut it? How did you read it?

  M: We wonder why Katharine would dance with Almásy—she could have said, No, I'm tired, but she accepted. She's obviously attracted to him, but afraid of that attraction. So she spends a certain amount of time during the dance not looking at him. She's talking to him but not looking at him. Then, since her body is forced to face him, the moment that she does look at him becomes very powerful. The only freedom of movement she has is either to avert her eyes or to gaze at him.

  O: But what she says is argumentative. Even though the intimate dance continues.

  M: That's the great thing about all of this! Katharine's words can be, I hate you—but I'm not looking at you, which means I'm actually saying I love you. And my body is facing you, so I really do love you. Then again, this can be framed in an unreceptive way to say, I really don't love you after all.

  Thus you add harmonic richness to the scene. Because we want film mostly to be interestingly argumentative, through the words that are being said and the emotions that are being expressed.

  We've taken the line of development from the screenplay, and now it's being orchestrated into visual, spatial, rhythmic, and sonic terms. What makes it appealing is to show and to develop the ambiguities, and then, by the end of the scene or the film, to resolve them in some way.

  O: It would be fun to take this kind of frame structuring and apply it to screwball comedies, which are so sedate sexually but so anarchic in their physical slapstick that somehow it all leads to bonding. A film like The Lady Eve—where you've got a passive Henry Fonda and a quick-witted, high-strung Barbara Stanwyck going after him—results in a lot of physical leaping around, with lovers locked in a small cabin with a possibly dangerous snake, et cetera….

  Two madcap scenes from The Lady Eve: a high-strung Barbara Stanwyck, far left and center, in pursuit of a rather passive Henry Fonda; The English Patient: “The love scene at the Christmas party is dangerous.”

  In something like the love scene between Katharine and Almásy at the Christmas party in The English Patient, where there are moral and social forces surrounding the two of them, did you play any part in choreographing all those dramatic angles when you cut the scene?

  M: A lot of those elements are of course largely determined by what I'm given. By how the director, the cameramen, and the actors have shot the scene. Sometimes, as an editor, you can change the staging. But only in a limited way. Whereas when the director is arranging the actors relative to each other and to the camera, that's when you're really grappling with those elements. But on the other hand, some things happen accidentally, and the editor can take advantage of that.

  The love scene at the Christmas party is dangerous, because of what's happening. It's Christmas, after all, and Almásy and Katharine are an adulterous couple making love in a semi-public place. If somebody came around the corner at the wrong time, it would be a disaster. The sexual charge of the scene is enhanced, complicated by the danger. Not only is there complexity in the physical geography of the party—how they meet, what he says to her, and where they go—the soundscape of that scene is very complex. There is Arabic music and there are people singing Christmas carols, improbably, in Cairo. A very English party. Then there is the love theme, the orchestral music. All three are going on at the same time.

  O: And sometimes one is more powerful than the other, so we hear the shift in the power structure of the various emotions.

  M: Right! I would say that in that particular scene the collision of emotions, the contradictory mess of emotions, is being amplified more by the soundtrack than by anything I am doing in the picture editing.

  You can achieve the same kind of thing with, for example, costume. The costume designer can say, This character Tom Ripley wants to be a certain kind of person, but he really is another kind of person. So I'm going to dress him in a way that reveals, profoundly but subtly, the contradiction in him. Everything is perfect, except his shoes…. When you look at his shoes, you realize he's not the person he has presented himself to be. The director and the cameraman and the actor can take advantage of that by having him cross his legs and unconsciously reveal to the world that his shoes are wrong. Or is he aware of the fact that his shoes are wrong, and does he try to hide them?

  You can achieve this kind of thing also with art direction—how the set of a person's room can reveal and amplify the desires and contradictions of that character. What we're discussing here really should be developed at every level, from the staging, the casting, the photography, the sound, the music, the editing, the costuming, the art design, the props….

  In making a film you're trying to get the most interesting orchestration of all these elements, which, like music, need to be harmonic yet contradictory. If they're completely contradictory, then there's chaos. It's like when instruments are tuning up before a performance, you can't make anything coherent out of it. It's a fascinating, evocative sound, but only for about fifteen seconds. If, on the other hand, all the instruments play the same notes—if they're too harmonic, in other words—yes, there's coherence, but I'm bored after a few minutes. Just as bored as with the chaos of tuning up.

  A symphony can last for an hour or more because the composer and the performers have deve
loped a harmonic argument, musical questions and answers and contradictions, affirmations and resolutions, all tumbling together in a continually surprising and yet ultimately self-evident way.

  A film is really trying to do the same thing, by bringing together all the different cinematic crafts, including music.

  O: I'm remembering your early edited versions of that Christmas scene in The English Patient. In the last stages, just before the mix, there was a huge leap— there was now a sort of upheaval of sounds: romantic music, singing, then the cupboard banging behind Katharine. A huge landscape or soundscape being choreographed. As editor, you at that point are the orchestra leader, deciding how long to hold the cut of Almásy's arm on her thigh, how brief the look on her face will be—

  M: And what music will be played at that moment. That's something I would at least sketch out. When the sound editor, Pat Jackson, and I discussed it, I said that it would be great to have the sound of a cupboard banging. That provides a rhythmic element, it accentuates the rhythm of the lovemaking, but also adds an element of danger—they're making a sound that can be heard. If everyone stopped singing, people would hear it, and Katharine and Almásy would be discovered. They're able to make love in a passionate, noisy way, and Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas really give themselves over completely to that moment. That's the essential foundation on which everything else is built.

  O: I remember Anthony Minghella talking about how as the director he had to choreograph the lovemaking scene. He gave the actors very specific directions. He charted out each individual movement, which gave them a greater freedom to act, so they didn't have to worry about inventing or have to compose the movements themselves. Then in the editing stage you performed another sort of choreography on a three-dimensional level, finessing what you were given.

  M: I guess what I'm trying to get at with all this—the I Ching business included—is that films, when they work, are functioning at a complex level of harmonic interaction—of sounds and images and acting and costume and art direction and photography and on and on. At the beginning we have a script which, complex as it may be, is like a simple melodic line, but we don't yet have an orchestrated score. The director—who is the closest we have to the conductor of the piece, visually speaking—doesn't have a way of orchestrating all these things except through talking and instruction by example and sometimes, it seems, through some kind of divine intervention. If every decision that had to be made on the film had to be articulated, spelled out in detail, the film would never get done….