Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  On assuming the director’s mantle (he never really stops being the writer), Minghella takes his screenplay and transmutes it into film. This director’s adaptation, while wholly different from the writer’s, is no less drastic. A new set of accommodations and adjustments get made based on practicalities such as locations, schedules, budget, and creative surprises—both good and bad.

  The admixture of love and death is a thematic combination to which Minghella has consistently been drawn, starting with his first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. The story of Cold Mountain is certainly predicated on this motif. In love, but separated and surrounded by death, the protagonists Inman and Ada spend most of the film apart. Inman goes off to war with the Confederate Army, receives a near-fatal wound after the Battle of Petersburg, and recuperates in a hospital by the sea before beginning a dangerous journey on foot back to Ada and Cold Mountain. Ada, alone in Cold Mountain, struggles to manage Black Cove Farm after her father dies, while she fends off Captain Teague—the leader of the vigilante-like Home Guard—and learns how to survive on the farm from Ruby, a local mountain girl. Both lead characters experience many separate violent episodes. Other than at the very beginning and very end of the film, there are no romantic scenes between Inman and Ada to leaven the brutality.

  A week after arriving in Romania, Murch gives Minghella a new set of script notes. One of the issues Murch raises with Anthony is the challenge of integrating the story’s piquancy (or “tang,” as a line from that draft of the screenplay expressed it) with its romance—found, postponed, and regained. The sharply detailed hand-to-hand combat of the initial Civil War battle scene, as well as individual killings and shootings along Inman’s journey back to Cold Mountain, have to be stitched into a fabric of longing and desire between Inman and Ada. Not an easy accommodation in the film world, where stories tend to lean toward one genre or the other.

  * * *

  From Walter Murch’s Script Notes to Anthony Minghella

  Cold Mountain—Notes, July 7, 2002

  Balance of “tanginess” and romance: how to find the right tone which will embrace both the blunt rawness of some of the situations, and the romance. The two do not naturally alloy to each other, and there will be some members of the audience for whom the vile stew of blood and innards [a descriptive line from the screenplay]—along with the various rooster, goat and sheep decapitations and skinnings (people being generally more squeamish about animal than human violence)—will make it impossible for them to feel warmly romantic when the time comes. As we discussed yesterday morning, perhaps it is the richness of the nature that surrounds our characters that might provide the key.

  * * *

  Surprisingly, especially for such a congenial, sensitive, soft-spoken person, Minghella chose to occasionally write even more “tang” into the screenplay than was written into the novel—not simply in the visual details he wants to show, but in the plot itself. One good example is a scene late in both the novel and the motion picture when Inman, nearing the end of his long trek back to Cold Mountain, is given shelter from a storm by Sara, a struggling young farm widow with a sickly baby.

  This episode appears in the chapter “Bride Bed Full of Blood,” about two-thirds into the novel. Inman, the injured, starving Confederate soldier who left the war and “wandered the mountains for days, lost and befogged through a stretch of wretched weather,” is finally nearing Cold Mountain, where he hopes his love, Ada, still waits for him. A little man named Potts tells Inman about “a good gal down the road three or four mile that will feed you and ask no questions.” Sara is only 18 years old, and “a pretty thing, little and slim and tight-skinned.” All she has of value is some chickens and a hog she’s been fattening up. She lets Inman into her cabin, fixes him dinner, and gives him a place to sleep in the corn crib—until later in the night, when she invites him into her bed for platonic company and to “bear witness to her tale.” The next morning Inman wakes to a raid by three Union soldiers. He escapes out a window and watches as the men harass Sara, put her infant girl out into the cold, and finally steal her chickens and hog. Inman follows the Federals through the woods, ambushes and kills them, and returns to Sara’s with the chickens (two are now cooked) and the hog. He spends another night with Sara after they butcher the hog together. Since Sara’s baby girl, “had a croupy cough, Inman figured there was little reason to expect it to come out the other side of winter alive.” Being restless, Sara sings to the baby, her “tones spoke of despair, resentment, an undertone of panic. Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed.” The baby sleeps and Sara then sings “a murder ballad called ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William,’” which includes the lyrics of the chapter’s title:

  I dreamed that my bower was full of red swine,

  And my bride bed full of blood.

  Then, with “a reduction of sadness” as written in the novel, Inman and Sara sit in the cabin together, and “though they talked but little the rest of the evening, they sat side by side in front of the fire, tired from the business of living, content and resting and happy; and later they again lay in bed together. The next morning Inman continues his journey back to Ada.”

  In the screenplay for Cold Mountain this scene also appears at the two-thirds point. And it begins much the same way, except there is no Potts guiding Inman to Sara. On Inman’s arrival outside Sara’s cabin he first hears the cries of the sick baby—now a baby boy—even before he hears or sees Sara. She is a more guarded, frightened creature than the character of the book, shouting out to Inman, “I’ve got a gun.” Inside, Sara nurses baby Ethan. She tells Inman about the hog and Inman offers to help her kill and butcher it, since she doesn’t know how. The screenplay proceeds as in the book, with Inman in the corncrib, then in Sara’s bed. The morning follows likewise, when the raiding party of three Union soldiers arrives and Inman hides out back. But now, in Minghella’s screenplay, while the baby is outside in the cold, the lead soldier forces Sara back inside her cabin to rape her. Outside, the youngest soldier begins to take pity on baby Ethan. The third soldier goes into the cabin to take his turn with Sara. But Inman is inside hiding. He slits the first Union soldier’s throat, and when the other soldier comes in, he gets axed in the back by Inman. Sara runs out to rescue her baby. Inman responds to the young soldier’s sympathies for the baby and lets him escape after forcing him to take off his trousers and boots. But Sara, standing behind Inman, shoots the young soldier in the back as he runs away. Then the screenplay returns to the thread of the book. With Sara’s hog hanging upside down, slaughtered in the front yard, Inman does the butchering and Sara renders the fat into lard. Now, while she washes the hog’s intestines—not as in the novel, when she sang this to her baby—we hear Sara:

  I dreamed that my bower was full of red swine,

  And my bride bed full of blood.

  Then the screenplay extends the Sara scene into new territory. When she checks on the baby, he won’t nurse. “THE BABY IS DEAD,” reads the screenplay. She returns outside to take Inman some food, then goes back inside with his knapsack. As Inman eats the food Sara cooked he hears “the sudden shooting report of a revolver.” By Inman’s reactions we know Sara has shot herself. At dusk we see Inman dig two graves. Inside the house are two bundled bodies, one very small.

  Murch circled a couple of dozen items in the first version of Minghella’s Cold Mountain script he read (dated August 21, 2001). He drew one of those circles around the screen direction, “THE BABY IS DEAD.” Something about this distressing moment caught Murch’s attention in that early reading. In part it’s the “tang” of the scene, but he also took notice of timing and structure issues, specifically the idea of introducing such a potent, self-contained scene with a new principal character (Sara) so late in the story. The “Sara scene” and its evolution from novel to screenplay, then to first film assembly and finished motion picture, will be a good case study to follow for understanding the powerful ways in which
editing influences story and character.

  Natalie Portman as Sara.

  Wrangling the Gear

  Murch’s first assistant, Sean Cullen, and Murch’s son, Walter, the second assistant, have now arrived in Bucharest. They begin to nail down the workflow that they will soon be responsible for: from film to telecine to preparing dailies to digitizing in Final Cut Pro. Sean quickly discovers sound problems stemming from the equipment and software that Kodak Cinelabs in Bucharest uses to do its telecine transfers. Cullen writes an email to Ramy inquiring about the Broadcast Wave audio file format the lab uses to prepare dailies. How can he get Final Cut Pro to read this kind of sound file, which isn’t native to it? Dan Fort and John Taylor, two of DFT’s house experts, provide Sean with a revised workflow that steps through the sound conversions he will need to make. This will not be the last time Cullen has to solve an audio-conversion problem on Cold Mountain.

  Sean Cullen begins synching up first dailies in Bucharest.

  JULY 5, 2002—LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  The computer equipment DigitalFilm Tree ordered for Walter starts arriving at DFT on Sunset Boulevard, piling up in the halls and in the training room where Murch and Cullen sat just a few weeks earlier. DFT takes delivery of four Mac G4s and begins to set them up. Since it is a holiday weekend, however, the RAID storage drives from Rorke in Minnesota will not be shipped until Monday, July 8. This causes Ramy some anxiety since he knows he still has a lot to do before DFT can ship reliable gear to Murch. In an email to Rorke, Ramy requests shipment even if all the cables are not included; those he can find in Los Angeles. He signs off, “Sorry to be so ‘grasping,’ but this is the biggest thing we’ve ever done and the production starts shooting next week. — Festive regards, Ramy.”

  Reinforcements arrive at DFT the following day when Zed flies in from New York and takes the airport shuttle directly to DigitalFilm Tree. He puts his bags down and immediately gets to work with John Taylor, helping to prepare the Cold Mountain workflow for digitizing video into Final Cut Pro. “Ramy called me and said, ‘It’s on.’ I literally walked out my door and didn’t go back to even visit for months after,” Zed says later. “Had somebody said at the time, ‘Dude, one day you’re going to be working right next to that man, Walter Murch,’ I would have just shouted, ‘You’re out of your mind. It’s just simply not possible!”

  Murch’s Final Cut Pro gear at Digital Film Tree.

  “The system we built for Cold Mountain really set the bar,” Ramy says later. The capacity and reliability of the equipment DFT ordered for Walter “was like bringing a sledgehammer to the table. It was the one system we needed to work right, and it did. The same thing with the workflow. If we ever wanted a workflow to be perfect, that was when we needed it to be perfect.” DFT prepares a document for Sean with the complete procedure for getting shot film safely and properly into Murch’s edit system. It has 31 separate steps.

  As Ramy and his staff prepare Murch’s equipment, they take extra precautions. During this period, they are seeing a lot of problems with new Apple computers. “We’d had some Apple computers that just died. They just stop working, the processor, the motherboard, something, inordinately,” Ramy recalls. He goes on to describe how DFT applied a special program to run on Walter’s gear to test its limits. “We ran an application on all four systems that was intended to make the process fail. It used obscene computational activities that would literally heat the system and make it fail. But those systems passed muster.”

  Later Ramy reflects on that intense period during July 2002. He recalls how gossip and scuttlebutt began appearing on the Internet (some is still posted on various digital video and filmmaking Web sites) asserting that Apple paid the Cold Mountain production, or Miramax, to use its computers and its Final Cut Pro software. “The rumor that Apple paid Walter, Miramax, or us—BS! They bought that bad boy. At the beginning there was talk of leasing the system through Apple Europe. But Apple Europe had never worked on a feature film like this, and the delays were putting real pressure on us. So then it was Bill Horberg who said, ‘Screw it, we’ll buy it on the spot.’ And they did.”

  * * *

  Zed Saeed On Life with Apple

  The first Macs came out in 1984—my second year in college—and my school got some of the first ones. It was impossible to get time on them, and I had to sign up way in advance. I was studying film and the idea of combining computers and film has fascinated me ever since. For many years I have done nothing but work on where and how Apple software and hardware fails, and how to get around it. This isn’t to say that Apple has poor design. The evidence is quite to the contrary. Everything made by humans fails, except that in Apple’s case the design is elegant and open enough for people like me to find a way around that and keep going. That is the ultimate compliment for a technology company.

  * * *

  Over the July 4 holiday weekend and into the following Monday, Tim Serda and other DFT staff uncrate equipment, plug it together, and run a series of tests using digitized film material. Ramy, still a documentarian at heart despite his new role as systems supplier to Cold Mountain, picks up his DV camera and shoots footage of all the activity. At one point he walks into the training room amid all the equipment and finds Serda logging equipment serial numbers into a laptop. Ramy asks him if he has any helpful tidbits to pass on to Sean in Bucharest. “He shoulda used the Avid—that’s the only advice I can give him,” Tim says seriously. Then he turns to the camera and flashes a silly grin.

  In Bucharest, meanwhile, Murch gets to see the first video transfers from film footage.

  July 8, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Here at Kodak, looking at telecine of Jude’s tests. Look good.

  “We tested the living shit out of those systems,” Ramy says later. “We didn’t want them to fail in Romania. But the systems held up. They never failed. And we went through everything we could think of in terms of what could go wrong.”

  “And built a margin of twice as much as was needed,” Zed adds.

  “Always assuming the worst, because, mind you,” Ramy continues, “we are dealing with Final Cut. Final Cut as we know it, as we’ve applied it...”

  “...does nothing but fail,” Zed says.

  “All the time,” Ramy continues. “It was scary.”

  Ramy and Zed had worked with Final Cut Pro for years, beginning with its initial product release. They loved its flexibility and affordability, but they also knew the application as intimately as a lover, with all its blemishes and imperfections. After all, they made their living troubleshooting FCP for clients and applying it for all manner of film and HD post work.

  July 9, 2:00 a.m., at DigitalFilm Tree. John Taylor (left) and Jim Foreman (right) finish reviewing the workflow for setting up Murch’s Final Cut Pro system before Foreman flies off to Bucharest.

  “It was a scary proposition,” Ramy continues, “that it would be in Romania, of all places, with bad electricity and all. We got the best power supplies, best components, and then all of that culminated in us tearing it down. We had no concern about it being rebuilt again in Romania. It was already detail by detail built here. Still, there was really just a sense of fear about it, that, my God, all this equipment is about to go to Romania.”

  Ramy explains how DFT beefed up FCP’s capability for accessing the digitized media that sits on the hard drives: “This is how we overshot the requirements. We provided Walter with the bandwidth so he could process data rates of 125 megabytes a second without a problem. And you know how much he needed? Two megabytes a second.” This is like the difference between logging onto the Internet with an old 28.8 kilobit per second dial-up modem versus logging on with a DSL line. “It wasn’t us being foolish. When you work on a project with that kind of complexity, you can’t be robust enough. No one could have thought this back then, but in many ways Final Cut ended up being a better system. For whatever reason, Final Cut, the animal, was more suited for that kind of irregular environment, bad elect
ricity and all.”

  “It wasn’t as finicky as Avid,” Zed adds.

  JULY 9, 2002—LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  By afternoon, DFT is ready to ship all the gear and software to Romania. Ramy phones the freight expediter for a 4:00 p.m. pickup. Even with the rush of getting everything packed up and prepared, he finds time to share the moment with Walt Shires, who had been part of the original orientation session with Murch and Cullen. Ramy sends Shires a collection of emails from the last several days, with this cover note: