Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  From: Walter Murch

  Subject: Re: Charleston

  Date: 9/2/02 4:41 PM

  To: Anthony Minghella

  Caro Ant:

  Coraggio! The material is going together very well. Aggie was here over the weekend and very moved and impressed with what she saw. Muriel and Ann as well.

  The coming into the world of the new is never easy because there are no guidelines.

  The Furies are jealous of such beauty and attack with weather.

  Perseverance Furthers.

  KYPU

  Etc.

  or as Stein put it in “Lord Jim”:

  “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? ... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be? ... I will tell you! ... In the destructive element immerse.”

  Butcher ... Hmm ... You could, but I think a wild line would do more to identify him. In the hurry of escaping, and him on the ground at night, I don’t think that we would know who we were looking at.

  Your pal in Bucharest,

  W. xox

  * * *

  September 2, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Sad email from Ant about woes—tropical storm Edouard is on its way to meet them.

  * * *

  Murch email to Minghella, September 5, 2002

  Remember that the first cut is not the film, it is a lens through which the film is glimpsed. My job at this point is to make the lens as clear and optically true as I can. Blessings upon you soldier of cinema.

  * * *

  Just then, an unexpected producing crisis strikes that will demand Murch’s attention. Whether for its own financial reasons or because of the size of the total budget, MGM pulls out of its financing deal for Cold Mountain. Miramax, left holding a half-empty bag, needs to find a partner with $40 million to complete the movie.

  September 10, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Anthony wants to make a demo DVD of key scenes from the film for extra financing. Can I do this somehow in the time available? Can you give me help?

  Origins of the Cold Mountain Project

  Cold Mountain originated as a United Artists/MGM motion picture. The initial producers, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger (Bona Fide Productions), took the book to Mirage Enterprises, the company partnered by Sydney Pollack and Minghella, for Pollack to consider directing. Pollack wanted Minghella to direct. The two entities connected with Lindsay Doran at United Artists/MGM, who’d worked with Pollack on previous pictures. Meanwhile Cold Mountain had become a best-seller and a hot property. The Bona Fide/Mirage/United Artists group bid for the film rights in an auction among several producers, including actor Brad Pitt’s company. Author Charles Frazier liked what Minghella said in their phone conversation about how he’d adapt and realize the novel for screen, and the Bona Fide/Mirage group won the rights with their $1.5 million offer. Harvey Weinstein, Miramax co-chairman, loved the story and the screenplay, so Miramax Films came on as a co-producing distributor, committing itself to 50 percent financing of the $80 million project. All was going along as planned until MGM executives decided that weather conditions and other difficulties were sending costs uncontrollably higher, and backed out.

  Murch and Minghella had been through this kind of thing before. It’s not that unusual for major studio films, like their low-budget independent cousins, to have last-minute fiscal crises. Minghella’s first picture with Miramax, The English Patient, started off with just such drama. Fox Studios put up production financing after producer Saul Zaentz had developed the project to the takeoff point. As crew and cast were assembling in Italy, and sets were being built, Fox got cold feet and pulled out. Minghella asked the cast and crew not to leave, he was that confident in the project’s viability. Minghella and Zaentz quickly shopped the project around, got Harvey Weinstein to put up the $30 million budget, and Minghella was shooting two weeks later.

  The only benefit of MGM pulling out of Cold Mountain at this late date is there is some film footage in the can, and it can be shown to attract interest. So Miramax, through Minghella, asks Murch to cut together a promotional sequence—a selling tool with sample scenes to attract a new studio partner. Murch gets right to work and makes another footage calculation:

  September 11, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Estimate Length:

  Of the scenes I have cut together so far, forgetting the battle = 34.45

  These were estimated to be = 18.14

  So expansion rate = 1.9

  For an estimated 2.48 length x 1.9 = 5.20.

  Five hours and twenty minutes.....

  How can I best break the news to Anthony? For I must...

  One week later Murch completes the first draft of a 25-minute sample sequence on DVD. And with a memo to the files he reminds himself about taking useful editing notes—never to forget that lesson of rediscovering the alternate line reading, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” from The Conversation.

  September 20, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  In taking editing notes the skill is to think that every line reading might have a context in which it could be good. Imagine the cuts, and the good might lie right next to the bad. Don’t under any circumstances write off a take as being throughout no good. If you must, then say WHY it is no good. This sharpens your perception as well as being a good reference later on.

  Murch put scenes together in conjunction with each other for the first time in cutting the sample DVD. Now, by editing actual scenes, the expansion factor is no longer theoretical. How will he ever bring the film in with a releasable running time? Working under the stress of a deadline to finish the sample DVD, Murch gets more comfortable with Final Cut Pro, and like Minghella and the producers, also contemplates wholesale scene removals.

  September 22, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Left eye seeing double.

  Where can script be cut: Inman start on his journey faster, and the area around Maddy, Junior redux, Sarah. Sarah could go if you were being brutal. Feel more and more comfortable with Final Cut, especially since QuicKeys can work with it. Make more use of duplicated keys and the f keys.

  “Junior redux” is a scene Minghella added to the screenplay late in the game. On his journey back to Cold Mountain Inman meets up with Reverend Veasey (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). The two fugitives take shelter with Junior, a backwoods moonshiner with questionable motives and a house full of sirens. Junior uses these available women to lure Inman and Veasey into his trap: turning Inman and Veasey over to the Home Guard for a bounty. In the added scene, Inman returns to Junior’s farm after his encounter with Maddy, and kills Junior in revenge, retrieving his LeMats pistol and the book Ada gave him. Faced with the fact that the first assembly is likely to be over five hours long, with all the attending financial, scheduling, and editing consequences, Minghella decides to abandon the Junior killing scene, and it is not filmed.

  Meanwhile, executives at Miramax see the DVD with the sample scenes and send word back to Murch through producer Bill Horberg that they are happy. Already there is a feeling at the studio that Renée Zellweger’s performance as Ruby is dazzling, that she will be an important element in the film’s success, and that Murch should adjust the sample reels accordingly.

  September 25, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Anthony came to cutting rooms [on his return from filming in the US] and liked what he saw—the cut footage and the facility. A refuge. He thought that I had put together a lot of stuff, despite that it seems to me that I haven’t. That funny perspective we have of what we do. Anthony finishes each day thinking that he hasn’t gotten anything—I remember it well from Return to Oz.

  Renée Zellweger as Ruby in Cold Mountain.

  October 5, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Call from Bill H. about Tap
e for MMX. They want to include more Renée and have less battle, keep it at 25 minutes. He said Anthony would phone.

  At last, the Final Cut Pro system is running smoothly. The hardware, software, and workflow hums along; footage from the North Carolina shoot is screened and logged; the DVD demo is out the door; Murch can breathe relatively easy for the moment. It’s a good time to introduce an innovation made possible only by virtue of Final Cut Pro: giving assistants a chance to do some real editing.

  October 6, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  A scene for everyone to cut: put them to work! Now that we have almost caught up.

  Up until the early 1970s, when film editors began switching from upright Moviolas to flatbed Steenbecks and KEMs, assistants worked in closer proximity with their editors—more like apprentices at their sides. But new editing systems began to push apprentices out the door, literally. An editor no longer needed an assistant right there, handing up film rolls and filing trims. Gone, too, was the chance for an assistant to learn the craft by watching and participating in editing moment by moment. The move to Avid accelerated the process of estrangement. Assistants began to work at their own edit stations doing file management, or on the film conform bench, away in other rooms. Murch seizes on Final Cut Pro’s inherent pluralism to make film editing more accessible. “Another upward twist of the spiral,” as he puts it.

  October 11, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  The guys have installed FCP on their machines and are getting ready to start cutting. Sean is helping them and they are excited.

  Murch seems to be in the zone. There’s joy in the work, being fully engaged, pushing the technical limits. He’s signing emails to Ramy: “Narok!! Valter Murcescu.”

  Assistant editors before biking to work on Cold Mountain in Bucharest.

  Chapter 7. The Flow of It

  The eye on the pole.

  OCTOBER 13, 2003—BUCHAREST

  Three months into production, Murch is working 12 to 14 hours a day, six days out of every seven. But he faithfully takes an eight-mile run once a week, on Sunday, his one day off. He throws a coin onto a city map, then heads off in that direction from the hotel. Bucharest is a wonderfully strange city, with much to take in, so he brings along two tools of the trade: a digital still camera and a microcassette audio recorder. Today, a fine fall Sunday, is particularly plentiful:

  October 13, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Good Run out Plevnei Boulevard to the pedestrian overpass across the RR tracks.

  Main entrance of Cotroceni Palace, passing it just now.

  Took a picture of an eye on a telephone post—beautiful.

  An older woman in an orange overcoat: talked to me about “sports” as I ran by on Plevnei.

  On Giuleshti—why does this all feel familiar in some strange way? The northern part of Manhattan, southern part of the Bronx when I was growing up.

  Grand Overpass: you can drive onto it from Giuleshti, but how do you get off it onto Grivitsei? It seemed like you could from the street map I just passed.

  The halfway point is the little pizza place on Grivitsei that they were painting up about a month ago.

  A wedding at St. George’s: with an accordion player outside welcoming them in.

  * * *

  The Story of the Eye on the Pole

  “It was in a bleak industrial boulevard and I was the only pedestrian. I had a creepy sensation someone was looking at me. I went back a few yards and found this eye looking at me from an old political poster. It was on a huge power pylon that had been painted over, but some of the paint had flaked off, revealing the eye. It was alternately frowning and encouraging at the same time, depending on where you imagined the nose to be. I made it my computer screen background—a talisman for the rest of Cold Mountain. It represented the ambiguous position I found myself in—doing this unusual thing with Final Cut Pro on such a large budget film in such a place as Romania.”

  * * *

  Next day, it’s back to work upstairs at Kodak Cinelabs. At this stage in the filmmaking process Murch organizes his editing activities into what he calls “groups.” He defines a group as the amount of film he can “put on my plate at any one time.” Ideally, it is also a sequence, a succession of connected scenes.

  Earlier, Murch broke the script down into numbered sequences before shooting began, based on his feeling for the dramatic “clustering” of scenes. For example, group 16, as Murch catalogs it, consists of part of sequence 18 and part of sequence 19, four scenes in all: Inman and Reverend Veasey leaving the river where they hid from the Home Guard; the two of them coming upon Junior (Giovanni Ribisi) and a dead bull; helping Junior dispose of the bull; Junior inviting them back to his place; and the men being greeted by the women at the cabin. In the screenplay these are part of scene 93 and all of scenes 94, 95, and 96. Murch’s one-line description for the sequence is: “Inman & V: find saw, meet Junior, ‘There’ll be tang.’” There are a total of 45 sequences in the film, and they consist of 213 scenes.

  October 14, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  If I finish Group 12 today, God willing then I will have cut 12½ minutes in three working days from start to finish, which would be 25 minutes a six-day week. If I could maintain that... I would be done cutting the film three days after they finish shooting... Inshallah. 01/14/03: I did not even come close. 02/14/03: I hope to be all finished by Monday Feb 17th.

  During production, selecting a group to work on is simply a function of what sections are available in their entirety—what’s been shot. A scene that has been shot has its card marked with a yellow tag, so when Murch looks over his scene boards and spots an adjacent set, all with yellow tags, he’ll designate that as a group. But group 15, for example, was made up of four disconnected scenes: 56–Rooster attacks Ada; 67–Ada looks into the well; 86–Ruby and Ada build a fence; and the main part of 93–Veasey finds a saw. A group averages 15,000 feet of film dailies, or three hours. By working in these hunks, Murch’s notes can be “proportional and useful,” he says. “Any smaller and I’d be too picky and detailed; any longer and I’d be overwhelmed.”

  * * *

  Murch’s First Viewing Notes of Shot #459-bi7

  Angle up the creek with calm water in foreground, Junior pulls the Bull and then both hands up when turn to Veasey, good see him get the liquor. Inman enters on Tassel. Good Inman kneeling by stream for dialogue.

  * * *

  Murch views each shot from the group, making a second set of notes about what he sees. He made the first set of notes during dailies, the day after shooting. Murch puts notes into the logbook on his laptop. It’s a record-keeping system set up in FileMaker Pro that he designed for this purpose, first used on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The single record (shown on the next page) contains all the editing information for one camera take: a wide shot in group 16/sequence 18—Inman, Veasey, and Junior stand in the creek; Inman and Veasey help Junior with the dead bull.

  Murch’s first set of notes from dailies screenings are simple, descriptive, and record his immediate emotional reactions—all that’s really required at this point in the process. The notes from his second viewing will be more detailed and analytical, go deeper, and record the footage counts for each of the 20 “beats,” or dramatic moments, that Murch feels in this single shot. “The first set of notes are a lover’s first impression of the beloved,” Murch says later. “The second set are a surgeon’s notes before making the first incision.”

  * * *

  On Note Taking

  He uses very base language in the description of shots when he first sees them. He’ll say things like, “Her forehead looks like a washboard.” It’s very simple language. He’ll know exactly what the first viewing meant to him.

  —Edie Ichioka, Murch’s assistant editor on The English Patient

  * * *

  Murch makes these scene cards by hand. When a group is marked with a yellow tag, it means the scenes have been shot and they’re ready for editing.

&n
bsp; A page from Murch’s logbook for the scene of Veasey, Inman, Junior, and the bull.

  The same scene as written in the screenplay.

  As he is writing his “surgeon’s” notes, Murch hasn’t yet looked at Minghella’s shooting comments, which come with script supervisor Dianne Dreyer’s notes as well. Interestingly, there is no distinction between Minghella’s and Dreyer’s comments. When Murch finally toggles FileMaker to reveal Minghella/Dreyer’s comments for this particular take, he finds simply, “With Hallelujah.” The note means there was an extra line recorded for this take: Veasey’s exclamation as he runs into the woods to defecate.

  Work on a group normally takes three days. On the first day, Murch screens and takes notes. If a group consists of three hours of film (a typical amount), it will take Murch nine hours to watch it, stopping as necessary to make notes. On the second day, he’ll use FCP to assemble the material into scenes—the first time the material has been joined together editorially. He will do this with the sound turned off, even if it is a dialogue scene, treating everything as if it were a silent movie. On his third day with a group, Murch turns on the sound and refines his work of the previous day—trimming beginnings and endings of shots, moving dialogue around, overlapping picture and sound. He is finding the film’s rhythm and getting shots to work more precisely with each other. Larger structural issues that may arise are noted but left undone. It’s not yet time for those kinds of decisions. As Murch describes it, he “doesn’t know enough yet, and I’m only the editor.” So he works with “eyes half-closed, not expressing opinions unreservedly.” Until the first assembly is completed, every scene gets the benefit of the doubt.