“There was a crucial issue with Nino Rota’s music, which Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, didn’t like,” Murch says, finishing his lunch. “He really didn’t like it—felt that it dragged the film down.” Murch was there with Coppola, at a crucial 1972 meeting at Evans’s house.
“Evans wanted to bring in Henry Mancini to replace the score, but Francis threatened to take his name off the film if that happened. So Evans decided on a compromise: he, Evans, would recut Nino Rota’s music and preview the film, then Francis would recut Evan’s recut, have another preview and may the best version win. I looked at Francis, and he looked at me. We both knew that this wasn’t going to happen—there was only time to mix the film once. Whoever got to go first would win. It was one of those moments when everything hung in the balance.”
“Just then actress Ali McGraw comes out, Evans’s wife at the time,” Murch recalls. “She says, ‘Bob, don’t forget, we’re going to Acapulco on vacation.’ ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right,’ Evans says. ‘Okay, Francis, you guys do your thing first and then I’ll do mine when I come back.’”
“I looked at Francis and we both knew we had won, but we also knew we had to maintain the fiction that everything was going to go the way Evans had proposed. But it was obvious to us, and to anyone who stopped to think about it, that there just wasn’t time to do two versions, evaluate everything, have the debates that would inevitably happen, and then produce a final mix.”
Coppola and Murch mixed the music the way they wanted it. By the time Evans and Ali McGraw came back from Mexico, it was too late. The momentum was with the version of the film that was ultimately released, and Nino Rota’s music went on to become part of popular culture.
By now it’s after 4 p.m., and Murch’s return flight to London is scheduled to depart JFK at 9 p.m. Before leaving he’d like to talk to Minghella, who will stay one more day in New York to do more ADR. The two of them haven’t yet had time to discuss last night’s screening, the focus group discussion, the Miramax meeting, or their own set of notes. Murch, who doesn’t own a cell phone, borrows one to call Tim Bricknell, Minghella’s assistant, to see about getting together.
“I’m jolly!” Murch says to Bricknell, who is just down the street with Minghella inside the Mercer Hotel.
“Does Mr. Minghella want to talk to Mr. Murch?” Walter asks.
A pause.
“Okay, back in London, then.”
“We’ll pick it up Monday when he gets back,” Murch says returning the cell phone. “He wants to get some distance from the collective angst that surrounds the picture right now. It’s his way of reclaiming the picture.”
The Apple Store in New York City.
Murch looks at his watch and decides there’s time to go to the Apple store nearby on Prince Street.
Murch comes here not to test drive the G5 computers, pick up something for his Final Cut Pro system, or check his email, but to buy his son a birthday present—an iPod. Since this is Murch’s first-ever visit to an Apple store, he explores it, but does so quickly, taking only a few minutes to cruise through the crowded displays of computers and other electronics, then upstairs through the bookstore area. He swiftly purchases the music player and returns to the stunning transparent glass stairway in the center of the store that connects the two floors. For the next 15 minutes he examines the staircase, its materials, and how it’s put together. He pulls out a digital camera and takes several photos, moving a companion into position on the staircase to properly capture its scale and proportions—another case of Murch admiring Apple’s attention to design and function. “Maybe something like this could work for our place in Primrose Hill,” he says.
Murch is making a fair swap, being here inside the Apple store. After all, the Final Cut Pro team had come to the Old Chapel in London two weeks earlier to visit him.
Returning the Favor
Apple’s Bill Hudson, Brian Meaney, and Will Stein, along with Brett Hale and Jeff Lowe were returning home through London from the IBC broadcasting technology conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Hudson and Meaney had contacted Murch earlier to ask if they could come to see him, and he agreed.
* * *
From: Walter Murch
Date: August 31, 2003
To: Brian Meaney
Subject: Visit in London?
Dear Brian:
Good to hear from you, and good to know you will be coming to London.
Yes, we will be here and would love to see you all. We will be doing some recutting, premixing, recording music, and doing final visual effects and color timing. Hectic, but we will certainly make room for you.
Best wishes,
Walter Murch
* * *
Late at night on September 16, the day before the Apple delegation was scheduled to arrive, Walter walked through the quiet streets near Primrose Hill, heading home from the Old Chapel. “So, we have Apple sometime tomorrow,” he says. “We’ve worked up three or four pages of things that it would be nice to include in the next version of Final Cut. Sean was just talking to Ramy at DigitalFilm Tree, going over that list and double-checking with him whether some of those features had already been taken care of in Final Cut 4.0.”
Walter then recounted the list of surprises he’d been through the last few days. He crunched together a last-minute temp sound mix for a 35mm print version of Cold Mountain that Miramax could show in Tokyo to potential Japanese distributors. Pollack and Horberg were in the edit room for three days, going over the cut. Murch had expected them to be there for only one day. Since Murch has not heard anything more from Apple since the end of August, he’s not sure whether or not they’re still planning to come. “We haven’t heard a peep out of them, they haven’t told us whether they’re in town or not.”
Before leaving the Old Chapel a few minutes earlier, Anthony told Murch about one more surprise: Weinstein is flying in from New York the day after Apple’s visit so he can see the latest cut.
He’s asked about the relentlessness of it all. “You have to keep your knees loose in this game,” Murch said with a smile. “You never can tell what’s going to happen.”
His stamina is palpable, considering he’s just worked from 8:30 a.m. to midnight, on this, the 451st day of editing, which began in the morning in Soho at the premix, and ended with editing back in Hampstead.
“Is it midnight?” Murch asked guilelessly. He truly didn’t know what time it was.
By this point it seemed Murch was operating far outside the parameters of normal time. The feeling is akin to exiting a very absorbing movie—that sensation of having no idea what time it is, or if it’s going to be day or night when you get outside.
“Being in the zone? Yeah,” Murch said. “It’s even more powerful when I’m mixing,” Walter says as he looked up at the western sky. “Hey, there’s Mars.”
The guys from Apple arrived at the Old Chapel at 1 p.m. the next day, having first gone by cab to Fleet Street instead of Fleet Road. Walter welcomes them into his edit room and invites them to watch the first reel of Cold Mountain. After the battle scene finishes, the large monitor goes black and Murch turns up the lights.
Murch’s guests were astounded by what they saw, and a little stunned from the intensity of the battle, which is understandable.
“Thank you, that’s awesome,” Jeff Lowe said, breaking the momentary silence.
“Thank you to you guys. It was fantastic,” Murch responded, meaning Final Cut Pro.
“Thank you that it actually worked,” Hudson says, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow in mock relief. The group shared a laugh.
“It’s been all transparency, openness, and speed,” Sean Cullen said. “There were no train wrecks. No down time like we had with Avid.”
Murch pointed out to the Apple guys that his experience solving Final Cut Pro problems wasn’t all that different from what he previously had to do with Avid when it released a buggy new version of Film Composer just before editing began on The Talented Mr. Ri
pley. “Everyone on the ground—meaning people who were actually using it—had started to try and figure out workarounds on their own. Avid maintained that there was no problem, or if there were problems it was operator error. I said to myself back in early 2002 when I was contemplating Final Cut, that if this was the situation in Rome with Avid, what was it going to be like in Bucharest with Final Cut?” Another round of appreciative, slightly nervous laughter from the Apple delegation.
“You can still see the twinkle of the Atari game-playing kid inside these guys, even though they’ve grown up and become successful.”
“In the end, there was never anything,” Murch continued. “We would have the occasional crash, but they would be what I would term ‘friendly’ crashes, unlike the ‘smoke out of the back of the machine’ crashes that we would get with the Avid on Ripley. And we had this redundancy of having four machines rather than two. If one of them had really gone down, you can still roll a cart on three wheels. You don’t have to have four. You just have to rebalance things. But that never happened. We were able to use the four workstations the way we had designed it, me cutting on one, Sean doing file management and cutting on another, and the two others—one for digitizing material into our system, the other for burning DVDs. That all worked great, both for stability and for the security of knowing we had redundancy, which in the end, was never called upon.”
“I spent more time with the machines waiting for me,” Cullen said, “which is also a sea change. On the Avid, it’s always the machines telling you, ‘Well, you want that, I’m in the middle of making this, and it means I have to stop.’ Whereas whenever I needed to do something, if I needed more DVDs, I could always repurpose one machine to get out the DVDs I needed. It was just a whole different scenario for me as a first assistant.”
“It’s a great world,” Hudson said. “The confluence of the technology and the creative.”
Apple’s Final Cut Pro team visits Murch in London. Left to right: Will Stein, Brett Hale, Brian Meaney, Walter Murch, Sean Cullen, and Bill Hudson. (Not pictured: Jeff Lowe.)
* * *
Flashes of Film
I have something in my head: a clip of film, someone saying, “Have you gone maaad?” with mock disbelief. Where is it from?? A film I think, and a film I worked on... It was from “Unbearable” and it was the closeup of the Soviet interrogator grilling Tereza after she had been arrested with her photographs.
—from Murch’s Journal, October 6, 2003
* * *
“Shall we have a sandwich?” Walter asked. The discussion continues over lunch, with Cullen and Murch going over a list of suggested improvements for future versions of Final Cut Pro. Later that night, at 11 p.m., Sean and his wife, Juliette become parents for the second time, with the arrival of their daughter, Florence.
Final Picture Cutting
Murch returns to London from the last preview in New Jersey. The final mix is scheduled to begin October 15, less than two weeks away.
Friday, October 3, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Over Atlantic on way back tired but satisfied that we got the job done. Meet this morning w/troops and go over the landscape for the next few weeks.
All the suggestions coming out of the final New Jersey preview need to be analyzed, consolidated, reviewed, and put up against the changes Minghella and Murch also still want to try. Taking the upcoming weekend off to recoup and recharge, Murch has 12 days to do all of the remaining picture editing before locking the film.
So once again, Minghella and Murch begin from the beginning, making adjustments and removals. By Tuesday two and a half minutes are gone. Substantial changes are also still getting made—Minghella adds a third letter for Ada to read, voiceover, after Inman arrives at Cold Mountain, sitting atop the snowy ridge. Murch never leaves the old Chapel before 1 a.m. all this week. But now, at least, he has a companion on his walks home: Hana, his border terrier, who arrived with Aggie from California last June. The dog often accompanies Walter to the edit room, where she watches patiently from the couch.
Harvey Weinstein may not be there in body, but he seems to have an eye on the edit room.
Thursday, October 9, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Phone conversation with HW [Harvey Weinstein], talking to Anthony. HW suggests delaying the release if we can’t get the balance right. Disturbing words, to say the least. Why would he say such a thing, unless there is an ulterior motive, to frighten us into some “breakthrough” action? Which is probably what it is.
Heading home at 2.15am—another warm night like the last one.
While Anthony and Walter ought to be getting closure on sequences and reels, considering the mix begins in five days. Instead, true to form, they re-examine anything that does not yet seem quite right.
The porch scene from Cold Mountain.
Friday, October 10, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Anthony thinking of working on the porch scene [between Ada and Inman] again. We looked at the assembly. His analysis of the problem with the scene is that Inman is a man who says few words, and then talks a lot about how words don’t describe the world of nature and feelings. Also, the way it is cut down now, there is no (or just a little) friction between them, so their romance is “too easy”—an old note of mine. What if we left the scene unresolved on “I don’t know you”?
* * *
Murch on Cutting for Words or Thoughts
Cutting tight on a line emphasizes the content of the line—the words. Cutting a beat or two later will allow the audience to focus their attention on the eyes of the character, to see what he or she really thought about what was said.
* * *
One can feel that Murch is on a roller coaster now, professionally and emotionally. He is nearing completion of the picture—editing and anticipating the sound mixing—but without any final approval from the producers. It’s not surprising then to find two radically different journal entries on the same day:
Friday, October 10, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Amazing that we are where we are, with as few problems as we have. As intense as it is right now, it could be much worse.
Strong sense of suffocation. With all the competing agendas, complete the film but don’t complete it. Harvey is coming to London on Tuesday, so no doubt we will screen the film for him here at that time. Gurgle, gurgle. We will prevail, Inshallah.
On Sunday, a day off, Murch gives a three-hour lecture to the Association of Motion Picture Sound (AMPS) at De Lane Lea. He speaks about technology and movies: the first motion picture with sound made in 1894 by W. K. L. Dickson for Thomas Edison (which Murch helped to reconstruct for the Library of Congress), the vacuum tube theory of power and coherence, Final Cut Pro, and hidden regions of technical breakthroughs still to be discovered. Then, in the afternoon, perhaps suffering a bit from early “parade syndrome,” the sensation of moving backwards after the parade passes by, Walter tries to relax at his house in Primrose Hill. Sometimes stopping the momentum for even one day is not such a good idea.
Sunday, October 12, 2003, Murch’s Journal
What happens if we get to 2 hours 30 minutes and Harvey comes in and wants it to be 15 minutes shorter or will not release this year? Harvey talking about being worried about “Anthony and Walter’s health”—ominous. That is what you say when you are getting ready to take something away from somebody. “I am doing this for your health.” It is what they said when they fired me from Return to Oz.
Film is 2.32.21.
Things like that do happen in the film industry. Murch has a right to be paranoid. But neither he nor Minghella will be sent packing. It’s a passing moment of anxiety.
From the Edison/Dickson film, the first movie with sync sound, which Murch helped to restore.
Tuesday, October 14, 2003, Murch’s Journal
CM is 2.29.40 (minus end credits): Under 2½ hours! Hard to believe but there it is. I restructured reel six, interposing the Christmas dance in the middle of Sara’s, and dropped “Goodbye
Maddy,” “Goat meat in stream,” “Brown leaf hill.” One minute 40 secs disappeared. And the junctures are better I think. Nice cut from Ada closing the window to Inman in the rain heading for the “troll tree” with music, pre-lapping “Heathcliff” over the tree and then coming out of Heathcliff into the approach to Sara’s with good music taking us there. Most remarkable is the interpose of Christmas dance during the interval at Sara’s. Nice that the music creeps in as Inman is going to sleep on the corn cobs—then go to happy dancing, full flush of energy and innocence, and then out of that with thunder to Inman waking up and there is Sara asking him to come inside. So now we have cut out 2 hours 36 mins and change. In other words, we have cut The English Patient out of the assembly of Cold Mountain. Thank you for your guidance.
It’s 2:30 a.m. Wednesday morning when Walter leaves the Old Chapel with Hana trotting by his side. Later that day Harvey Weinstein and Colin Vaines, Miramax’s London executive, will come in for another viewing of Cold Mountain. Murch expects substantial conflicts.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Harvey and Colin visit. Now come and gone—3 to 7:30—went away happy, impressed with the work we had done in the last couple of weeks, tried a few ideas for cuts, loved the new reel six juxtapositions (Christmas music in the middle of Sara’s), the meeting in the gorge, the Cherokee village and the shootout/death. Liked the very ending, but Anthony has some ideas there he wants to try. “Let’s lock this picture,” said Harvey. “Lock it by Friday.” Congratulations to all. During the reel-by-reel, Hana made a beeline for Harvey, jumped up on his lap, and sat there, happily smiling. Much improved over the hangdog Hana of the last couple of days.
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