Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  “Mark would have loved to have explained this to us himself,” Joseph tells Murch, “and when he and Anthony are free from Harvey, of course, he will.” He is referring of course to Harvey Weinstein, who has returned to London to check on the film’s progress.

  * * *

  October 28, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  To commute by foot through a fountain-studded flower garden, to mix a film you enjoy working on, with people that you enjoy working with: what a blessing.

  * * *

  “What’s the Harvey situation?” Murch inquires.

  “He’s arriving any minute now.”

  “To do what?” Murch asks in between bits of ADR.

  “To destroy my edit room, I think,” Joseph says facetiously.

  “They’re going to play Harvey the narration, the voiceover?”

  “Yeah,” Joseph says. “The voiceover on reel one and reel nine, but also the new letter on reel two.”

  “Them Yankees gonna die in their own holes!”

  “I opened the door to my edit room this morning and there was Anthony,” Joseph says. “He looked like a zombie.”

  “Really? Oh, God,” Murch says.

  “Damn Yankees, trapped in...”

  “Hurry up! They’re stuck! Shoot ’em!”

  “It’s not just tiredness,” Joseph says. “It’s that weight, isn’t it?”

  Murch agrees.

  “You could feel his shoulders are a little bit down,” Joseph says.

  “Tim said he’s just getting angrier and angrier, which is not a good place to be in,” Murch says.

  “Not at this stage.”

  “Let’s get ’em, boys!”

  Like the process of editing the picture, finishing the sound mix consists of making a version, reviewing it, taking notes, addressing those notes in a new version, reviewing that, and so on—for as long as the schedule allows. That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, on a Minghella movie, new sound elements fly in as the mix progresses (ADR from the principal actors, loop group dialogue, revised music, new closing songs, and remixes of already recorded musical score). On the picture side, opening credits, closing credits, the main title sequence, and subtitles are still in process. These new and changing visual elements may throw the soundtrack off kilter, since they could require adjustments to the soundtrack structure, such as allowing more space for Kidman’s voiceover reading supplements to Ada’s letters, or adjusting musical transitions. Murch and the sound crew mix at a moving target.

  Unlike picture editing, where it’s just Murch and Minghella (and the occasional producer), the mix is more of a team effort. With so many changes to the soundtrack still being made during the final sound mix, the sound editors from each subdepartment (dialogue, ADR, effects, Foley, music) are all there, standing by to edit the soundtrack right in the theater should that be necessary. The division between sound editing and mixing is becoming less defined. In part it’s because digital sound editing technology makes instant editing possible; and automated mix boards can save settings and versions just like an audio workstation. Given that Minghella encourages collaboration (which Murch enjoys, too), sound editors are not just present, they are consulted during the mix, asked to provide notes on the mix in progress.

  “Them Yankees gonna die in their own holes!”

  Each reel is just under 20 minutes long and is mixed individually whenever it becomes ready, often out of sequential order. If final audio elements are missing from a reel, or the exact running time of final visual elements is still uncertain, that reel is put off to be mixed later.

  So how does Murch start? “I just kind of dive in,” he says. “I’ll listen to tracks in isolation and find out what works particularly well. For example, I may decide in a certain section of the battle to concentrate on people firing at each other and maybe their voices. And we won’t hear much music or other effects, like footsteps.”

  Everyone makes a list of what still needs to be fixed as a reel plays through, pegged by timecode. An LCD counter below the screen enumerates elapsed minutes and seconds. Whoever has the first note starts the discussion. It’s an audio symposium among equals; everyone’s items hold equal weight and get debated only if there is disagreement, which is rare.

  At this point, about halfway through discussion of reel one, Murch has a note. It concerns the section between the big explosion underneath the Confederate entrenchments and the charge of the Union Army.

  “Okay, at 10:07... the horse snorts and it whinnies when it gets up. But then there’s a huff-huff after that, which we could boost. Let’s keep the monitor on dim here [an across-the-board level reduction to permit conversation while mixing]. At 10:42...”

  Eddy Joseph jumps in. “Immediately after that, at 10:11, the first bit of the fife. I don’t think you should have that.”

  Mike Prestwood-Smith agrees: “I don’t like that, either.”

  “It sort of brings us out of the music,” Joseph adds.

  Murch agrees and goes on to the area where the Union Army makes its mad dash from screen left to screen right, Stars and Stripes flying, horses thundering, bayonets rattling, battle cries screeching.

  Tuesday November 4, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Finished 3 and starting 1. We ran it through and the battle sounded like a big ball of noise. Guidance and perseverance.

  “In general, this is a festival of midrange sounds [600 to 2,000 cycles],” Murch says to the sound crew. “The music is right in that range; the screaming people are in there; so are the small arms, and the rifles—right in there. What is very welcome when I hear them are sounds above and below those frequencies. Like all of the cannon fire and the subharmonic stuff. So we should find out where we have an opportunity to add something down there because it anchors everything. When Oakley hits the other guy, there’s a nice high metallic tinging sound. And also some ricochets and some things up around 5,000 or 6,000 cycles that will sing through. So if you know of any other effects that are like that, we can put them in.”

  Matt Gough hits the Play button. The projected picture (downloaded from Final Cut Pro and shown via the video track of Pro Tools for this review) jumps ahead into the peak of battle down in the pit. A chorus sings, a horse whinnies, Oakley yells as he’s run through with a bayonet, explosions go off, men scream.

  “We’ve gotten too hot on the clattery guns and stuff,” Matt says.

  “The firing of the guns is good,” Murch says. “But it’s the combination of the clatter, the screams, and the rebel yells. It’s too much all on top of itself.”

  Later that night at 8:30 pm, walking home from De Lane Lea through the now quiet, darkened streets of central London, Walter reflects on reel one and the issue of loudness and soundtrack complexity.

  “Bullets, people, explosions, music—if you’re not careful everything congeals into noise that isn’t particularly interesting. If you play a track loud and then some other track comes along that’s louder than it, you immediately transfer your attention to the louder thing. Then a masking phenomenon takes place. A whole sound element isn’t perceivable. So we have to get rid of it.”

  Murch describes the mixer’s task as “directing the attention of the audience’s ears, just as a director of photography directs its eyes.” He wants to give the audience the impression that there is sound for everything, all the time. In fact, only two or three sound concepts are present at any one moment—Murch’s rule of two and a half. Does it get tiring for Murch to mix a sequence like the Petersburg battle? “Because of the noise level it’s exhausting work since we’re immersed in it ten or twelve hours a day. The audience experiences a five-minute scene, but we’re hearing it continuously for two or three days.”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2003—SOHO, LONDON

  At a lunch break in Studio A, Tim Bricknell, Minghella’s assistant and associate producer of Cold Mountain, sits down on the couch next to Murch. Murch previews these newly revised opening titles and closing credits which are in QuickTime mo
vies on Bricknell’s PowerBook. Debbie Ross, the title sequence artist in Los Angeles, has been creating them using computer imagery. She finished these versions just a few hours ago, uploaded the sequences to a Cold Mountain FTP (file transfer protocol) server, from which Bricknell downloaded them. It’s another stunning one-two punch of digital editing technology and the Internet, increasing convenience while saving time and money.

  The title sequence uses visual images of sky, water, and mountains, and Walter comments about the pacing and rhythm among the three elements. “We looked at these like dailies,” Murch says later. “But they are ready to be imported into the film using Final Cut because the graphic sequences are in QuickTime, and Final Cut works on QuickTime.” Prior to these technological advances, Ross would have made a videotape copy of her work (or a film print, if you go back farther in time), which would have been shipped from L.A. to London (two days) for screening.

  * * *

  Anthony Minghella on British Cinema

  Rogue voices of British cinema—the independent voices, the forgotten voices, the voices from the past and from world cinema—might otherwise drown under the incessant demands of Hollywood and its irresistible machine of promotion and dissemination. I’ve been the beneficiary of that machine and am grateful to it, but I am also the product of an era which enjoyed a robust British Film Institute (BFI) in London and in the regions, where repertory cinema flourished and through which I learned while at university in Yorkshire, of the beautiful and complex worlds created by Fellini, Kurosawa, Ray, Visconti, Truffaut, de Sica, Lean and Bunuel. Right now the domination of the commercial cinema is unacceptable. Provocative cinema is in danger of being ignored, forgotten or suppressed. And the BFI must be its champion. The BFI’s job, put simply, is to love cinema, to contextualise it, and to make its treasures available.”

  —Opening night address, London Film Festival, October 31, 2003

  * * *

  Murch quickly moves his conversation with Bricknell from visual effects to the most formidable unresolved area still facing Anthony and Cold Mountain: the beginning of the film. Every storyteller knows that the start and finish to a narrative are the most vital—and the hardest to get right. The success of a story is determined right up front, when an audience meets characters, locates itself in space and time, and reads stylistic clues for tone and intention. Likewise, the choices for how a story is resolved determine whether moviegoers leave the theater satisfied, feeling two-plus hours of their time was well spent.

  “Pretend you are Anthony for a moment,” Murch says to Bricknell, “and tell me what his thinking is on the whole reel one beginning idea.”

  There are three issues: Where does Kidman’s voiceover reading of Ada’s letter begin? Where does the initial subtitle explaining the Battle of Petersburg appear and what will it say? Which music will be used for this entire section, from the studio and producer’s logos to the explosion shot?

  So far, Murch hasn’t had a chance to go over these questions directly with Minghella, who just returned to London that morning on the red-eye from New York where he, Bricknell, and ADR supervisor Mark Levinson went to record Kidman reading new material for the expanded voiceover letter. The answers Murch needs bear immediately upon choices he must make about how the picture might require recutting and when to mix which reel.

  Bricknell has some tentative answers.

  The Kidman voiceover should begin immediately after the producers’ logos but before the main “Cold Mountain” title, he says. Murch asks whether there is enough time to fit it all in. Bricknell believes so, based on Levinson having tried Kidman’s narration against the picture on his laptop during the flight back. The subtitle will go at the end of the initial wide shot that reveals the Southern army’s encampment—what is being called “the rabbit shot,” since it starts with a rabbit coming up out of a hole. But, Murch notes to Bricknell, that shot is 12 seconds too short if the subtitle is going to stay on screen long enough to be read. And since that footage was enhanced much earlier with visual effects to strengthen details in the tableau, this means going back for more visual effects, which takes time. As to the music for the opening, Bricknell reports that Minghella is still undecided: “He’s trying ‘Scarlet Tide’ at the very beginning (a song written for the movie by Elvis Costello), he’s trying ‘Pretty Bird,’ he’s trying Ralph Stanley singing ‘Tarry With Me.’ He also likes the score at the very beginning, over the credits.”

  “Okay, Murch says, “when we’re done today, I’ll go back up to the Chapel and sketch that out.”

  In an email to producer Bill Horberg about the screenplay back in June 2002, before he had left California for Romania, Murch wrote about the way Cold Mountain begins. “The beginning of the film is harder going than the material past page 35. Which is the way the book was for me—harder to get through the first hundred pages than the rest. The Battle of the Crater is the whole enchilada, and gloriously upends traditional dramatic structure. You expect a film to end with a big battle.”

  Murch likened this to Apocalypse Now, and how scenes with Kilgore (Robert Duvall) “front-loaded the film in a way it could never recover from. How could you top it? Nor could Private Ryan, for that matter. We have to watch out for this.”

  In addition to beginning with a big battle, there is a basic issue for the audience right at the start: Which side are we on? Who do we root for? “The first voice we hear in the film now is the voice of the Northerner,” Murch says, “and then we see masked soldiers with an American flag going to blow up some other army. The natural unthinking response is the guys in blue (Union) are ‘us’ and those other people in grey (Confederates) are the ‘enemy’—in fact it’s just the opposite.” Inman is the hero of the film and the people to be concerned about are the enemies of the people with the American flag. “So there’s a kind of a warp at the beginning of the film,” Murch continues, “when you alter people’s ordinary preconceptions, which is that anyone with an American flag is on the right side and people with another kind of flag are on the wrong side.”

  “The beginnings of films are wildly interpreted differently by different people. Everyone is coming into the theater in a different frame of mind, attaching their own meanings to the opening images. Everyone will put it together slightly differently. It’s very much like the beginning of Touch of Evil [which Murch re-edited in 1998]. It begins with a bomb being set, put in the trunk of a car, and then you wait three minutes and 20 seconds, and then it explodes. Here, instead of Charleton Heston and Janet Leigh, it’s Jude Law and a picture of Nicole Kidman. A bomb is underneath them. Are they going to get blown up? They do, in fact.”

  The one-hour break from the sound mix is nearly over, but there’s still enough time for Walter to take Hana out for a walk through bustling, midday Soho. “There are advantages to having me mix the film,” Murch says, trying to keep Hana’s retractable leash from tripping lunchtime walkers hurrying through the narrow alleys. “There is the same brain working on the sound as worked on the images. But a significant disadvantage is that that brain can’t be cloned. I’m not available for emergencies: ‘Break glass and use editor.’ If I were simply the editor, I could come and go from the sound mix and be working on editorial things as the film was being mixed.”

  Hana gets twisted around a traffic bollard just outside Golden Square Park before Walter lets her off leash. “There’s so much happening right now, and it’s so end-game, that unless you keep your wits about you, it’s easy to make a stupid critical mistake. We’re always braced for having to stop and re-cut a whole scene. Everyone would be amazed, I think, if that didn’t happen. So far, it looks like it’s not happening. It’s just this issue of extending the rabbit shot out by 12 seconds.”

  After lunch, Minghella comes to the mix studio to discuss possible answers for the three remaining issues at the beginning of the film: Kidman’s voiceover, the subtitle, and the music. With Murch engaged as sound mixer, and so much uncertainty surrounding the film’s ope
ning sequence, it’s understandable that Minghella wants Murch’s attention as editor.

  “When Walter is out of his running-the-mix-board mode, he needs to sit back here with me, and we need to play, in terms of offering up some alternatives,” says Minghella. “My plan at the moment is that the movie will open with the music we’ve got and keep it going right up until the entry of the tunnel and the barrels. Then we lose that music, the big overture. It does something to the first five minutes that somehow generalizes it. We need to see if there is one piece of ethnic music that can go from there to the explosion. The challenge is, can we have score, silence, ethnic music, and Ada’s voice without everything turning into a blob? It needs Walter to be sitting away from having to push the button so he can help me adjudicate.”

  There are two categories of music for Cold Mountain: original “score” composed solely for the film by Gabriel Yared and recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London, and “source music” from the Civil War era chosen by music producer T-Bone Burnett and recorded at his direction in Nashville with musicians such as Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Stuart Duncan, Dirk Powell, and the Sacred Harp Singers. Yared and Burnett work independently of each other, but under Minghella’s direction. Yared first provided musical sketches early on during production, as did Burnett. Once Murch had a first assembly and scenes became more defined, the music was elaborated.

  Sometimes Murch ignores the music’s original structural and emotional intentions and uses it the way he feels works best for the film. Over the course of editing for many months much of the score and source music gets shifted around, with Murch finding new places to use it, or even suggesting not to use some of it at all. Creative issues, such as whose music gets used where, can quickly get personal inside a film-in-progress. The buck in this case stops with the director. He is the person on the film whose job it is to resolve conflict and massage bruised egos. One moment this may involve two music composers; a few hours later Minghella might have to explain to an actor doing ADR why she is not rereading lines for her favorite scene—because it got cut.