Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  Wednesday, November 5, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Mixing reel one. Lots of Con Edison “Dig we must for a better New York” barriers up around the music at the beginning, the Ada narration, and the extension of the rabbit “Petersburg” shot. “Can I be excused, teacher?” says Anthony. “I feel sick I have to go home”—only half joking. This is where the S hits the F. Hard slog through reel one with only two hours sleep + burning blood.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2003—SOHO, LONDON

  Everyone convenes at the mix with fresh ears. Minghella, having slept for the first time in 48 hours, explains his intentions clearly: “Whatever we do should end up with the tunnel shot [of Union soldiers laying explosives] wiping away that piece of music—the whole atmosphere of Ada—like a bit of nostalgia. And then what I’m hoping for is we have silence until we get to the caption, which is ‘Petersburg, Virginia,’ date, and so forth. At which point we get some so-called ‘primitive music.’ And what is that piece of music that carries us to the explosion and makes room for Ada’s voiceover with the letter?”

  “And has the right mood,” Murch adds.

  Minghella likes the idea of a single singing voice to underlie tranquil scenes of Inman and the other Southern soldiers just before the explosion. He suggests “Tarry with Me,” sung by Ralph Stanley, or “Pretty Bird,” performed by Alison Krauss.

  “Do you have an instinct, Walter?” Anthony asks.

  Murch comes right to the point: “My instinct is that neither of them will work. The pucker factor is very high. I don’t know if that music lets you sit back and go into this world, setting aside how it fights the dialogue, since both songs use very articulated voices. Is that the way to begin a movie like this? I know ‘Pretty Bird,’ and it’s noble, but may be too noble. It says: This film is going to be good for you.”

  “Can I just see the Ralph Stanley?” Anthony asks. “Just play a little bit.” Which co-mixer Michael Prestwood-Smith does. Ralph Stanley is the legendary musician who was brought to an even wider audience through the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ film, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

  Ralph Stanley

  The initial scene of the movie begins: Union soldiers set explosives underneath unwary Confederate soldiers, and Stanley’s unaccompanied voice emanates from some ancient place:

  Tarry with me, O my Savior,

  Tarry with me through the night;

  I am lonely, Lord, without Thee,

  Tarry with me through the night.

  We see young Oakley push a wheelbarrow full of dead soldiers’ uniforms through the trenches, stopping where Inman and Swimmer crouch, waiting. “Don’t worry, son, them Yankees keep store hours,” someone says to Oakley. Inman chuckles and takes a dead man’s coat. The rabbit from the establishing shot emerges in the trench and a soldier chases it, shouting, “Keep your paws off my rabbit, keep your paws off my rabbit.” Meanwhile the fuse is burning down below the surface, about to ignite barrels of dynamite. Ralph Stanley sings on. It’s obvious by this point in the sequence that action and music are diverging, with two very different messages: bad things are coming as denoted by the darkness of Stanley’s singing, but the moments on screen are peaceful and comradely.

  The sequence comes to an end with the first underground explosion. With hardly any discussion, Murch and Minghella agree that the Ralph Stanley vocal isn’t working here.

  Minghella then asks to run the scene with no music, which they do.

  Again they watch the Confederate encampment, Oakley, the wheelbarrow, Inman and Swimmer, and the rabbit chase. But it all seems to unfold at half-speed, like a pantomime. Not using any music is not going to work either. As Murch says to Minghella, “The architecture of the shots, the way it’s been edited, says music.”

  Minghella realizes that none of the period, or source, music is transposable to this section. Murch agrees. “It doesn’t accommodate itself to what we’ve got.”

  It is one of those “expect a miracle” moments, but none arrives at Studio A. Characteristic of the way they work, Minghella and Murch stop on a dime to probe what’s going on artistically, trying to comprehend what the film is telling them while a dozen people in the mix theater wait for a cue to what they’re supposed to do next. This isn’t self-indulgence. Only by understanding why something doesn’t work, why a filmmaker’s intentions are not getting realized, does it becomes possible to figure out a good alternative.

  Minghella muses that during the battle and hellish combat down in the pit, source music not only works well, it enhances and deepens those scenes. “Why is it, do you think, that the shape-note singing, ‘Born to Die,’ works in the battle?” he asks rhetorically.

  “We’ve earned it,” Murch responds. “We have invested in the film and in the explosion, and we’ve gotten to know the people. And there’s this incredible thing we’re looking at we’ve never seen before. It’s the juxtaposition of that imagery with the choral voices and seeing thousands of people—souls roasting in a pit of hell. There’s a resonance between souls crying out in torment and the sound of the music, and what we’re looking at.”

  Minghella has to figure out what should be done, and do it right now. It’s that literal, unglamorous part of film directing that has more to do with managing than creating. Adding to Minghella’s frustration is the fact that he needs Murch to be in two, or even three places at once: with Levinson to help make selections from the previous night’s loop group for the chapel-building scene; discussing music options for the pre-explosion sequence with the two music editors, Alan and Fer; and continuing the final mix by skipping over this problem area for the time being.

  “You and I aren’t getting the opportunity to share all the stuff that is going on in other rooms,” Anthony says to Walter. Then he makes a decision: “Alan, Fer, and I would be well used just going away and having a conversation and debate about what possible music we can offer into the mix in terms of the opening. I suggest you, Walter, continue with the mix starting from Ada’s conversation with Inman at the chapel.”

  Minghella leaves Studio A with the music editors. The mix picks up in reel one from the scene when Inman and Ada first meet and talk as the chapel is being built—Inman’s flashback. Murch will mix this section knowing that additional loop group voices will be added later to build up the background atmosphere of young men alluding to the looming Southern secession.

  Oakley (Lucas Black), the young Confederate soldier.

  Murch continues with the mix until nearly 8 p.m. He is particularly fatigued, which is unusual, and takes a cab back to Primrose Hill. On the way home he talks about plans for the next day.

  “Harvey is coming tomorrow at 9 a.m. I don’t think to the mix, I think to wrangle with Anthony again.” While Minghella has final cut on the film, the dance between him and the studio is complicated: a director might exercise the final cut prerogative if there’s irreconcilable conflict. But the studio can always find ways to retaliate, such as decreasing what it spends to market and promote a film.

  Before leaving for London, Weinstein had been phoning from New York, inquiring about what Anthony was doing, trying to figure out if the studio still has time to recommend, cajole, or argue for changes they might want. “We’ll see tomorrow when Harvey shows up,” Walter says.

  Grading the Print

  Although the primary job facing Murch is the final sound mix, there are other finishing tasks requiring his attention that are equally important and time sensitive. One is preparing the digital intermediate so it is ready to strike the thousands of release prints of the film for Cold Mountain’s Christmas rollout. CFC, the film lab, finished scanning the camera negative into its computer system. Now the focus is on color-timing the material (called “grading” in the U.K.) using CFC’s proprietary software system to give the movie the look Minghella and cinematographer John Seale intend. Color, contrast, and brightness are adjusted within each shot, and balanced shot to shot so every scene appears seamless. The film gets printed from vi
rgin negative that itself was created from a digital file made by scanning the original camera negative. So every digital reel must be carefully examined to make sure there are no artifacts, excessive graininess, or other imperfections. Only the director can sign off and approve each reel.

  Director of photography, John Seale.

  Minghella was worried in October when the first answer print came out of the lab for review. The colors he saw on film weren’t matching what he’d seen on the lab’s computer screens. John Seale spent three weeks in September with CFC color timer Adam Glasman, making minute color adjustments in a darkened room. It’s almost unheard of for a director of photography to have so much time to do color timing. But once a decision was made to use a digital intermediate, it only made sense to let Seale take full advantage of its latitude to make precise color adjustments. Normally the DP comes to the lab for color correction after the picture is locked and the negative is cut. That leaves only a small window of time, and by then a DP is often halfway around the world shooting another film. Even getting a DP to come in to do color correction the traditional way for a few days isn’t guaranteed. The digital intermediate process for color correction, however, can start several months before locking picture, giving a DP more flexibility to schedule the timing. Even though grading the negative for a digital intermediate can start well before the picture gets locked, subsequent changes to the edit are easily incorporated by integrating a new edit decision list (EDL) with previously determined color settings.

  “We plug in the new EDL that Sean sends us,” Glasman says, “look at the data we’ve got, the grading decisions we’ve made, and make a new version. Then we can just flip through it and tweak accordingly.”

  Seale says his first experience with color correction on a digital intermediate is paradise. “It’s so exciting. It’s like being able to get inside the frame and change somebody’s face, just isolate their face, change the color, pump it up a little brighter, take it down... There’s a million things that you can do within the frame.”

  In the love scene between Ada and Inman at the end of the film, for example, Seale describes the initial images as “awful yellow-green” because of the way they were digitally scanned. In his color timing, he adds more red to give the scene a warm glow and even introduces a little flicker of yellow light: the burning campfire.

  Midway through mixing on November 5, the call comes into Studio A that reel six is arriving fresh from the lab, ready for screening. Finding a stopping point, Murch walks upstairs and goes through the second floor café/lounge to De Lane Lea’s small screening theater. Minghella is on his way from down the street where he’s been working with Levinson selecting new ADR takes. While waiting for him to arrive, Walter engages Glasman in a conversation about the relationship between film print color and the sound mix—that nexus where Murch in particular makes his home. “I’ve just been looking at what we’re mixing to: Final Cut Pro output being projected in video. It achieves some of its dramatic effects by alternating bright, dark, bright, dark, and that visual aggressiveness is working well with the sound. If everything in the film print comes out too muted and dark, then the chemistry between visual and sound will get spoiled.”

  Adam Glasman, colorist on Cold Mountain.

  Minghella arrives with assistant Bricknell. Claire McGrane is here representing CFC, along with post-production supervisor Michael Saxton. Glasman explains that reel six, which the group is about to screen, is printed “cyan-green, two lights plus,” which means the settings the lab used—the printer’s lights—were too blue by an almost-imperceptible quarter of a photographic stop. These sorts of small inaccuracies are commonplace in the rush of preparing answer prints overnight. Chemicals in the “bath” through which the film travels at the lab are never absolute; neither is their temperature. These variables, along with the trial-and-error nature of film printing, often result in imperfect test prints, which is why they are also called “trial prints.”

  Minghella finds it disconcerting to be reviewing a reel that the lab already admits is compromised. “Why is it that they can run it through and come out two points cyan?”

  “It’s a hit-and-miss system,” Murch says. “The mysteries of the photochemical process.”

  A major film director like Minghella has been through this process many times before. But with the stress of completing Cold Mountain and his executive producer breathing down his neck, he is too worn out to mask his feelings.

  “I mean, the difficult thing is we’re going to be looking at a print that’s two points cyan. So it’s hard to navigate the grading, because we’re looking at it through a pair of sunglasses.”

  He gets no argument. But unless things are delayed a whole day, Minghella will have to watch the reel and make a mental adjustment as he does.

  “So anyway, we’ll look at it.”

  The lights go down and reel six begins, playing without sound since it’s a test of just the film’s print quality. It starts with the second part of the Christmas party where Ada, Ruby, and Sally Swanger join Stobrod, Pangle, and Georgia in festive singing and dancing. As the shots go by, Anthony and Walter comment on what they see:

  “This is all positive dust, isn’t it?” Anthony asks hopefully, wanting reassurance that occasional dark spots don’t represent unalterable blemishes on the underlying negative.

  “Yes,” Glasman says.

  “I’m worried about Renée’s lipstick,” Anthony says, thinking Zellweger may look too made up.

  The reel plays on to the Sara scene, when Sara invites Inman into her bed. The scene ends with a zoom in on Inman’s face that was produced using a digital visual effect Murch requested. It’s designed to match, compositionally and emotionally, the incoming shot—a similar extreme close-up of Ada’s face at the Christmas party. There is concern that the visual effect shows too much grain, a consequence of enlarging a dimly lit, already grainy shot.

  “We were a bit concerned about that zoom to the eye because of the grain,” Glasman says.

  Minghella agrees, and adds that the close-up on Jude Law may reveal the makeup effects of his beard.

  “Don’t you want to reconsider going back to what we had before?” Minghella asks Murch. Murch agrees.

  There is concern about reverse-angle shots of Ada and Ruby listening to the music in the Christmas party. They appear dark in relation to the rest of the scene.

  When they’re done watching the reel, Minghella seems happy after all: “The night scenes are looking really superb. You’ve really done beautiful work there. This has been one oasis of pleasure.” The group laughs, knowing Minghella spent most of the morning sequestered with Harvey Weinstein going over another list of change notes.

  Then Minghella, Bricknell, and Saxton review the schedule for approving reels from the lab over the next few days. Minghella will fly to Los Angeles the following Wednesday for five days of promotion on Cold Mountain. Claire says she’ll have reel eight for him to see Monday, followed by one on Tuesday and reel nine on Wednesday. Minghella says he’d like to check the sound mix that is underway against these film print reels, as opposed to only hearing the mix while watching the Final Cut Pro digital video version. Using actual film will help Minghella and Murch check sync and also give them a truer idea of how the soundtrack will play in a release print.

  The Christmas Party scene with Georgia (Jack White) left and Pangle (Ethan Suplee) right.

  No one confirms this request; there probably isn’t time. Minghella can sense the walls closing in. He turns to Saxton and says: “What I don’t want to do, Michael, and I’m not going to do, because it doesn’t make any sense, I’m not going to let go of anybody until I’ve let go of the film. I don’t want anybody to be signed off or let go until I’ve signed off on the movie. And I don’t care what that involves.”

  Saxton agrees.

  “I don’t want people being shut down or told to return their keys and their machines until we—Walter and I—have said this is where we w
ant to be, even if we have to go back in and keep mixing next week. What is the final day that we need to release this mix?” he asks Saxton.

  “Well, it depends. The very first screening is November 24. So we need to ship it by the 22nd. We’ve got—what is it?—a day and a half to print master,” Saxton says, referring to the final transfer of the finished sound mix, ready for marriage to the negative.

  “We have to do the print master, then check it,” Murch says, “and then have a buffer in case there’s some problem with the optical negative.”

  “We’re keeping everybody on until the print master is finished?” Anthony asks.

  “I would if you want to,” Saxton says. “Some, not all, of the sound boys were going to finish at the end of the mix, because for the print master normally it’s just...”

  “But when is the end of the mix?” Minghella asks.

  “Well, that’s... you tell me.”

  “I’m being asked to be schizophrenic.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want, Anthony. We’ll keep everyone on. Keep all the options open. I’ve got the mix theater, I think, at least another two weeks.”

  “We could be flying in more... I won’t bore you with it all. But there’s a mismatch, a disconnect between finishing the movie and the requirements of the studio.”

  “We won’t have the film ready if you want to carry on mixing after you come back from the States,” Saxton says, referring to Minghella’s upcoming promotional trip.

  “It’s not whether I want to,” Minghella says. “Want doesn’t have anything to do with anything. We’re still juggling. Walter hasn’t heard stuff we’ve done. We’re working on a reel where we’ve got new information. If there’s a problem when we put all this stuff together and we don’t like the effect of it, then they don’t get the movie. I can’t just deliver a movie when I haven’t seen it.”