The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  As a writer I have found that the last two years of any book I work on are given over to its editing. I may have spent four or five years writing in the dark, but now I have to discover the shape of the object I have been struggling to make, its true organic shape, that figure in the carpet. I have made two documentary films, and my fictional works tend to follow this structural process: shooting or writing everything for a number of months or years, then shaping the content into a new form, till it is almost a newly discovered story. I move things around till they become sharp and clear, till they are in the right location. And it is at this stage that I discover the work's true voice and structure. When I edited my first film documentary I knew that this was where the art came in. When I watched Walter Murch at work during my peripheral involvement with the film of The English Patient, I knew that this was the stage of filmmaking that was closest to the art of writing.

  Murch likes to quote Robert Bresson to the effect that a film is born three times—in the writing of the script, in the shooting, and in the editing. With The English Patient there were, in fact, four births, because there was also a book as the source. It is interesting to chart how variable those births were in termsofjust one scene. In the novel there is a moment when Caravaggio, whose hands are bandaged, watches a dog drink from a bowl of water and remembers how he was tortured three years earlier. Something about the table he is sitting at begins this quick flood of memory. The scene is about two paragraphs long, and the dog beside him in the present and the torture scene from the past merge. Caravaggio doesn't want to face that traumatic memory, so it is vaguely, and intentionally vaguely, remembered. It is dreamlike, not at all realistic.

  When Anthony Minghella wrote the script, the scene went on for about four pages of sharp and frightening dialogue. It was now a scene where the German interrogator (not Italian, as in the book) tries to break down the defenses of the caught spy Caravaggio. In order to link Caravaggio to the crimes of the “English patient,” it is clear in Minghella's version that Almásy is the cause of Caravaggio's capture which results in his torture. We are therefore already a long way from the scene in my book: in the novel the past haunts Caravaggio at certain moments, but none of his torture is described in detail, just suggested— only the way he is handcuffed to the table is remembered. Minghella's scene of the interrogation is full of tension, the phrases of dialogue repeated again and again, with the interrogator casually circling around to catch Caravaggio by surprise.

  The next “birth” was the shooting of the scene. As Willem Dafoe, who played Caravaggio, said, “We shot the hell out of the scene.” And they did, at least fifteen takes and then the close-ups—a razor opening, the typist recording the interrogation, a fly (stunned by being shaken in a bottle) crawling over Caravaggio's hand and buzzing off as the razor enters the frame. I remember one astonishing take where the camera remained on Dafoe's face all through the scene and stayed with him while he pulled the table to which he was handcuffed all the way to the back of the room to avoid that razor. When I saw the dailies, this was the moment that I thought most remarkable: Minghella had taken another step forwards from the written screenplay with the shooting of the scene. Now he gave it to Walter.

  And what did Walter Murch do with this scene?

  Well, he had been reading the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte on the “Nazi character,” and he plucked from his reading the fact that the Nazis hated any demonstration of weakness. This idea was certainly not in my original paragraph, not in Minghella's script, nor in any of the hundred minutes of footage that had been shot and that somehow had to be cut down to a nerve-racking three or four minutes. Every scene, every film, for Murch, needs to have a larger science of patterns at work within it, and this would be the idea or concept that governed how he cut the scene.

  At one point Caravaggio/Dafoe says, before he even sees the razor, “Don't cut me.” He says it once. Walter has the interrogator pause in his questioning when he hears this, extending the time of his response. He has threatened the spy with the idea of cutting off his thumbs, but only in a casual, not serious, way. When Caravaggio says, “Don't cut me,” the German pauses for a second, a flicker of disgust on his face. The interrogation continues. Walter found another take of Dafoe's line, this one with more quaver in the voice, and decided to put it in again, a few seconds later. So Dafoe repeats his fear. And now time stops.

  We see the look on the German. And now we know he has to do what he was previously just thinking about. To emphasize this, Murch, at that very moment, pulls all the sound out of the scene, so there is complete silence. And we, even if we don't realize it as we sit in the theatre, are shocked and the reason is that quietness. Something terrible has been revealed by the spy, about his own nature, and now something terrible is going to happen. To this point, Murch has built numerous layers of sound to give us the feeling of being within that cavelike room; he even provides sounds taking place outside the room (a favourite device of his—listen to the street sounds when Michael Corleone commits his first murder in The Godfather). In this scene there is the sound of a firing squad somewhere outside, soldiers yelling, while inside there is that continual typing, the fly buzzing, the telephone that keeps ringing, all this behind the tense conversation between the two men. Then, when Dafoe repeats the line—which in reality he did not repeat, which was not even there in the script—Murch makes the response to the line a total and dangerous silence.

  Walter has said that the use of silence in movies did not come in until the invention of synchronous sound in 1927. Until then there was the continuous accompaniment of music: live orchestra, organ, or piano. Murch always tries to find a moment in his films when that shock of silence will fill the theatre. And in The English Patient it happens now. It feels as if it lasts five minutes but it really lasts only about five seconds, and during that time everything is decided. After that moment all hell breaks loose. This is when members of the audience begin to close their eyes and when some faint. In fact, they faint probably because they close their eyes. We see nothing violent on the screen. But we hearthe suggestions of it. And the ones with closed eyes are now under the control of this master editor and so they must imagine it all.

  FIRST CONVERSATION

  SAN FRANCISCO

  In the spring of 2000, Walter Murch, at the suggestion of Francis Ford Coppola, began to re-edit Apocalypse Now, a film he had worked on back in 1977–1979 both as sound designer and as one of the four picture editors. Twenty-two years later, all the takes and discards and “lost” scenes and sound elements (carefully preserved in climate-controlled limestone caves in Pennsylvania) were brought out of vaults to be reconsidered. Apocalypse Now is a part of the American subconscious. And in some way this was the problem. Having dinner with the novelist Alfredo Véa in San Francisco, after spending my first day with Walter at Zoetrope, I mentioned what was happening with the re-editing of Apocalypse Now, and Véa immediately launched into Marlon Brando's monologue about the snail on a razor blade. This was followed, during dinner, by Véa's precise imitation of Dennis Hopper's whine: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wiseman? …” For Véa, who fought in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now was the movie about the war. It was the work of art that caught it for him, that gave him a mythological structure he could refer to, that showed him what he had gone through and would later write about himself in books such as Gods Go Begging.

  Mark Berger, Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch mixing Godfather II, 1974.

  So those working on the new Apocalypse Now were aware that there would be problems connected with their dismantling and restructuring a “classic.” It was now public property.

  “It has become part of the culture,” said Murch. “And that's not a one-way street, as you know from your writing. As much as a work affects the culture, the culture mysteriously affects the work. Apocalypse Now in the year 2000 is a very different thing from the physically exact-same Apocalypse Now in
the second before it was released in 1979.”

  The idea for a new version grew out of Coppola's desire to produce a DVD of Apocalypse Now with a number of major scenes that were—for reasons of length—eliminated from the 1979 version. Also, 2000 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, so it seemed appropriate to re-evaluate editorial decisions that had originally been made while the war was still a vividly painful bruise on the nation's psyche. But rather than have the restored scenes appear in isolation, appended in their own chapter, why not integrate them into the body of the film as originally intended? The problem was that the editing and sound work on the excised material had never been finished, and one scene in particular was eliminated before it was completely shot. Fortunately, the negative and original sound for all this material were perfectly preserved in original laboratory rolls, and could be retrieved, two decades later, as if the film had been shot a few weeks earlier.

  And so Walter Murch was now working in San Francisco, in the old Zoetrope building. Mostly he had to collect and reconsider the material for three large sequences that were cut from the film in 1978—a medevac scene involving Playboy Bunnies; further scenes with Brando in the Kurtz compound; and a ghostly, funereal dinner and love scene at a French rubber plantation. In Eleanor Coppola's book about the making of the film, she writes of this scene:

  I heard the French plantation scene is definitely out of the picture. It never seemed to fit right. I am one of the people who liked it, but it did stop the flow of Willard's journey. Today I was thinking about all the days of agony Francis went through during the shooting of that scene. The hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the set and the cast flown in from France. Now the whole thing will end up as a roll of celluloid in a vault somewhere.

  “The film acquired a body in the absence of these limbs,” said Murch, speaking of those missing scenes. “Now we're trying to sew them back on, and who knows? Whether the body will accept or reject or find the addition diffi-cult is something we're struggling with right now. I have a sense of it and it's actually been going quite well, but until we finally step back and look at the work as a whole, we won't be able to say whether this will be artistically successful or whether it's simply going to be a curiosity piece for those who were already interested in the film.”

  The three scenes are the major additions in the new version of the film, but there are many other small changes that Murch and his colleagues were making—additions that give a different tone to much of the film. There is more humour, and with the addition of bridges between episodes that had been cut because of time concerns the film has also become less fragmentary. Those previously missing elements, said Murch, “were casualties of the hallmark struggle in every editing room: How short can the film be and still work? Even though Francis had final cut, he was as acutely aware as anybody of the strictures of getting a film into the theatres as lean as it could be. With the new version, that particular drive—for compression above all—is not as compelling.”

  Much of our first conversation took place during four days in July 2000, while Walter worked on the new version of the film. Our talk during those days dealt with the “new” scenes but also with the differences and similarities between writing and editing, music, and his feelings about other editors. We talked as Walter worked on the Avid in his editing room at Zoetrope and later continued over lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The new version of Apocalypse Now Redux would not open in theatres for almost a year, and Walter was still uncertain about several changes.

  We began, however, by talking about the early days and how he became involved with the world of sound and eventually film.

  HUMBLE SOUNDS

  O: You're an editor who works in sound as well as picture. You created “sound-scapes” for films such as Apocalypse Now. When did you first become interested in this landscape of sound?

  M: It was with me from as early as I can remember. Maybe I heard things differently because my ears stuck out, or maybe because my ears stuck out people thought I would hear things differently, so I obliged them. It's hard to say. What's true is that if words failed me I would switch to sound effects, I would imitate the sound of something if I didn't know its name. Back then there was an animated cartoon character, a boy named Gerald McBoing-Boing, who spoke in sound effects instead of words, and he was able to communicate with his parents this way. That was my nickname: Walter McBoing-Boing.

  Around that time the tape recorder was becoming available as a consumer item. The father of a friend of mine bought one, so I wound up going over to his house endlessly to play with it. And that passion, which was a kind of delirious drunkenness with what the tape recorder could do, completely possessed me. I eventually convinced my parents that it would be a good idea if our family had one, because we could then record music off the radio and wouldn't have to buy records. In fact, I rarely used it for that, but I would hold the microphone out the window, recording sounds of New York. I would construct little arrangements of metal, and tape the microphone to them, striking and rubbing the metal in different places. It was fascinating.

  And then I discovered the concept of physically editing tape—that you could rearrange it by cutting out sections and putting those sections in a different order. You could record two things at different times and juxtapose them, getting rid of the middle, or you could turn the tape upside down and play it backwards, or flip it over and play it back muffled, or any combination of these things.

  O: So did European movements such as musique concrète in the fifties inspire you?

  M: Definitely. I came home from school one day and turned on the classical radio station, WQXR, in the middle of a program. Sounds were coming out of the speaker that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I turned the tape recorder on and listened for the next twenty minutes or so, riveted by what I was hearing. It turned out to be a record by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry—two of the early practitioners of musique concrète. I could hear a real similarity with what I had been doing—taking ordinary sounds and arranging them rhythmically, creating a kind of music on tape. In France at that time, people would go to concerts and a big speaker would be wheeled out onstage. Somebody would come out and turn the tape recorder on with a flourish, and the audience would sit there patiently listening to this composition being played back. Then at the end they'd all applaud. This was the future!

  O: You were how old when this hit you?

  George Noble provides sound effects, and his brother, Joe Noble, receives a knockout in the first lip-sync animated cartoon for British Talking Pictures, 1928.

  Pierre Schaeffer, the celebrated French musique concrète composer who inspired Murch when he was making his own recordings at age 10.

  M: Ten or eleven, something like that. It was intoxicating to realize that somebody else was doing the same things I was. Up to that point I'd thought that this was just my strange little hobby. But here was validation. There were adults in the world who took it seriously. I felt like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday's footprint in the sand.

  O: And these were essentially documentary recordings with an artistic structure?

  M: It was an early, technically primitive form of sampling. What's strange— only in retrospect—is that I didn't follow through with it. By the time I was fif-teen or sixteen, I had relegated all of this passion to my pre-adolescence—I thought I now had to get serious. Maybe I was going to be an architect. Or an oceanographer. Was I going to be … what? It was only in my early twenties that I discovered those early interests all came together in film.

  O: Did someone like John Cage interest you, were you interested in what he was doing?

  M: My father was a painter and tangentially involved in Cage's world. We would go to some of his concerts. I appreciated them, but I was moved more by the idea of what he was doing—that by taking humble sounds out of their normal context you could make people pay attention and discover the musical elements in them. It was very close to w
hat my father was doing in his paintings: taking discarded objects and arranging them in ways to make you see them with new eyes.

  O: Was the interest in editing film something that existed at the same time? Or did it come much later?

  M: When I was a student at Johns Hopkins, a group of us made some short silent films, and I discovered then that editing images had emotionally the same impact for me as editing sound. It was intoxicating. You write eloquently about that in Anil's Ghost, about the state of mind of a doctor in the middle of surgery: You get to a place where time is not an issue at all, and you're oddly at the centre of things but also you are not. You're the person doing it, yet the feeling is that you're not the origin of it, that somehow “it” is happening around you, that you are being used by this thing to help bring it into the world. I felt that way when I was eleven, playing with my tapes. I didn't know how to interpret it then, but I discovered, when I was twenty, that editing images gave me the same feeling. Then when I got to the University of Southern California as a graduate student, both of those things—sound and picture—came together.

  As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.

  O: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity.

  M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.