The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  Of course, buried in the realization that somebody made this film is the corollary that I could make a film. Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player reinforced the idea for me. But it was all still unconscious.

  Toshiro Mifune, left, in The Seven Samurai, 1954. Jean-Pierre Leaud in the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut's 400 Blows, right, that Murch found “electrifying.”

  O: And here was Truffaut using David Goodis's American novel, and transplanting it to France. It's interesting what the French have learned from American B novels, which they then send back to America….What about a film like Robert Rossen's The Hustler, based on Walter Tevis's book? It's a great film, beautifully edited, unlike many American films of its time, but also pure Americana—in a way less sentimental than the French versions of America.

  M: Definitely. If I had to think of one American film that had a big impact on me from that period, it would be The Hustler. But it was not a typical Hollywood production in any sense, even though it starred Paul Newman.

  O: The editing of the pool games is stunning.

  M: Dede Allen was the editor.

  O: She worked mostly with Arthur Penn, didn't she?

  M: Yes, they did five films together: Little Big Man, Bonnie and Clyde, et cetera…. Also, before you leave the Zoetrope building you should go down to the second floor and say hello to Anne Coates, who's working there. She's roughly the same age as Dede, both in their mid-seventies. Anne was the editor of Lawrence of Arabia. A real dynamo. She's edited a film a year since 1952.

  O: Really? And still working!

  M: The most recent was Erin Brockovich. Anne has been a hero of mine for a long time.

  O: Why do you think women like Dede Allen and Anne Coates end up as editors? It seems to be the profession where women have more power.

  M: In fact, many of the editors of early films—back in the silent days—were women. It was a woman's craft, seen as something like sewing. You knitted the pieces of film together. And editing has aspects of being a librarian, which used to be perceived as a woman's job.

  O: And the man is the hunter-gatherer, coming back with stuff for her to cook!

  M: The men could bring it home, but they didn't quite know what to do with it. But there was a big shift when sound came along in 1927. Sound was somehow a “man” thing—it was electric. It was complicated in a different way, an engineering way. A lot of men started coming into editing at that point, and women left.

  But if you made a list of the ten best editors ever, Anne Coates and Dede Allen would be in there. They've been an inspiration to a whole generation. Dede got her start in New York. I never ran into her there, because I had moved out here to the West Coast, but Richie Marks, Barry Malkin, Steve Rotter, and many other New York editors my age grew up under her guidance. Margaret Booth, who is still alive at 102, was the preeminent editor at MGM during its glory days. Her films included The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Camille….

  O: So who are the other ones, your top editors?

  M: The director David Lean, who started out as an editor and continued to edit the films he directed, though he never took credit. Gerry Hambling, who works mostly for Alan Parker. Thelma Schoonmaker, who cuts for Scorsese.

  O: Raging Bull is certainly one of the great works in terms of editing.

  M: I agree.

  O: Are there films you've seen, say in the last ten years, where the editing style has startled or impressed you so much that you will possibly alter your own techniques or rules?

  M: Hmmm … You know, I see so few films. My film background is selective and intense….

  O: A film like The Battle of Algiers, for instance, did it suggest a possible way to edit?

  M: Yes, that was one of a number of films, along with the works of Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and Bergman, that influenced me early on, as a student. I guess I'm sort of like the queen bee who gets impregnated once and can lay millions of eggs afterwards. The influence of those films is still with me.

  Here's our bill….

  O: My fortune cookie says: “Executive ability is prominent in your makeup.”

  M: Mine is: “You have a quiet and unobtrusive nature….”

  DIRECTORS AND EDITORS

  O: What's the distinction of roles between editor and director—in the way a scene is finally cut or the way a plot is possibly altered from a script? We know the editor has a very intimate relationship to the material. Does this give him or her a finer sense than the director of subliminal details and hidden structures in the film?

  Film editor Dede Allen with the director Jim Bridges, above, at the old David O. Selznick studio, Los Angeles; David Lean, center, in the white shirt, directing Great Expectations. Lean started out as an editor and continued to edit the films he directed; Thelma Schoon-maker, far right, working on Woodstock, 1969.

  For instance, for me, in Coppola's The Conversation there are some wonderful framings of scenes, or a peculiar emphasis on, say, an abstract shot of the back of Gene Hackman's head, or of the grey-green wall, or the scenery behind him—and I wonder if these were “recognized” by you, plucked out of a secondary shot and perhaps made more significant than Coppola originally conceived them. Two random shots of a character's feet in a film suddenly can become potent, symbolic. It's interesting to me how fragments in a corner of the screen can become important. In courtroom scenes I'm always drawn to the court stenographer typing silently, I'm always watching her hands.

  M: A talented director lays out opportunities that can be seized by other people—by other heads of departments, and by the actors, who are in effect heads of their own departments. This is the real function of a director, I believe. And then to protect that communal vision by accepting or rejecting certain contributions. The director is ultimately the immune system of the film.

  Those images you were talking about from The Conversation are images that Francis shot. He chose to shoot them, and in ninety-nine percent of the cases I chose to use them deliberately—I recognized their power and put them in the order you see in the finished film. Francis would then of course see my work and accept or reject the approach I was taking.

  There were many other possible alternatives: the structure of a film is created out of finding those harmonies we were talking about earlier—visual harmonies, thematic harmonies—and finding them at deeper and deeper levels as you work on the film.

  Sometimes it happens in purely accidental ways, but I don't think an editor—except in certain kinds of documentaries—can impose on a film a vision that wasn't there to begin with. All the things you talk about were in Francis's head, in some form. I may have found things that worked along with his vision in a unique way, orchestrated it more fully in certain areas perhaps, but I doubt whether that would have happened had Francis not already written the melody, so to speak.

  I become tuned to see things in a certain way when I'm working on a film. One of your obligations as an editor is to drench yourself in the sensibility of the film, to the point where you're alive to the smallest details and also the most important themes. This also applies to the head of every department. It's very similar, I'm sure, to how a conductor relates to the performers in an orchestra.

  A scene, above, from Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers:“The influence of those formative films is still with me …” Opposite: Murch and Coppola. Murch, in the background, was working on Julia in England when Coppola flew him to the Philippines for the weekend during the shooting of Apocalypse Now to discuss mixing the film.

  The practical aspect of what you were talking about though is very potent. The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. The director simply doesn't. To actually look at all the film the director has shot, and review it and sort through it, to rebalance all of that and make very specific notes about tiny details that are sometimes extremely significant, this falls to the editor.

  As it's happened, I've always done the initial assembly of t
he film myself. I sit with the director when we watch dailies. If he or she has something to say about a particular moment, I note it. But if I were to add up the Director's Comments column on my database, I wouldn't find a tremendous amount of information there. What's there is significant, though, and leads to other decisions. The smallest suggestion can help guide my eye to see the film the way the director is seeing it.

  In the end, the editor of a film must try to take advantage of all the material that is given to him, and reveal it in a way that feels like a natural but exciting unfolding of the ideas of the film. It's really a question of orchestration: organizing the images and sounds in a way that is interesting, and digestible by the audience. Mysterious when it needs to be mysterious, and understandable when it needs to be understandable.

  O: And not too much on the nose.

  M: If you're too much on the nose, or you present too many ideas too quickly, either they are so obvious that they're uninteresting or there's so much confusion that you can't take it all in.

  The editor works at both the macroscopic and the microscopic level: ranging from deciding how long precisely each shot is held, to restructuring and repositioning scenes, and sometimes to eliminating entire subplots.

  EYES HALF CLOSED

  O: When you began as an editor, thirty years ago, you must have discovered certain principles that worked for you. When you look at those early films, do you feel those rules and values have altered? Do you have a desire to re-edit them the way a writer might who looks at an old book?

  M: I was interested to go back and look at the first two films I edited, The Conversation and Julia, which I had done “mechanically”—physically cutting the film itself. After I made the transition to “electronic,” and started working on the Avid in 1995, I was curious to see if there was a difference between my mechanical and electronic styles. There wasn't—in fact I was struck by how immediate the earlier films seemed. I would make the same editorial choices today. It made me wonder: How did I know how to do all that?

  O: I know you don't like to watch other people's films when you're editing—but when you do see other films, by your contemporaries, are you surprised by editors and what they do and how they work?

  M: Sometimes. But it has to be extreme. Usually when I'm watching a film, I turn off a part of my critical thinking. But if that same film did appear on my editing machine, I would have a very different reaction to it. That's what happened with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and Robert Duvall's The Apostle. When I saw The Apostle projected, I thought, Well, perhaps it could be shorter. I didn't have many specific ideas how to help: the negative had already been cut, and it had been screened a few times, to good response. But when I was given the film—to try to reduce its length by twenty or thirty minutes—and was looking at it on the Avid, I realized, Yes, absolutely, this could be shorter, that could be different, I could move these scenes around…. I could do this, I could do that. There's a musical equivalent to this, and I'm sure a surgical equivalent—at a certain point your fingers do things that are beyond what your conscious mind is capable of.

  O: Do you feel you're essentially imposing your taste, as you do this? It's not just a mechanical thing—

  M: I am always at the service of the film, and the film, by rights, belongs to the writer, the director. I'm aligned with them. Financially it belongs to whoever financed it. In the case of The Apostle, Robert Duvall financed it, wrote it, acted in it, and directed it. I was lending it my editorial eye, but that was just my take on Robert Duvall's vision.

  O: Was The Apostle a difficult film to re-edit?

  M: No, because the original edit was good, and it was such a linear story. Linearity does sometimes present its own problems, however, particularly regarding a film's perceived length. That was true with The Conversation, and The Talented Mr. Ripley as well. Those three films are told from the point of view of the central character: the Apostle, Harry Caul, Tom Ripley. Films with a single point of view are on borrowed time if they are more than two hours long. Since there's only one point of view, there's no relief if the audience is not one hundred percent with the film, and it can subsequently seem too long even if it isn't objectively so.

  O: When you say point of view, in terms of film, you're talking about focussing on just one character—

  M: In The Talented Mr. Ripley, everything the audience sees is either Tom Ripley or something Tom Ripley sees. There are no scenes where we go off with other characters—as is always happening in The English Patient, for instance, where you have a complex dance, different people with different attitudes to the same events. But Ripley is about Tom Ripley. Likewise The Apostle—there is only the Apostle's story.

  O: And that's deadly, you think?

  M: No, no, it's not deadly, it's just that the clock runs faster with that kind of film, and unless there's something wildly unusual or different about it, it's better not to have those films be more than two hours long. The Conversation is only one hour, fifty-two minutes. Even then, some people think it's too long. With more points of view you can sustain that juggling act for longer, just because it's richer and more complex. A symphony can be longer than a sonata.

  O: In writing, especially in poetry, you are always trying to find ways to forge alliances between unlikely things, striking juxtapositions, finding the right shorthand for ideas, metaphors. You see it in the influence of Spanish poetry, what in the West we call “leaping poetry”—those sometimes surreal, sometimes subliminal connections that reveal a surprising path or link between strangers. The way a pun or even a misprint can work on a simpler level. There's the story about Auden writing the line “The poets know the names of the seas” in a poem. It came back from the typesetter as “The ports know the names of the seas,” and Auden realized that the misprint was better, and kept it.

  M: That's how Harry Caul got his name. Francis was reading the novel Step-penwolf at the time he was writing The Conversation, and he transformed Steppenwolf 's hero Harry Haller to “Harry Caller.” Then he thought, No, that's too much, too literal—since Harry was a professional eavesdropper, bugging telephones, et cetera—and he shortened it to “Harry Call.” Then his secretary accidentally typed “Caul.” And—it was exactly as happened with Auden—he thought, This misprint is much better. “Caul” sounds like “Call,” but it gave Francis a visual metaphor for the film, of a man who always wears a semi-translucent raincoat, which is a caul-like membrane, and whenever he's threatened or something bad is going to happen, he retreats behind pieces of

  Gene Hackman, as Harry Caul, in The Conversation, wearing a caul-like raincoat that became a visual metaphor for the film.

  plastic or rippled glass. In several scenes, Francis has Harry spell his name out, C-A-U-L, so we get the point.

  O: And that led to—

  M: It led from the costume to a way of acting, a way of being: Harry Caul is a man who has a membrane between himself and reality. The film is about the shedding of that membrane, and how painful it is for this character.

  O: What's your “state” when you first start to edit the material you've been given? How strict are you? How quick to decide?

  M: There's an interesting phenomenon I ran into early on in editing The Conversation. As you're putting something together for the first time, you have your own ideas about how it is supposed to work. You see the material that is being shot, and you are simultaneously reacting to it and gently shaping it. Of course the film has dramatic ups and downs, peaks and valleys, but the script indicates an overall shape. When you detect what you think is a deviation from that shape, your first impulse is, Well, I'll get to work and fix that now.

  Let's say the dramatic slope seems to be going up too fast. Your tendency will be to do things editorially to compensate. Then when you think it's going too slow, you will shorten things or boost the intensity.

  If you let that impulse completely loose out of its cage, what you'll find is that you may have pushed down a bulge at point A, but unbe
knownst to you, later, at point C, there's going to be a compensating lift that you don't know about yet—no one may know about it since films are usually shot out of sequence. So by pushing down on A you will have an overreaction at C.

  It's a stage in the process I call “editing with eyes half closed.” You can't open your eyes completely, which is to say, you can't express your opinion unreservedly. You don't know enough yet. And you're only the editor. You have to give everything the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, you can't be completely without opinion, otherwise nothing would ever get done. Putting a film together is all about having opinions: this not that, now not later, in or out. But exactly what the balance should be between neutrality and opinion is a very tricky question. The point is, if you squash this down, then you push the whole curve of the film down, whereas it might have righted itself by its own mysterious means. If you try to correct the film while putting it together, you end up chasing your own tail.

  What you really want to do when first assembling a film is to put it together, right from the beginning, without second-guessing anything. Don't try to be too smart too early. When you've finally gotten it all assembled, you can see how far the film has strayed from its intended trajectory. There may have been lots of deviations, but in the end let's say they've mostly cancelled one another out and the film is only ten percent off. Now you can stand back from the whole thing and begin to reshape it judiciously, with some objectivity. Is it the same thing when writing something for the first time?

  O: I never have a strict controlling governor present during the first draft of a book. I write as if it were a rehearsal, I attempt or try out everything, though of course a subliminal editing is taking place. But I'm not thinking of that. And I find I am always surprised later. A scene I might think is too casual when I am writing it will later, in context, have just the right tightness. I remember when I was writing the first draft of Anil's Ghost, there was a somewhat wild and lack-adaisical chapter where the exhausted doctor, Gamini, hires a car and goes north for some rest, and has a few drunken adventures … I was winging it, thinking, well, I will go along with it right now but I suspect I will have to lose it. But when I came back to the section much later, it had just the right energy and change of pace for that moment in the book.