The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  M: Exactly. But the thing about film editing, as opposed to writing, is that there's this huge machine, grinding on inexorably, whether you do anything or not. There are all these deadlines. You have to exercise certain opinions, but it's all a matter of your intuition and judgement about how deep those opinions are on the first round….

  Let me ask you a question. As the author of a book, you're in some sense more like our imagined filmmaker of the year 2100, who has a digital power-house in his hands, who can create an entire film by thinking it—someone who can go into a room and come out with a finished film. Within the limits of their craft, that's what writers have always done. There's rarely collaboration in writing a novel as there is in making a film. How do you cope with the authority you therefore have? As you can tell, I'm always trying to break up the authority of the film to allow other voices to be heard—chance voices.

  O: There are some writers who have a plan before they sit down for those years of writing a book—they have a concept or plot that's very certain. These are good writers, who know exactly how the story will end. I seem to have none of those assurances. I'm much more uncertain, insecure almost in the way that I'm continually being fed and diverted by the possibilities from the world around me—chance anecdotes overheard, the texture within a rumour—as much as by what my research reveals. For those four or five years, I collect such things, and they fall into a form or a shape or a situation I have established … the final stages of the war in Italy, the preparation for death by a gunfighter…. As I said, I don't have too much of a governor at work. So it's similar to what you say about the first pass at editing a film. When writing I reject nothing. I am much looser about that, much more accepting at that early stage.

  I do this till I have a complete but rough first draft, by which time I've essentially discovered the story. I then put on a different hat—I put on yourhat—and I start eliminating the wrong notes, the repetitions, the trails that go nowhere. I start merging and tightening the work … at this stage three scenes can become one. I take this process as far as I can. There are numerous drafts…. Eventually I try it out on my peers and my editor, and I try not to be too defensive about the work. I don't always agree with them, but their responses and notes are an essential stage for me. The only way I can get that democratic, communal sense is to be not so sure about what I have done. But it is also important that I don't show them the work until that stage is reached, until I've taken it as far as I can go. I don't want their influence to come too early in the process after my discovery of the story and the form.

  And until the last days I always know that this isn't the final draft. The whole tone can be changed or a problem solved by a small structural shift. This is why I love working in theatre. I love the energy of that communal opinion and participation. And especially the influence of that practical side of an art. I've always been more interested in the blocking and the gestures and the lighting and the pacing than whether my words are correct. And I like the radically different chancelike situations. Unlike Beckett, who insisted that the play could be done only one way, and always to his unbending rules.

  But all writers have a different set of habits and rules. Apparently Anthony Burgess, who began as a composer, couldn't afford music sheets, so he perfected each page before he copied it onto a sheet. And when he became a novelist he would write the first page, then rewrite it ten times, and only then go on to the second page. Which I personally think would be a deadly limitation to a natural pacing—re-editing yourself, reevaluating yourself every moment and then stepping forwards again.

  M: It's all a question somehow of metering out the right amount of generative impulse and modulating that with the right amount of critical impulse, and knowing when to say, I'm not going to touch that right now, I'll wait until I know more.

  O: I remember when I was writing Anil's Ghost, I had a sequence where Anil was working at a grave site. I wasn't certain, during the first draft, where it was taking place. Guatemala perhaps? Or somewhere in Sri Lanka? The scene appeared about two-thirds of the way through the story. It wasn't working, so I dropped it. Much later, during the final stages of the book—when I sought reactions to it—some people felt Anil was too tough verbally on those around her in the beginning (I had seen that as a defensive quality, but it wasn't coming across). One editor felt that the book hit the ground running—Anil landed by plane in Sri Lanka and the story took off before we knew much about her. I then remembered that scene at the grave site and tried it at the very start as a prologue, now clearly set in Guatemala, where she had been working before going to Sri Lanka. It gave Anil a history, clarified her profession as a forensic anthropologist, showed the reader that her profession was nomadic, and that the job in Sri Lanka began as just another assignment, though she had been

  born there. But more valuable, the scene also showed her unspoken compassion and empathy for the woman waiting beside the grave site as she worked. I had rejected that moment too quickly. But when I found the right place for it, it solved a lot of problems. And in the right place the scene suggested a lot about her character.

  M: We hope we become better editors with experience! Yet you have to have an intuition about the craft to begin with: for me, it begins with, Where is the audience looking? What are they thinking? As much as possible, you try to bethe audience. At the point of transition from one shot to another, you have to be pretty sure where the audience's eye is looking, where the focus of attention is. That will either make the cut work or not.

  O: So before you make the cut, if you feel the audience is looking towards point X, then you cut to another angle where the focus of attention is somewhere around that point X.

  M: Yes. If you think of the audience's focus of attention as a dot moving around the screen, the editor's job is to carry that dot around in an interesting way. If the dot is moving from left to right and then up to the right-hand corner of the frame, when there's a cut, make sure there's something to look at in the right-hand corner of the next shot to receive that focus of interest.

  O: Or else the film's movement stops and starts again.

  M: Right. After each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you don't carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become dis-oriented and annoyed, without knowing why. Now, if you are cutting a fight scene, you actually want an element of disorientation—that's what makes it exciting. So you put the focus of interest somewhere else, jarringly, and you cut at unexpected moments. You make a tossed salad of it, you abuse the audience's attention. That creates the impression of chaos. Or, if you want to hide something,

  A manuscript page from Anil's Ghost.

  by misdirecting the audience's attention you can make them unaware of the thing you would rather they not see. Like an actor's hand in a different position, or a scene where the stage line is crossed, or a mismatched piece of costume or something…. These are all the traditional techniques of magic, which is to make the audience look to the right while you secretly do something over here to the left….

  And then there is the issue of composition, which is deeper and more mysterious. You can have the man looking at the woman and facing the woman, and saying, “I love you.” If the framing is off, it can imply, he really doesn't. Shethinks he does because he just said so. But the filmmakers can frame the shot in a way that says: He doesn't, really.

  Framing a shot in an “off” way to convey another meaning than what is being spoken: in The Godfather, Michael Corleone telling Kay it's better if she doesn't come with him.

  There's a fascinating example of that, in the first Godfather, when Michael is saying good-bye to Kay. She's saying, “Maybe I could come with you.” He replies, “No, Kay, it's family, there will be detectives, you just can't.” And suddenly the framing has shifted, suggesting that something is wrong. Even though he's still facing her, and being nice to her, the framing says the oppo
site. He's being pulled by something behind him, something that is going to take him away from her. It's easy for him, in this new composition, to move away from her, into the empty space that's on the right side of the frame….

  THERE IS ONLY ONE FIRST TIME

  O: When you work now with directors like Francis Coppola or Anthony Minghella, do you go over the scripts with them before they begin shooting? Do you have meetings with them? And if so, what's discussed at such meetings? I would think your influence would be much greater than simply editing a film after it was shot.

  M: When I'm considering a project, I read the script, take notes, type them up, and give them to the director. I would include both what I think is good about the script—what attracted me to it—and where I think there may be room for improvement. Perhaps I don't know what I'm supposed to feel at a certain moment. The director may have a very good idea in mind, but I'm just reporting that I don't get exactly what is intended from what's on the page. Or there may be something too long or repetitive, or maybe the script gave me some idea about transposing two scenes. Already, I'm kind of editing.

  Writing out these notes helps me see into the project, get under its skin, and the notes give the director some idea of my thoughts and approaches to the material. If he doesn't agree with them, it's good to learn that early. Maybe something can be changed—or maybe I'm just not the right person to edit the film. Either way, the notes serve a purpose.

  O: I remember when I first saw you in Rome at Cinecittà, watching rushes of The English Patient that had been shot the day before, sitting in the dark with your laptop, writing as you watched each take….

  M: I write down whatever occurs to me about what I see on the screen. And that text appears in the left-hand column of my database. These are the emotional responses: How does the shot make me feel when I see it for the first time? Are there any associations? If, say, the image of a banana occurs to me for some reason, I write “banana,” even if I have no idea why. Maybe later I'll find out the reason—but at the moment I don't question any of these things. I try to remain completely open to whatever is going through my mind.

  O: That's your response to your very first viewing?

  M: Yes, and because the film has come straight from the lab, it's being projected in the order it was shot, so there's usually a degree of chaos. You might suddenly find yourself looking at material from the middle of another scene, which just happened to be shot as a pick-up.

  Murch's editing notes from The English Patient: the interrogation of Caravaggio.

  These “emotional” notes are as close as I will ever get to the reactions of the audience seeing the film. There is only one “first time.”

  Later, when I'm getting ready to put the scene together, I take a second series of notes: these are less emotional and more surgical, and appear in the centre column of the database. I'm no longer the lover beholding the beloved, I'm the surgeon looking at the patient, analyzing her joints and ligaments, writing down the exact footage number at each comment. The free-associative emotional notes give me insights about primary reactions; the surgical notes give me insights about how best to take things apart and connect them again.

  Both columns of notes are always in front of me when I'm assembling the film for the first time, but afterwards, in re-editing, I use them less. If I want to completely change the premise of a scene then I'll go back to them, but ordinarily I don't. When I started creating this database, in 1986, I thought I would be referring to my notes all the time. But it turned out differently. At a certain point, I've internalized them.

  O: When researching my memoir Running in the Family, I interviewed a large number of people, on tape. But in fact I never listened to the tapes again. It's as if I was learning how they spoke, and that allowed me to discover how they would tell their stories.

  I suppose a writer, unlike a film editor, has to research and compose andassemble simultaneously during a first draft. When I began the memoir I had no plan for it and certainly had no structure or series of sequences in my head. However, the book was taking me in a hundred directions. I realized I needed some frame or limit, even if it was minimal. I knew it had to do with the persona of the narrator, who had returned temporarily to his birthplace in Sri Lanka, and because of the state of his life at the time was being drawn to certain stories. So that became the point of view—though the subject matter and the content could come from anywhere. I also realized that the story's events could take place only in Sri Lanka, on the island which I left at the age of eleven. They couldn't continue in England or North America. The values and behaviour of that culture were bound to be different elsewhere. The book would lose the magic and the rules of this semi-invented landscape, that sense of fairy tale that comes with a reinterpretation of childhood. As a result, the portrait of my father, whom I knew only in Sri Lanka, is much larger than that of my mother, whom I really got to know in England and Canada. But those were the boundaries I gave to the structure as I wrote.

  The thing is, the structure in a book allows the reader a more meditative participation than film. Because we are not bound by time. The experience of a book is not finite. The reader can “investigate” the given story and look back and pause and qualify the material. But I suspect you see the viewer of a film participating in a different way?

  M: In film, there's a dance between the words and images and the sounds. As rich as films appear, they are limited to two of the five senses—hearing and sight—and they are limited in time—the film lasts only as long as it takes to project it. It's not like a book. If you don't understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again, at your own pace. With a film, you have to consume it in one go, at a set speed.

  But if a film can provoke the audience's participation—if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work. How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person. So the film, although it's materially the same series of images and sounds, should, ideally, provoke slightly different reactions from each person who sees it.

  Even though it's a mass medium, it's those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear that they saw it, but in fact it wasn't there. Enough was there so that they completed it in their own way, but as it's happening they don't stop to think: That's just me completing it. They really see something that appears as authentic to them as anything else that's actually physically in the film.

  How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.

  O: I remember receiving very moving letters from people who had read The English Patient to a parent or friend who was dying. And then when the film came out, they found it heartbreaking to see a young woman reading to a dying man in a bed…. What seems odd with film is that this private experience takes place in a public space. With the book, you're alone in your living room reading it, but to have that sense in the Colosseum—

  M: It's a kind of mass intimacy. A paradoxical state, because you're in a group and benefitting in some strange way from the group experience—yet if the film is any good, you also feel that it's speaking directly to you. Even though it's touching all these other people as well. The ambiguity comes from the fact that it's flowing through, like a river. You don't have a chance to say—

  O: Wait a minute—

  M: As you do with a book.

  O: One of the things about watching a video is that it never feels private. I'm always conscious of it as a group thing. But it never feels that way in a cinema— even at a comedy with people laughing around me. Watching a video at home, I'm always conscious of others in the room—or even if
you're alone, there's still the situation of the room. So you can become self-conscious during an erotic scene….

  M: The first step in the cinematic state of mind, which is what I think you're talking about, is the urge to leave the familiar surroundings of the house and be drawn outside to a particular film. You are in some way dissatisfied with where you are. You need to get out, to be part of something larger than yourself, yet you're drawn to this particular film in the hope that it will speak to you directly. So again it's this same paradox: Film is a mass medium—you go to the cinema because of the massness of it—but you feel good only if the film speaks intimately to you. Whereas video is something you've brought into your house. It's there at and for your pleasure.

  Juliette Binoche as Hana reading to Ralph Fiennes as Almásy in a shot not used in The English Patient.

  O: Strangely, if you watch a DVD on a computer, with headphones, you get back to that true intimacy that film has.

  M: I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. That gets back to the very origins of film, with Edison, who didn't like the idea of projection. He thought film should be seen by individual people looking into their own Kinetoscopes. He thought he would make more money that way.