The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  BURNING CELLULOID

  O: The remarkable opening sequence of Apocalypse Now, where we see Willard drunk in a Saigon hotel room, seems to cradle all aspects and moments of the film, as well as introducing us to Willard, who will eventually be sent out to kill Kurtz. How was that scene conceived and built?

  M: After Francis hired Martin Sheen, he began to feel there were Willard-like character traits in Marty that Marty was not able to fully utilize because they were too dangerous: a certain kind of anger and vulnerability, linked to Marty's problems with alcohol at the time. So Francis set up the scene in the hotel as an acting exercise, but he shot it with two cameras, at right angles to each other, almost as a laboratory experiment. It's a technique Francis had used before: to do a rehearsal but with the cameras turning—to burn celluloid almost as a kind of incense. Because it's a natural human reaction to take things to a deeper level when film is being exposed. It raises the spectre that the scene might wind up in the film. If the conditions are right and if you're lucky, this technique can brand certain things into the psyche of the actor that ordinary improvisation doesn't quite achieve. The original intention was not to use that material in the film, but there were aspects to it, once it was projected, that were provocative: Marty spontaneously smashing his reflection in the mirror, for instance.

  The scene with Martin Sheen as a drunk Willard in the Saigon hotel room was shot with two cameras at right angles to each other as a rehearsal, with no idea that it would end up in the finished film.

  Right around this time, Francis set off the biggest gasoline explosion in film history. This was for the napalm drop in the Kilgore—Robert Duvall— section of the film. It was a risky, once-only event, so there were eight cameras running, positioned at different locations. One of the cameras had a telephoto lens, and was running at high speed, producing a slow-motion effect. The material from this camera was not used in the Kilgore sequence, but the shot itself, in slow motion with the telephoto lens flattening the jungle, and the sensuously licking flames, and the helicopters like metallic dragonflies drifting through the frame at odd angles, was so compelling that it seemed to Francis to capture some essence of what Apocalypse was about.

  So the opening scene of the film is the collision of those two ideas: of Willard in his hotel room, and that slow-motion napalm explosion, knit together with additional material that Francis shot to help everything coalesce. These concepts were already in place when I joined the crew in August of 1977. But exactly how all of it was going to come together hadn't been worked out— and that became my job: to create an abstract, dramatic, multilayered, visually arresting scene out of this raw material.

  O: You worked on the soundscape of the film and were also one of the original editors. How many editors worked on the film?

  M: When I started there were already three, so the film was divided into four sections. I had responsibility from the beginning of the film till the end of the sampan massacre, with the notable exceptions of the whole helicopter/ Valkyries attack, which was being edited by Jerry Greenberg, and the Playboy concert, which was edited by Lisa Fruchtman. Richie Marks, who was the supervising editor, had responsibility for everything after the sampan massacre. Jerry left the film in the spring of 1978, and then I took over the helicopter sequence. I worked on that and everything else in the first half of the film for another six months. All told, I was editing picture for a year and then working on sound for another year. Two years—kind of like enlisting in the military!

  O: How did all those editors work together, in terms of linking the film stylistically? Did you attempt to combine your styles?

  M: We were in and out of each other's rooms all the time, and there were screenings of the film about every month. The work was so complicated, there were so many decisions that had to happen, both consciously and unconsciously, that you couldn't depend on all the goals being articulated. At a certain point, though, we began to have intuitions about how each of us was approaching the material. That's how it happens. You pick up the good things that the other editors are doing and you metabolize those approaches into what you're doing, and vice versa. It's kind of like women who live together eventually having their periods at the same time.

  The most intense discussions happened once Michael Herr joined us to write the narration: ideas would be tossed around as to where Michael's material would go in the film.

  O: How much was Michael Herr around during the editing?

  M: I believe he started in the spring of 1978—a year after the postproduction began—and was involved right through to the end.

  Coppola, above, directing Robert Duvall in a helicopter during Apocalypse Now.

  O: Was the narration in the film script there from the start, or was it added?

  M: The original shooting script had voice-over narration—Willard spoke to us. By August of 1977, however, the decision had been made to jettison the narration. And yet, we were supposed to have the film finished in December of 1977. So we had four months to lock the film and create the soundtrack! In retrospect, it wasn't realistic, given the state of the film at the time.

  But I was new to the project and I thought that if we were even remotely going to consider a December release, the only way to do it was to reinstate the narration. This seemed perfectly natural to me because I had just finished editing Fred Zinnemann's Julia, which had narration. And in the circumstances it seemed necessary—because Willard is such a relatively inactive, inarticulate character. So I took the old narration that was written for the original script, recorded myself reading it, and then put it into the film, both to help get information across—there didn't seem to be any other way to get it in the time available—and also to help structure the events. And just to see how all this might work.

  O: Was the narration you recorded at that early stage written by Michael Herr?

  M: No, by John Milius and Francis.

  O: And then Herr was brought in, I suppose, because of Dispatches, his great book on Vietnam.

  M: And because, I believe, Milius had adapted some of Michael's articles in writing the screenplay of Apocalypse Now.

  O: There's something very much like the Do Lung Bridge scene in Herr's book.

  M: Milius had read the articles when they were originally published in Esquire,and had adapted them—I'm guessing without Michael's approval. So it was also a way of bringing Michael into the fold as a collaborator on the film, and not having him on the outside, saying, Wait a minute! That's my stuff up there!

  O: Did Herr do a lot of the rewriting of the narration?

  M: Yes, he rewrote all of it. The narration went through maybe a year of evolution. The film would get to a certain stage, Michael would write something new, Marty would come in and read it, and then we would integrate that into the film. The film would change as a result, and then maybe six weeks later we'd go through the whole process again. I think there were seven different recordings of the narration.

  O: Did Michael Herr respond specifically to your editing? Did he see it in raw footage and say—

  M: He saw the version which had me reading the old narration. I'm sure he thought, I can do better than that!

  O: I love the narration. Not just for what it's saying, but also the way we are made to hear it. What was done to create that very intimate, inner voice?

  M: There's a direct line from the narration in John Huston's Moby Dickthrough Zinnemann's Julia into Apocalypse Now. Les Hodgson, whom I met when I was working on Julia and who cut sound effects on Apocalypse Now,also worked on the sound effects for Moby Dick. Fred Zinnemann wanted the narration for Julia to have a sonically intimate quality, as if we were somehow overhearing someone's private thoughts, but how do you achieve that? Les told us that when they were recording narration for Moby Dick with, I think, Richard Basehart, Huston was dissatisfied with how it was sounding because he thought it had a declamatory quality. Huston was in the studio downstairs and Basehart was up in the booth. Basehart leaned forward clos
e to the microphone and asked: “John, what should I do next?” The microphone was right against his mouth. And Huston said, “That's it! That's what you should do! I want all the narration to sound just like that.” “But I'm much too close.” “No, you're not!” So the narration in Moby Dick was the first to be recorded with the microphone right here, with somebody talking just the way I'm talking now, very low and close.

  If you position the microphone perfectly, you can get that intimacy without too many unwanted side effects: distorted b's, p's, and s's. I asked Marty to imagine that the microphone was somebody's head on the pillow next to him, and that he was just talking to her with that kind of intimacy.

  O: Was it mixed and re-recorded in any special way?

  M: In the final mix we took the single soundtrack of his voice and spread it across all three speakers behind the screen, so there's just a soft wall of this intimate sound enveloping the audience. The normal dialogue between characters in the film comes only out of the centre speaker. So aside from the intimacy of the original voice recording itself, there's a distinct shape to the sound as it hits the screen, and it's very different from the rest of the dialogue in the film.

  O: When Russell Banks was asked about the narrative voice he used in his novel Rule of the Bone, he said he imagined two young boys lying in their bunks, in the summertime, almost asleep. One is looking up at the ceiling and talking. Russell wanted the narrative voice to have a similarly open confessional tone, as if saying: “It's dark and I trust you, and you're lying next to me and we're near sleep, and I'm going to risk telling the truth.”

  BRANDO

  They were common everyday words—the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But … they had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either…. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too…. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

  Heart of Darkness

  O: In Conrad's Heart of Darkness the moral debate between Marlow and Kurtz when they finally meet is never actually spelled out—there are just chilling paragraphs of Marlow talking about fighting to save Kurtz's soul, and Marlow gives up in the end. My memory of the film's last sequences in Kurtz's compound is of constant smoke and shadow, with Brando half seen. For me the finale didn't have the danger and clarity that was there in the rest of the film. There was a “religious” or “mythical” pitch I didn't fully believe. I wonder if there is other material you found in the process of re-editing that makes the climax clearer, less hidden?

  M: Well, we're adding one scene in the Kurtz compound after Willard has been mentally and physically broken down. He's in a metal shipping box—a Conex container—which has been left out to bake in the sun. The door opens and there is Brando/Kurtz. He sits down, surrounded by Cambodian children, like a happy Buddha, and reads Willard three short paragraphs from Time circa 1967, about how well the war is supposedly going. As he leaves he tosses the articles to Willard, and says,“We'll talk about these things later.” Willard tries to stand up, collapses, and then is brought into the temple.

  This addition allows you to see Kurtz in full figure in daylight, which is significant: he's coherent, ironic, and authoritative. And it forecasts the next section of the film, Kurtz's “pile of little arms” monologue: his realization that there is no clean path to victory—you have to fight a war like this on the ground, and ultimately you have to become as savage as the people you are fighting, in order to defeat them. But do you? And at what cost? For an intellectual like Kurtz, ready to go all the way upriver, he arguably becomes more savage than his opponents because he has more resources. In any event, the cost to Kurtz, personally, is his sanity: he cannot act with savagery and remain the human being that he was. It's going to be fascinating to see how including this scene will shift the chemical balance of the film!

  A scene added to Redux: Kurtz reading an article from Time about how the war is going to Willard and the Cambodian children after Willard has been let out of the Conex container used to break him down.

  O: Perhaps it will locate us more in that place and that time, more than abstract visions of Kurtz in the half-lit darkness did.

  M: I hope so. It will certainly amplify the earlier discussions at the French plantation, where the French were arguing about their version of the same problems in Vietnam fifteen years earlier: What is it like for a soldier out in the field to feel he's being sabotaged by protesters back home, who don't know anything about the predicament he's in? And yet why has he been placed in that predicament? The French were in Vietnam because they had been a colonial power in that part of the world…. It's very much like what's happening in Zimbabwe now. The white farmers think the land is theirs. By their own logic, this is home: they have been there for four generations, enough to convince them that the land is theirs and they have no other. But their ancestors displaced people who had been on the same land for hundreds, thousands of years.

  The Americans had none of that history in Vietnam. Southeast Asia, other than the Philippines, was never part of the American orbit, so the persistent questions are: What are we doing here, and what do we think we're accomplishing? The French had very definite, personal answers to those questions, and even they failed.

  O: Were Brando's monologues improvised?

  M: Yes. In the sense that Brando hadn't memorized any text. But he and Francis had worked out what he was going to talk about.

  O: Brando came on the set quite late in the filming, didn't he? How closely attached was he to the role of Kurtz?

  M: He arrived in the Philippines in September of 1976 and claimed to be dissatisfied with the script. The discussions that followed were exacerbated by the fact that he was heavier than he said he would be, and therefore couldn't reasonably do what his part called for. When they reached an impasse in these discussions, Francis would say, Well, just read Heart of Darkness. That is where you can see what I'm talking about. And Brando would answer, I've read Heart of Darkness and I hate it! And Francis would think, Oh my God.

  The production shut down for a week or so while Marlon and Francis battled it out. Finally, by chance or design, a copy of Heart of Darkness was left in Brando's houseboat. The next morning he appeared with his head shaved and said, It's all perfectly clear to me now. All along, he had thought John Milius's original script was Heart of Darkness.

  O: So he'd never read Conrad's novel before….

  M: And it had a tremendous impact on him. And now he was bald like the novel's main character, Kurtz. After that turning point, everything went as well as it could. The problem was they'd eaten up so much time arguing and Brando would not back down from his original deal. Whatever he got—his millions of dollars—was for a certain inflexible amount of time. They'd lost the first week in discussions, and everything with Brando now had to be done in half the time.

  He even wanted to adopt the name Kurtz, which he had previously resisted. Prior to that, when he'd read the script, he'd said something to the effect that, “American generals don't have those kinds of names. They have flowery names, from the South. I want to be ‘Colonel Leighley.' ” So Francis had agreed. Suddenly, after reading Conrad, Brando wanted to be Kurtz. But many scenes had already been shot, and his character was being referred to as Colonel Leighley. In the scene where Willard is given his mission, Brando is spoken of as Colonel Leighley.

  O: So what happened to that scene?

  M: We had to re-record the dialogue. The actors' mouths are saying “Colonel Leighley,” but in fact we hear them saying “Colonel Kurtz.” It's very carefully done. Listen and watch this scene….

  O: Here's Harrison Ford, in a small role as an officer, saying “Colonel Kurtz”— but I guess mouthing “Leigh
ley.” It is a strangely shot scene.

  M: The Italian camera operator on Apocalypse didn't speak English. And in this scene, Francis instructed him: “Whenever you're bored, just pan the camera.” His rationale being that Willard is very badly hungover, and this camera position is his point of view. It was the most complicated thing to edit, however. I could never tell when anyone was going to be on camera: just in the middle of a big speech, the camera would drift off to the left. The actors weren't sure when the camera was going to be pointing at them, which gave an extraordinary, unsettled feel to the performances. Here you've got Harrison Ford, checking out where the lens is. But it has this wonderful quality…. He seems to be watching Willard conspiratorially, as if to say: This is really crazy what's going on here.

  O: Did John Milius and Coppola continue to work on the script throughout the production, or was Milius's original script just a starting point?

  M: I think John did go to the Philippines. There's a very amusing section in Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola's documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, where, as I remember, John flies out to the Philippines to set Francis straight on some things. But by virtue of Francis's personality and his powers of persuasion, John comes back completely turned around, ready to follow Francis into the volcano if necessary.

  O: Was Apocalypse Now a project the two of them thought up?

  M: No. Originally George Lucas was going to direct, so it was a project that George and John developed for Zoetrope. That was back in 1969. Then when Warner Bros. cancelled the financing for Zoetrope, the project was abandoned for a while. After the success of American Graffiti in 1973, George wanted to revive it, but it was still too hot a topic, the war was still on, and nobody wanted to finance something like that. So George considered his options: What did he really want to say in Apocalypse Now? The message boiled down to the ability of a small group of people to defeat a gigantic power simply by the force of their convictions. And he decided, All right, if it's politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I'll put the essence of the story in outer space and make it happen in a galaxy long ago and far away. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese, and the Empire was the United States. And if you have the force, no matter how small you are, you can defeat the overwhelmingly big power. Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version of Apocalypse Now.