The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  O: And that's the structure of the novel.

  M: Yes. I was fascinated to find out how we were going to deal with that in the film! Jean-Claude Carrière and Phil Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay together, created a very fine first draft that ironed out the time structure and told it continuously, from an omniscient point of view. I read this draft and thought it was great. Then I anxiously awaited the next draft, which was going to be where they rediscovered the episodic, different-point-of-view structure, in filmic terms. But that never happened. It became clear that there was so much to deal with that the narrative line had to be continuous.

  That was what I think made it hard to discover the short story inside the film. Everything that was nonlinear in the book was now linear, and therefore the fracture points were very different, or even nonexistent.

  The English Patient also had many different time sequences, but by contrast, Anthony Minghella's screenplay intricately manoeuvred the backwards-and-forwards in time—telling a personal story, a love story, against the historical palette of World War II.

  In some ways the two stories—Unbearable Lightness and English Patient—are similar. When you look at all the possibilities of literature, they're surprisingly similar. But what was inherent within your book that was brought out filmically was the fragmented structure. I think there are more than forty time transitions in The English Patient. A huge number. Many more than in Julia,which also goes backwards and forwards, and many more than in Godfather II,which does the same thing.

  Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin, left, in a scene from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988; Philip Kaufman directing them in a scene from the same film.

  In Unbearable Lightness, those transitions were all eliminated, so it moved continuously forwards.

  O: I love the book of The Unbearable Lightness of Being—it was stunning for me how it worked as a novel. And there were great things in the film. But whereas the sexual/personal story was alive and taut, and while some of the political scenes, like the arrival of the tank and the invasion, were powerful, I thought some of it didn't really have the sudden and wild anarchy of the book. Why was that?

  M: I don't know. We never took that film down in length. It was a long first cut. And in the end I think the film is two hours and fifty minutes. It's about the length of The Godfather—just under three hours. At a certain point during the editing of The Godfather, Francis cut it down to two hours and twenty minutes. But it was clear it didn't work at that length. Then, when we restored the length, somehow, having gone down so deep, it didn't come back exactly to where it was before—we had learned things by going that far. We never did that on Unbearable Lightness. Phil—for his own reasons, probably correctly—didn't want to take it that far. Looking back on it now, I think we probably would have learned something if we had. There would have been scenes in collision with one another that were not written to be in collision. And even if they didn't work, that would have taught us something about how to reinvent the film in its longer length.

  O: The film of English Patient is almost as long as Unbearable.

  M: But with Patient there was a tremendous amount of experimentation in how the stories collide with one another. Of the forty transitions, I think only seven remained the way they were in the screenplay. Everything else was reinvented to take advantage of the film's strengths. Because Unbearable was a linear story, we didn't have the flexibility to shuffle scenes around the way we were able to do in English Patient.

  THE TRAGEDY-OF-JOB MOMENTS

  O: I know this is not a fair question…. Are there specific scenes you've edited that you're very fond of?

  M: (Laughs) I particularly like the invasion scene in Unbearable Lightness of Being—what we were able to achieve integrating all kinds of documentary footage from 1968 with the new material shot with our actors, Daniel DayLewis and Juliette Binoche. Because the cold war was still on in 1986, Phil was unable to shoot in Prague. But there was easily forty hours of documentary material about the Soviet invasion of Prague, scattered all over the world. The challenge was to collect and distill that material, and it was a crazy quilt of textures; some of it was in colour, some of it was shot in 16 millimetre, some of it had been copied thirty times, some was original 35 millimetre black-and-white negative. We had to find a way to integrate our story into that footage—to have the two characters move through it—and tell the entire story of the invasion in twelve minutes; and we had to get into that footage from a film that had a very different “undocumentary” texture and very stylized look, and also to get out of it at the other end and back into our story in an interesting way, and not leave the audience with the sense that this was an aberration or an intrusion. Even though we were going into this very different technique and universe, it had to feel authentic and viscerally powerful—as if you, the audience, were caught up in these events as well.

  O: Are there other scenes you remember editing a certain way which were then scrapped and eventually recut in another way?

  M: The closest would be the final confession between Almásy and Caravaggio in The English Patient. Very late in the editing we altered it from a private dialogue

  Overleaf: Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche in one of the street scenes in Prague from The Unbearable Lightness of Being; street scenes in Prague were shot to re-create the Soviet invasion and were mixed in with real documentary footage.

  between two people to one where a third person, Hana, overhears the Patient's confession. She was not a part of that scene when it was shot. But inserting her presence into the conversation allowed her to have the important knowledge about who Almásy was—which Caravaggio alone had had in the screenplay and during the shooting—so that when she later administers the fatal dose of morphine to Almásy she does it with the weight of that knowledge. So we used footage of her from a scene we had dropped, where she was with Kip—and in one case we actually removed Kip from the frame, optically, to give Hana a whole frame to herself.

  O: What was remarkable was how her emotion from that earlier scene with Kip was immediately altered, and now expressed something new in this different context. Also, that artificial link brought the various narrative threads in the film together. It's a wonderful example of lateral thinking during the editing process—this can be in a book or a film—that to me is as creative as the original composition. It's the art of shaking a scene up, turning it upside down, to discover other possibilities in the written or filmed work.

  I also remember, in an early cut of The English Patient, a scene after Hana says good-bye to Kip, who is on his motorbike, where she walks back to the house. There was an amazing shot of her back—her whole body expressing great loss. A great shot. But in the next cut of the film it was gone. Her grief there, over Kip's leaving, was too close to the grief of the Patient's last scene. You couldn't leave it in, because you had to pace the film. You needed, I suppose, to save the grief for the next scene. You had to remove what was a remarkable shot for the value of the film as a whole.

  M: Yes, that's what I call the “Tragedy-of-Job moments.” They are like the good man Job, who does everything—and more—that God requests of him, but God perversely afflicts him and not the bad person who is Job's neighbour. Why me? Job asks. Well, it's because God can see the whole that Job cannot see, and in some mysterious way these afflictions are for the good of the whole, in a way that is invisible to the person.

  From The English Patient: Hana overhearing Almásy's confession. Kip has been optically removed from the lower frame.

  There was a moment in The Conversation—it had to do with Harry Caul's initial assembly of his tape recording of the lovers—that was in every cut of the film, and somehow any changes in nearby scenes had to be reflected in it. It was like a hinge scene. Over and over again I would be working on that scene, and it would accept the changes, it would accommodate itself to the whole. If you anthropomorphized, you could see the scene becoming prouder and prouder of itself, of how it did all this f
or the film! And yet there came a point when I said, You know, I think I'm going to remove this scene. Everything else is now so clear that this scene no longer needs to be in there. It's making the point that is made elsewhere in the film.

  And as I was removing that scene, at two in the morning, it began to speak to me, as if it were Job, saying, Why are you removing me, me of all scenes who has been so faithful to you, who has tried so hard to accommodate your every wish? And I said, I know what you're talking about, and believe me, I've spent many hundreds of hours on you and yet I'm willing to throw all that work away for the benefit of the whole.

  O: It's so similar to editing a book, in those final stages of trying to find the right balance for the emerging organic form. It's like pruning trees in a landscape. You've got fifteen trees and you take out numbers 3 and 7 and 9, and once they're gone you realize that—

  M: You see a whole different thing.

  O: You can see a different possible form and you discover that a whole new set of trees can go, or should at least be moved to a new place…. In literature, even in something as intimate as a poem, those early drafts can be just as wayward and haphazard as the early stages of a film. Look at the gulf between the untidy, seemingly almost useless, first draft of Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” and the remarkably tight and suggestive final version of her nineteen-line villanelle. It becomes clear that all the subtleties of nuance and precision of form were achieved during the editing. So much so that it's almost difficult to recognize the link between the original lines and the final poem. I'm sure the gulf is just as great, even greater, in film.

  M: Very much. Film travels at one mile an hour through its projector. So in Apocalypse Now, we shot over two hundred and thirty-five miles and reduced it all to two-and-a-half miles—a ratio of just under 100 to 1. That's high, but not unique: Michael Mann's recent film The Insider had a similar ratio. There will be long stretches in the evolution of a film where nothing seems to fundamentally change—plateaus.

  And how you prune or chop will determine the very character of a film. There are two approaches to reducing the length of a film: There's what I call the spaghetti-sauce method, which is simply to put the film on the stove with some heat under it, and stir. You taste it occasionally and say, That's great! Now the carrots are working with the tomatoes in a good way, or, No, it's a little too thick, let's add some water! Gradually, organically, the volume of the film reduces to the appropriate level.

  The opposite approach is more brutal. There was a brigand in Greek mythology, Procrustes, who lived on the road between Athens and Sparta. He had a cabin at a place where the road got very narrow, along the coast. Everyone who happened to pass his cabin was obliged to spend the night, and sleep on Procrustes' iron bed. While you were sleeping, he would either stretch you so that you were as long as the bed, or he would lop off things that stuck out, so that no matter how tall or short you were, by the time you left his cabin, you were the same length as everyone else who'd been there.

  Well, Procrustes would say: Here we have a film that's three hours long, and we need it to be two hours long. Let's just—chop—and make it two hours. You do brutal, awful things to the film, but you quickly get down to two hours. The good thing about this process is that you now have the luxury of sitting down, watching the film, and two hours later getting up. Very occasionally it actually works. The editor Robert Parrish tells the story in his book, Growing Up in Hollywood, how All the King's Men was previewed seven times over six months with increasingly unsuccessful results until the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, was about to take the film away. The writer-director, Robert Rossen, in desperation told Parrish to go through the whole picture and “select what you consider to be the center of each scene, put the film in the sync machine and wind down a hundred feet (one minute) before and a hundred feet after, and chop it off, regardless of what's going on. Cut through dialogue, music, anything. Then when you're finished, we'll run the picture and see what we've got.” Parrish did it—cutting a two-hour-and-ten-minute picture down to a ninety-minute picture and it worked, made sense “in an exciting, slightly confusing, montagey sort of way.” And All the King's Men went on to win the Oscar for best picture.

  The bad part of it is that it's not an organic process, so there are big, bleeding stumps in the story. All of the subsequent work is to figure out what can be done to cauterize those wounds and yet keep the film at two hours. In the end,

  The first and the final drafts of the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, published in 1975.

  we usually use some combination of both: the spaghetti-sauce method and the Procrustean.

  O: In Canada, the spaghetti-sauce method is known as the maple-syrup system. We have to boil the collected material down to its essence.

  M: Delicious….

  O: Miles Davis, talking about his music, said, “I listen to what I can leave out.” That seems similar to what I've heard described as your “blue light” theory— how sometimes you artistically need to remove a key element of a scene.

  M: I formulated this idea during The Conversation—probably because we wound up taking so much away. It went from almost five hours to less than two.

  As I began to eliminate things, I would have the feeling that I couldn't remove a certain scene, because it so clearly expressed what we were after. But after hesitating, I'd cut it anyway … forced to because of the length of the film. Then I'd have this paradoxical feeling that by taking away something I now had even more of it. It was almost biblical in its idea of abundance. How can you take away something and wind up with more of it?

  The analogy I came up with was the image of a room illuminated by a bare blue lightbulb. Let's say the intention is to have “blueness” in this room, so when you walk in you see a bulb casting a blue light. And you think, This is the source of the blue, the source of all blueness. On the other hand, the lightbulb is so intense, so unshaded, that you squint. It's a harsh light. It's blue, but it's so much what it is that you have to shield yourself from it.

  There are frequently scenes that are the metaphorical equivalent of that bulb. The scene is making the point so directly that you have to mentally squint. And when you think, What would happen if we got rid of that blue lightbulb, you wonder, But then where will the blue come from? Let's take it out and see. That's always the key: Let's just take it out and find out what happens.

  So you unscrew the lightbulb … there are other sources of light in the room. And once that glaring source of light is gone, your eyes open up. The wonderful thing about vision is that when something is too intense, your irises close down to protect against it—as when you look at the sun. But when there is less light, your eye opens up and makes more of the light that is there.

  So now that the blue light is gone and the light is more even you begin to see things that are authentically blue on their own account. Whereas before, you attributed their blueness to the bulb. And the blue that remains interacts with other colours in more interesting ways rather than just being an intense blue tonality.

  That's probably as far as you can go with the analogy, but it happens often in films. You wind up taking out the very thing that you thought was the sole source of an idea. And when you take it out, you see that not only is the idea still present, it's more organically related to everything else.

  In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the one thing that is never talked about is the reason, the real reason, that Raskolnikov killed the landlady. If Dostoevsky actually explained why he killed her, everything else would be minimized and it would not be as interesting and complex. It reminds me of something my father said when people spoke about his paintings. He related it to a comment Wallace Stevens made: that the poem is not about anything at all, the poem is what it is. It's not there to illustrate a point.

  HUMB“WIDEO”

  O: You developed a wonderful theory about editing a few years ago, in your book In the Blink of an Eye: that often the best place to cut from one shot to anothe
r coincides with the actor's blinking, especially if the actor is good— since a blink naturally signals a closure to a thought.

  M: From my early editing experiences I became convinced that there was a connection between the patterns of a person's eye blinks and the patterns of their thoughts. That blinks are the equivalent of mental punctuation marks— commas, periods, semicolons, et cetera—separating and thus providing greater articulation to our thoughts. I owe the equation Cut = Blink to the director John Huston—he put forth the idea in an interview with Louise Sweeney in the early 1970s.

  The upshot of all this is that I believe the pattern of cuts in a film, to be at its best, needs to reflect or acknowledge the pattern of thoughts of the characters in the film—which ultimately means the thought patterns of the audience. In arranging the sequence of shots, the editor is in effect “blinking” for the audience, and the resulting cuts will seem most natural and graceful when they fall where the blink would fall in an exchange between two people in conversation.

  O: Since your book first came out, have your thoughts about the “blink” changed?

  M: I discovered something, working on Ripley, that I was amazed I hadn't discovered before. Statistically, a blink will most often happen when the actor is speaking a nonvocalized consonant. I think they're called fricative consonants: an s or an f, th, but not d(uh)—d has a vocal component to it. If somebody is speaking, the blinks tend to happen on s's and th's—sounds like that.