The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  O: Is it because those letters are more difficult to say?

  M: I don't know. I've just discovered this. It may be that. It may be that the blink is waiting to happen and somehow, in the moment, there's a brief pause of some kind, because the vocal cords are not being used and you take that opportunity to blink. It's another aspect of the blink that would be worth a little study—watching to see what part of the alphabet coincides most often with blinking.

  Practically what it means is that those fricatives are good places to cut because the same thing that makes a person blink, when he speaks those lines, is also making the audience “blink”—the audience is more receptive to a shift of attention at that moment. The cut just looks better. Feels better, rhythmically, within the cadence of speech.

  O: We had a prime minister in Canada who had a tendency to lisp, so his speechwriters were told to avoid the s's.

  M: (Laughs)

  O: When I came from Sri Lanka to England I was eleven years old, and I had a problem distinguishing the letters v and w. So I would say “wideo” or “wagabond.” For the first three years in England, I'd always have to think twice before I said a v word or a w word. That's probably a more cultural kind of halt.

  THE NON-FILM WAY OF LIVING

  O: Tell me how you got interested in Curzio Malaparte's writing? Did you learn Italian in order to translate him?

  M: I took a year of Italian in college and then studied in Perugia, so I had a preexisting interest in Italian. And I speak French—I like the Romance languages.

  In 1986, when we were in Lyons shooting the invasion of Prague for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I ran out of things to read. I went to a bookstore and bought a book on cosmology. The author was explaining the very early stages of the universe after the Big Bang, and he confessed, “I could try to tell you about this moment, but it's better simply to recount Malaparte's story about the frozen horses of Lake Ladoga.”

  The story involved the siege of Leningrad, artillery bombardments, forest fires, hundreds of cavalry horses escaping in a frenzy from the flames only to end up flash-frozen as they reached the supercooled water of the lake. And to top it off, all this somehow related to the condition of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. I loved it! I had to find out who this Malaparte was.

  Curzio Malaparte and friend.

  Back in Berkeley, I went to the university library and found that of the three works of his that are translated into English, one of them was Kaputt,which contains the story of the frozen horses. Reading the rest of the book was like falling into a waking dream. I read everything of his I could get my hands on after that, including works that had not been translated into English.

  After The English Patient, in the course of an interview with the magazine Parnassus, I compared the process of film adaptation to translation, in the sense that many of the decisions you make—when you go from a book to a script and then from a script to shooting and from shooting to editing—are like translating from one language to another, from the language of words to the language of images and sounds. But there is naturally within each language a different emphasis on certain things. You have to take that difference into account when you translate from one language to another.

  After the interview, I thought, Hmm, it sounds good, but maybe I'd better do some translation to make sure that what I'm saying is true. So I went back to some of the Malaparte material that was only in Italian. I was happy to discover that I enjoyed translation, particularly right after having finished a film. You're so keyed up in making the film that when it's over, suddenly, after a year of work, you feel like you've fallen off the edge of a cliff. To continue that work, in a different form, was a very pleasing way to make the transition back to the non-film way of living.

  O: The politics of Malaparte's life seem very complicated and ambivalent. We are never too sure where he stands. He's constantly changing sides.

  M: “Complicated” is putting it mildly! His real name was Kurt Suckert—his father was a German who had married a girl from Milan. So he was Protestant German in an Italian Catholic world. He ran away from home at age sixteen and fought all four years of World War I on the side of the French against the Germans. He was so disturbed by what happened during the war that he joined

  Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli on the rooftop stairs of Villa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, 1963, filmed at the extraordinary villa on Capri designed by Malaparte.

  the Italian Fascist Party in its early, idealistic phase. Later he was expelled for writing an exposé of Mussolini's rise to power after he felt that the original ideals had been corrupted. After World War II he became a communist, and then on his deathbed he converted to Catholicism apparently.

  His adopted name—Malaparte—could be read as the “bad part” that does not fit in with the rest of society. There's still a great deal of controversy about him in Italy. Some see him as an egotistical opportunist. I think there's something else going on, a bruised idealism that could never find a home in this world….

  O: He was essentially a prose writer, and you're translating his prose into poetry. What's your reason for that?

  M: It seemed to happen all by itself. It surprised me because I'm not somebody who naturally gravitates to poetry. I prefer to read prose, if given the choice. So I was surprised, but because it seemed to happen automatically, I let it.

  With hindsight, I'd say it was probably due to the rich, almost overwhelming density of Malaparte's original text, the fabulous nature of his imagery, his frequent use of repetitions, and the cross-sensory nature of his metaphors: “the air filled with water and stone,”“a bitter blue light.”

  I think one of the reasons his writing has found it hard to breathe in English is that extreme density of image. If you get into it—as I did—it's fine, but it's almost too much, too thick a potion. It's less thick in Italian because there's a musicality that relieves the thickness. But in English it doesn't have that. In a way, the fragmentation on the page into lines of poetry is a way of aerating it, reinfusing that musicality. It was also fascinating to me because I suddenly saw a parallel between the decision of where to bring a line to an end and the decision of where to end a shot.

  O: I know. When I phoned you and told you how good and natural the line breaks seemed, and then to hear that you'd not done this before … I was amazed at that!

  M: We confront this all the time in film editing: The point at which you decide to end the shot usually has very little to do with the grammar of the scene around it. You do not end a shot at the comma, so to speak. You end a shot sometimes right in the middle of a word, and go on to another shot with the dialogue hanging over. But the architecture of those shots, and where you choose to end the line, has to do with the rhythmic balance of the material up to that moment.

  O: You can see another aspect of this in Robert Creeley—who is a master of line breaks in poetry. Where he breaks the line is utterly bound up with his voice and persona—so the craft represents him, draws a portrait of him, as much as the text does. The form in this way can mirror the speaker's state and nature. There's a wonderful statement about Creeley by the poet Sharon Thesen that describes this. “When you see/hear Creeley read it's almost like managing pain…. It's that probing consciousness, the turnings toward and away from what can literally be borne in or by the line … and it's all in the line…. His vocabulary is not large and florid. There's that intelligence that just will not exceed its form…. It pulls back with that lovely eloquent ‘humilitas.' ”

  In your translating and editing of Malaparte's poems such as “Sleepwalking” or “The Wind,” how faithful were you to the text?

  M: Well, as faithful as a translator can be. There's an Italian adage: “Traduttore, traditore”—translator, traitor.

  O: So you did at times betray his original text?

  M: Yes, but I hope I betrayed the surface only in the interest of getting at a deeper truth. In one language an idea can be expressed in a s
ingle word and in another language you need five words for it. If you translated each of those words literally, there would be something wrong. So it might be better to find out what happens if you condense these five into a single word. And then what does that do to the architecture of the rest of the material? You probably have to make other adjustments as a result, and so on.

  O: What surprises me about Malaparte is his surreptitious humor.

  M: He's full of that. But you have to be alive to it. It's subtle—particularly for an American audience—so far from overt that it's easy to miss it. I find Malaparte's work is infused with this quality…. There's a fascinating description of a dinner scene in The Skin, which takes place just before the Allies move into Rome. Malaparte is serving as an aide-de-camp with the French army, and they're billeted on the hills overlooking Rome. Some French generals and Moroccan soldiers are having couscous for dinner. During the preparations for dinner there's an explosion—a grenade goes off and one of the Moroccans loses a hand. During the dinner the subject of Malaparte's experiences in his book Kaputt comes up, and one of the French generals protests, Why do these incredible things happen to you, Malaparte? I'm a general and I've gone through the whole war and nothing incredible has ever happened to me. You must be inventing these things. And Malaparte says, No, I don't invent them. I may be a magnet for them. But they happen.

  There's a debate back and forth, and then Malaparte says, Well, in fact, as I've been talking to you, the most incredible thing has happened.

  What is it?

  He says, Well, as I was eating I discovered some human fingers mixed in with my couscous. Naturally, being a good guest, I didn't mention this and have been eating as if it were really prepared for me.

  Everyone else at the table goes into a state of shock, and Malaparte says, No, no, look. You can see these little bones on the plate. What must have happened was that the Moroccan's hand landed in the pot in which the lamb stew was being prepared, and it was cooked along with the stew and served to me.

  They're all revolted, but one of the guests, Jack, an American friend of Malaparte's, examines the plate and realizes that he's played a joke—that it's just lamb bones carefully arranged to look like a hand. After the dinner, Jack is slapping Malaparte on the back and saying, What a jokester! What a trickster! Yet with this mixture of the true and the concocted, Malaparte ends the story on a note of ambiguity. It's finally unclear whether they were human fingers or not. And perhaps the joke was on Jack, after all. But it's funny. And horrible. In his introduction to Kaputt Malaparte writes: “This is a gay and gruesome book.”

  Generally, the only accounts of the war experience from the fascist side came either from nonliterary people or from the Nazis themselves, and you had to discount what they said because they were Nazis. Whereas here was Malaparte, this much more neutral, ironic observer, telling you things you hadn't heard before, and in that particular way of his. That's what I responded to, I guess.

  O: I remember a story about William Carlos Williams visiting Ford Madox Ford in France. They're walking in a field and Ford is expounding on his theories of impressionism and the modern novel and so forth. In his journals, Williams wrote: “For forty minutes Ford was going on and he didn't even notice that nearby there was a sparrow, terrified because we were approaching its nest.” A magazine ran Williams's account on the left-hand page, and on the opposite page Ford's diary account of the same afternoon. And Ford's entry was almost entirely about that sparrow he'd seen on the walk. It wasn't anything to do with aesthetics. It was wonderful, full of details, his mind was totally on the three little birds in their nest.

  THIRD CONVERSATION

  NEW YORK CITY

  In the fall of 2000, I was a writer-in-residence at the Columbia University medical school in New York. Every morning I would take the A train to Columbia Presbyterian on 168th Street, the hospital where, in fact, Duke Ellington was admitted in the last days of his life. During those three months I invited some writers to come and speak to the class I was teaching. As there was a chance Walter would be travelling through New York in December, I asked him if he would address the students and medical faculty about his work in film. He agreed partly because he had been born in the hospital, as he said (always precise), “fifty-seven years and one hundred and fifty-two days ago.” So I was able to introduce him one afternoon as an older and wiser Walter Murch.

  The talk held his medical audience spellbound. He projected clips from various films, talking about how they were structured, and he projected slides to show how picture, light, sound, and electricity combine in the process of amplification in a theatre. His constant fascination with and knowledge of the sciences has always made him very much at ease with this kind of audience. A year later he would be giving a lecture in San Diego on the future of digital cinema to a gathering of three thousand neurosurgeons.

  Elizabeth MacRae and Gene Hackman looking at dailies from The Conversation with Coppola.

  The next morning after his talk at the hospital, we sat down for our third conversation. The sound of the steam pipes in the walls of the SoHo loft where we met constantly startled us with their loudness, a sort of haphazard and unseen gamelan orchestra. This time our talk focussed mostly on two films: The Conversation and Touch of Evil which Walter had spent the early part of 1998 recutting according to Orson Welles's recently discovered memo. The Conversation was the first feature on which Walter edited picture, and in many ways I think it's his most interesting (and probably his most independent) work in his ongoing collaboration with Coppola as writer-director and himself as editor.

  Our conversation ended with a late Vietnamese lunch on Greene Street.

  EDITING THE CONVERSATION

  O: When you and Francis Coppola worked on The Conversation, the content must have seemed like the absolutely logical subject you would want to make a film about, a celebration and inquiry of “humble sounds.” Really, the same obsession you had when you were eleven years old. Was it a film Coppola wrote on his own and you then got involved in, or were you involved at an earlier stage?

  M: He wrote it in the late sixties. The idea for the film was a Life magazine article that Irvin Kershner, the director, had brought to Francis's attention. It was a portrait of Hal Lipset, a surveillance technician who worked out of San Francisco. Francis had seen Antonioni's Blowup a year or two before, and he had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup with the world of audio surveillance. The central character, Harry Caul—loosely inspired by Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf—is an ordinary bourgeois person who is suddenly plunged into a world over which he has no control.

  “A sense of doubling”: hands and machines—Murch echoes Hackman's moves in the mixing room.

  O: It's an amazing film. On one level it's a thriller, but it also has that ambiguity we were talking about earlier. And it's got such a chiselled and obsessed point of view.

  M: Yes, since the story is relentlessly told from the single point of view of this ordinary surveillance technician. You know he's been hired by the Director of a faceless Corporation to secretly tape the conversations of a young couple who may or may not be having an affair. But since you only know only what heknows, you never really discover the whole story of what happened. You just make assumptions. And because he's a sound man, over the course of the film you, the audience, naturally begin to hear the world the way he hears it. That was a wonderful opportunity.

  O: This is one of the great unreliable narratives in film. And it seems an obsession so close to yours….

  M: There were many times while making the film that I had a sense of doubling. I'd be working on the film late at night, looking at an image of Harry Caul working on his tape, and there would be four hands, his and mine. Several times I was so tired and disoriented that Harry Caul would push the button to stop the tape and I would be amazed that the film didn't also stop! Why was it still moving?

  It's curious that recently I've been working on the Edison-Dickson film, doing
exactly the same kind of thing that Harry Caul did on that tape.

  O: The craft of Harry Caul and what you do as a sound person do seem very close.

  M: I think Francis was probably studying me occasionally, as if I were a member of a strange tribe and he were an anthropologist! I was the sound person most accessible to him—I supervised all the postproduction sound work on Rain People, Godfather, THX, and American Graffiti.

  O: Watching The Conversation, I feel Coppola has given us, in an odd way, a celebration of artists, of professionals. There's such a pleasure in the craft—in the scene following the conference on electronic surveillance technology, where Harry's four fellow professionals stand around chatting about their craft, and in the way they talk about Harry as one of the “notables.” It's a portrait of a clan of artists.

  M: Yes, that was very much on Francis's mind. I remember him saying at the time how fascinating it is, particularly in film, to watch a craft being exercised. A woodcarver. Or a stonemason. To simply sit and watch. How often does he sharpen the blade? Oh, that's interesting—he sharpens it every tenth stroke. There's a very tactile, visual quality to it all. And it's of considerable human interest at the same time.

  O: It's the way that in a samurai movie we become much more interested in the warrior's detailed training in solitude than in the final battle.

  M: Yes. And for Francis, Harry Caul's craft is, of course, very much like film-making: Here's the raw material, and how do you get the best out of that material? It's an insight into the way such a mind works. Also, there's a lot of Francis in Harry Caul, although when you meet Francis you don't think of him as Harry. Francis comes across as the expansive, voluble paterfamilias. He'll welcome you to his table. He loves to have lots of people around and he loves discussion, to be the host, to cook dinner for you—all those social things that run absolutely opposite to the lonely Harry Caul in his motel-like apartment, playing a saxophone alone. But in fact there's another side to Francis that's very much like Harry Caul.