The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  Also Francis himself has a highly developed technical side. Had his life gone another way, I can easily see him getting even more deeply involved in technology: “Harry Coppola.” The story that Harry's rival, Bernie Moran, tells at the party in Harry's loft—how Harry bugged the neighbours' phones when he was twelve? That's actually a story about Francis when he was twelve.

  Also, every filmmaker is a kind of voyeur. It just happens that Harry's voyeurism is very narrow—only the sound spectrum. But as soon as you become a filmmaker you are naturally always looking for subject matter and looking at new ways of seeing things and snooping on aspects of people's lives: not only subject matter but approaches to subject matter. I think it was easy for Francis to understand Harry Caul and his craft, out of his own experience.

  That's been one of Francis's great strengths—finding ways to get his films to tap into his own personal experiences. I think sometimes that when films Francis has made have gone wrong, or not been as fully developed as they might have been, it's because he hasn't found a way to use his own life and experience as a reservoir from which to nourish those particular films. Then it tends to become a more technical exercise. But certainly in the Godfather films and The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, he was able to convert the making of those films into a kind of personal battleground and enrich the subject matter of the film itself.

  O: Even though they are surrounded by “big” plots, most of Coppola's characters—Willard, Michael and the others—are solitaries, compulsively private. They are one-way mirrors, looking out, seldom revealing themselves, in some way at war with the outside world. That's where the drama lies.

  M: My personal image of a Coppola film is a close-up of a very human face against an incredible backdrop of historical action. And having the two things work together without unbalancing each other.

  O: I remember when you were accepting the Scripter Award for Anthony's adaptation of The English Patient, you read out the scene numbers in the screenplay and then you read out the order of the scenes as they finally played in the film. The eventual order was something like 1, 42, 2, 98—everything seemed to have changed, in the course of editing. Is that something that has happened in most of the films you've done, or was that an unusual occurrence?

  M: In editing, the order of scenes often changes from what it was in the script. The Conversation was changed a lot. But in terms of its entanglements, I think The English Patient was the most changed. In The English Patient, there's a double variability—you're going backwards and forwards into several different time frames, and the point of view is not fixed: you can jump to a scene between Caravaggio and Hana as easily as you can to one between Kip and the Patient. Yet they're all in the same environment. Whereas The Conversation was limited by its somewhat linear time frame and by the nature of Harry Caul's singular point of view. You only have scenes in which Harry Caul is present. You are looking either at Harry or at something he is looking at. I should say listening as well as looking.

  O: When you were editing The Conversation, was there a sense that you could have shaped it ten different ways, constructed new involvements? Because I get the sense watching it that the plot could swerve backwards or sideways into all kinds of unexplored material. Was it a very difficult edit?

  M: A peculiarity of the project was that a good ten days of material was never filmed—Francis and the production team just ran out of time and money to shoot the entire script, and he had to go off to do preproduction on Godfather II. His advice to me at that point was, Well, let's just cut what we have together and see if we can find a way to compensate for that missing footage. So from the beginning we couldn't structure it the way the screenplay called for. I'd say there were about fifteen pages of script material that were not shot.

  O: Was it a small complexity of plot that was missing from the shot film, or was it something major? How did you work around the missing scenes?

  M: We had to be pretty inventive. For instance, in one scene Harry pursues Ann—the young woman who was his surveillance “target”—to a park, where he reveals to her who he is and what his concerns for her are. Francis shot the park material, but the material leading up to it, including a chase on electric buses, was never shot.

  O: In the film, that conversation in the park is part of a dream sequence.

  M: Because since we had no fabric with which to knit it into the reality of the film, it floated for a while, like a wild card, until we got the idea of making it a

  dream of Harry's, which seemed to be the way to preserve it within the film…. When you have restricted material you're going to have to restructure things from the original intent, with sometimes felicitous juxtapositions.

  O: Were there other scenes like the park sequence where you needed to adjust or even reshoot material?

  M: In the end, the only additional shot we had to film, to make it all work, was a close-up of Harry's hand pulling a reel of tape off the tape recorder, so we could reveal that Meredith, the woman who seduces him at the party, has stolen the crucial tape. In fact, the idea of Meredith as an agent of the Corporation was created in postproduction, and it clarifies and shapes the whole story.

  O: It's almost as if you're inventing the script, discovering it, as you work on it.

  M: Inventing elements of it. That was necessary, given that there was unshot material.

  O: When films are worked on in this way, they seem to give off a novelistic air. I felt the same way watching Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, where I believe he created a “story” during the editing from a much larger canvas of possibilities that he had filmed. And in The Conversation, we get the sense that there's a complete story behind the selection of material—it's back there in the distance. That's similar to the kind of thickness that a novel gives off. We are not held hostage by just one certain story, or if we are, we know it is just one opinion: there are clear hints of other versions. Not many films do that. I think youachieve that effect by always suggesting through sound that something is going on off screen—in The English Patient, the sounds that come from outside the torture room when we are inside suggest other worlds and other plots: we don't see them, but we hear them through the layering of sounds. In The Conversation, something like that is achieved by altering and colliding the order of events.

  M: One thing that made it possible to do that in The Conversation was Francis's belief that people should wear the same clothes most of the time. Harry is almost always wearing that transparent raincoat and his funny little crepesoled

  Overleaf: Surveillance by Gene Hackman and John Cazale in The Conversation. Above: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as the “husband” and “wife” from Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. The voyeurs: Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window, 1954.

  shoes. This method of using costumes is something Francis had developed on other films, quite an accurate observation. He recognized that, first of all, people don't change clothes in real life as often as they do in film. In film there's a costume department interested in showing what it can do—which is only natural—so, on the smallest pretext, characters will change clothes. The problem is, that locks filmmakers into a more rigid scene structure. But if a character keeps the same clothes, you can put a scene in a different place and it doesn't stand out.

  Second, there's a delicate balance between the time line of a film's story— which might take place over a series of days or weeks or months—and the fact that the film is only two hours long. You can stretch the amount of time somebody is in the same costume because the audience is subconsciously thinking, Well, I've only been here for two hours, so it's not strange that he hasn't changed his clothes.

  As soon as this issue becomes overt, of course, you have to address it—if somebody in the story gets soaking wet, then of course he'll have to change his clothes, or if he's at a different kind of social function a week later, of course he'll be wearing a different set of clothes. Short of that, it's amazing how consistent you can
make somebody's costume and have it not stand out.

  Elizabeth Hartman and a skeleton in Coppola's 1966 comedy, You're a Big Boy Now.

  O: Film—even more than theatre, I think—insists on a unity, in some odd way. Not just in costume or location but even in sound.

  M: Mm-hm.

  O: I mean, if a different, distinct sound or room tone is suddenly introduced, unless it's explained or established it can appear inexplicably foreign. There's a forced consistency in film.

  M: Right, which is necessitated by the fact that films are shot out of sequence.

  Actually, one of the main structural changes in The Conversation was necessitated when we realized that the audience found what Harry Caul does—his regular work—so mysterious that it was not only hard for them to understand it but hard to understand the twists of this particular situation in which he finds himself. There were many screenings we had along the way where the audiences were completely flummoxed!

  In the original filmed version, when Harry decodes the tape he's made of Ann and the young man, Mark, he immediately uncovers the line, “He'd kill us if he got the chance,” then goes to return the tape to the Director. As an experiment we divided the scene in two. In the first part we had Harry working on the tape in a routine way, without uncovering the key line. The next day he goes to deliver the tape to the Director. But the fact that the Director's assistant—a very young Harrison Ford—seems a little too anxious to get his hands on the tape gives Harry—and us—pause. Harry takes it back to his studio to listen to it more closely. Now we have the second half of the scene where he uncovers the fateful line—which now has greater meaning in this new context.

  This structure allows the audience to follow the train of events more clearly. But it took us some time to realize that there was a problem and then figure out what to do about it.

  O: For me, The Conversation felt like the first American film of our generation that was really European. It was a new perspective, a new focus. In You're a Big Boy Now and The Rain People, I saw that something strange was happening, but this was the one that was so gutsy, in terms of, Okay, we're going to talk about this from this obsessive angle and we're not going to deal with, or think about, the John Ford vista.

  M: Exactly. The inspiration for Billy Wilder's The Apartment was a tangential character in David Lean's Brief Encounter: the man who agrees to lend the lovers his apartment for the night. Wilder wanted to take a peripheral character from one film and make him a central character in another. What is it like to be that character? Harry Caul is very much in line with that. In a “normal” film, Harry would be the anonymous person recording the tape: you would see him only briefly as he comes into the office and hands the tape in, is paid, and leaves.

  Francis was interested in following an anonymous person and really investigating the fabric of his life. It was a courageous act on his part never to flesh out the story of the murder that finally happens. We know there are two suspects, but what and who they are, and what their real jobs are, and what their relationship is, we don't know, because Harry doesn't know. And even Francisdidn't know: he felt that if he knew, he'd somehow be infected with that knowledge, and he'd be obliged to shoot it, to have it just in case. And if it existed, the impulse to put it in the film would then be almost irresistible. So he willingly said exactly what you said: I'm not going to think about that at all. It was courageous and risky.

  It made the film more awkward to edit, because we didn't have lots of conventional plot material. In the end, the film was a delicate balance between a character study of this rather colourless man—Hermann Hesse's Harry Haller—and a dramatic mystery of corporate takeover and murder—a Hitchcock kind of idea. It was very much in Francis's mind, from the beginning, to try to make an alloy of Hermann Hesse and Hitchcock, to forge an unlikely alliance between those two sensibilities. The struggle of the film, at every level, was how to achieve that balance.

  What we found was that if the balance shifted ever so slightly towards the murder-mystery aspect, our test audiences became impatient with the character-study parts: they seemed unnecessary—Get rid of that! But we had nothing to replace them with…. On the other hand, if we stayed more with the characters, the murder mystery was so partial that it seemed unnecessary. It seemed like something chosen by the filmmakers to beef up—

  O: An intellectual plot.

  M: Right.

  O: But it's what I love about the film! It's that wonderful balance of those two things: a mystery genre and an intellectual character study. I thought what was interesting about it, watching it again, was that it was like Rear Window—the central character is a voyeur, an eavesdropper who later on is the one invaded by the person he's watching. And it's like Vertigo, which has that strange, subliminal obsessive subplot that you don't know if Hitchcock was even really aware of, which rises up and exists there, equal with the mystery.

  M: My memory of getting the structure of that film as right as we ever got it is of a knife-edge alchemy between two elements that don't naturally flow together: copper and tin easily go together to make bronze, but this was something else. The metal of character study and the metal of murder mystery don't easily melt together.

  O: I know. I began The English Patient by reading a nonfiction book about a spy who goes across the desert during World War II. A friend of mine had told me about a spy her father was tracking in Cairo. Read this book called The Cat and the Mice, she said. There was Ken Follett's novel too—The Key to Rebecca—based on the spy's adventures. But in the nonfiction work it was the man who guided the spy across the desert who seemed to me much more interesting than the spy, though there were only a few lines describing him. And I knew, like Billy Wilder did, that this was the guy I wanted to write about … and this was Almásy. I was not really interested in a spy story, I was interested in Almásy's character, but I also wanted the drama of the spy story to hover on the horizon as I wrote.

  O: How long did it take you to edit The Conversation?

  M: A little longer than The English Patient. They finished shooting The Conversation in March of '73, and the mix and everything was done about eleven months later. More than usual, but less than some. It also had a very long first assembly, like The English Patient:four and a half hours. To complicate matters, I was doing two things at once—mixing American Graffiti and editing The Conversation. I was new to the job, it seemed crazy, but doable. Now, looking back on it, I can't imagine tackling something like that! I was also newly a father for the second time, and Aggie and I had just moved house.

  O: You did the sound on Graffiti while you were editing The Conversation?

  M: Editing The Conversation during the day and mixing Graffiti at night— some combination of that. Richard Chew was my associate editor on Conversation. He was able to take up the slack, thank God. If I had to be gone for a period of time on Graffiti, he was able to keep the editorial pots boiling. Richard went on to edit One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and win an Oscar for editing Star Wars.

  O: When you put together the DVD version of The Conversation twenty-five years later, did you see it as an opportunity to finesse any of the editing?

  M: No. We didn't touch the picture at all. We remastered the soundtrack though. It was originally mixed in 1974 as a monophonic optical track, the kind of sound that had remained virtually unchanged since the late 1930s. By 1976, with the introduction of Dolby stereo, we were able to mix higher-quality sound, and in stereo. Since then, of course, there's been tremendous progress technically: we've seen the introduction of digital sound and all the different kinds of sophisticated computer-controlled multitrack systems. The Conversation was, technically speaking, plain vanilla. Artistically, it was another matter. We were trying to push the envelope. A very small envelope.

  If you release an older film on DVD, you're almost obliged to remaster the soundtrack so that it can withstand scrutiny by the magnifying glass of today's sophisticated equipment. Luckily, we found the original masters
of the music—now twenty-eight years old. They had been recorded on three-track magnetic tape. The idea at the time was that the three tracks would allow us to shift the balance between the bass and the treble parts of the piano, to give different colourations of the mono sound.

  But today, if you play the three tracks through a theatre system, it reproduces a very nice stereo field. So we were able to present the music in stereo for the DVD. That then obliged us to re-create some of the atmospheres, and an occasional sound effect, in stereo.

  O: It's strange to realize that The Conversation came between the first two Godfather films, as opposed to being pre-Godfather.

  Roman Coppola, flanked by his parents, carries the Palme d'Or won in 1974 at Cannes for The Conversation;Murch and his wife, Aggie, walk behind.

  M: In a sense, it was pre-Godfather. The Conversation was a script that Francis had written and developed long before The Godfather. In fact, he had intended to make Conversation right after Rain People. But the financing fell apart, and Godfather luckily came along to fill the gap. If that hadn't happened, American Zoetrope would probably have had a short life.

  Nonetheless, as soon as Godfather was over, Francis put The Conversationinto production, almost as a wedge to keep himself from being crushed between the Godfather films. There was tremendous pressure on him financially, and then creatively, to do a sequel to Godfather. And he took it upon himself to do it right: to show that sequels can be films that stand on their own.

  Anyway, the Godfathers had such power, both within the industry and the culture at large, that Francis was desperate to stake out his own personal turf, in between, so as not to be known just as “the Godfather guy.” The decision to make Conversation right after Godfather turned out to be creatively the right thing to do. And strategically it was wonderful, since both The Conversationand Godfather II—very, very different films—were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1975. People thought, This guy can do everything!