The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  THE INVISIBLE PARTNER

  O: There's a distinctive use of music in all your films. In The Conversation,there's that scene where Harry works on the tape, and slowly turns the tape machine dials off one by one, click, click, click, click, after he clearly hears the line “He'd kill us if he got the chance”—and then you allow the piano to come in at that point. It's such a grace note, underlining a clarifying moment: Harry now understands something. And the music signals the end of Act One. Curtain. For me, it has the same effect as the appearance of music after the silence that follows Michael's first killing in The Godfather.

  M: You're right, it's a very similar situation, though the films are very dissimilar. In that scene in The Conversation, you go through a good five or six minutes with no music accompanying what's happening, other than the music that's actually on the tape. It's only at the moment when Harry realizes, to his chagrin, Oh no, this apple is poisoned, that the music comes in. As I said, music seems to function best when it channels an emotion that has already been created out of the fabric of the story and the film.

  O: Obviously you're very careful not to overuse music. But you must have been tempted to use much more of Jim Morrison's music in Apocalypse Now. But even that's restrained. Most filmmakers would have drowned themselves in his music.

  M: It's funny, we did an experiment…. At a certain point in the film's evolution we thought we would use Jim Morrison's music much more, but as it turned out no matter where we put it, it always seemed too much on the nose, even though the music was written long before and had nothing to do with Apocalypse Now in any direct sense. Yet you felt as if Jim Morrison was right there behind the screen, telling you exactly what was happening. No matter how hard we tried, there was something about that music that seemed to be commenting on the action. So we pulled back and only used it at the very beginning and at the end.

  O: Where did the great drumming music come from, in Apocalypse Now?

  M: Mickey Hart, who was the percussionist for the Grateful Dead, organized a group called the Rhythm Devils. Francis asked them to do a percussion track for the entire film. They were to look at the film and improvise as they watched it.

  O: That's what Louis Malle got Miles Davis to do when he “played” the sound-track to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows] … in the late fifties.

  M: And that's just what the Rhythm Devils did. Twenty percent of the music in Apocalypse Now is Mickey Hart and the group, sometimes in isolation, other times integrated into the electronic score.

  O: Does music always tend to be written and brought in at the last stage of a film?

  M: In The Conversation the music was done in a very intelligent way—I was surprised later on to find out this was not the usual method. Francis gave the script to the composer, David Shire, long before the film was shot—highly unusual, although I recommend it if the director and the composer have a good relationship. Francis asked David to pretend that this was a strange kind of musical: The screenplay is the book, so now come up with tunes for it. David wrote two or three of the themes that are in the film, based just on his reading of the screenplay. Francis was able to play those themes for Gene Hackman and the other actors at the time of shooting, so they could hear the music that might be played with the scene. They could hear the scene's colouration—so they didn't have to act that colour. It gave them a great deal of freedom to have that advance knowledge, to pitch themselves against or with the music, to know how the music would fill in their performances, the yin to their yang.

  O: Balanchine, talking about Stravinsky's score for the ballet Apollo, said “the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not use everything. That I too could eliminate.”

  M: It's incredible to me that it's done in any other way, when you think how critical music is in film. But music is almost always written after the fact, with the composer reacting to events already filmed and edited together. How much better if the music is present at the birth of the film, born along with the screenplay, the two of them interweaving through the process of shooting and post-production….

  Later, when I was editing Conversation, I could place the music where it felt right, and David might say, Oh yeah, I agree with that, or, No, I don't like that, or he'd go away and compose something else and give me that to work with, so there was constant feedback between the script, the music, and the film, as it was evolving. Each was able to nourish and influence the other, in ways that don't happen in most conventional films. Usually the music not only comes in very late but is almost spray-gunned on to the film: Now stand back! The music guy comes in all suited up with a big spray gun and blasts it red! Your alternatives at that point are either: I don't like it, or I like it. Maybe shift its location. But at that stage you really can't change the fundamental nature of the music. Nor has the music had an opportunity to shape the film.

  That's why the music sometimes ends up being thrown out—because it wasn't given a chance to grow with the film. Then you have panic, and some other poor composer is called in and told: We have two weeks before the film has to hit the theatres! It's like putting out an oil fire with dynamite.

  My experiences working with Anthony Minghella and the composer Gabriel Yared on both English Patient and Ripley are the closest to that Conversation-type collaboration of music and film.

  O: I remember when Anthony shot the deathbed scene between Hana and the Patient, he played the aria from the Goldberg Variations on set, even though that was replaced with other music later on.

  M: That's a technique that was used a lot during the silent era, when there was no recording at the time of shooting. When sound recording came in, that was used less and less, for obvious reasons: it would leak onto the dialogue track. Kubrick used it during the filming of Spartacus, I believe. And maybe 2001.Certain directors still make great use of it. But you have to then re-record the dialogue.

  O: One of the things that struck me about what you and Anthony did musically in The English Patient was that if there's music on the soundtrack, the audience later realizes it's part of the reality of the scene. For instance, we hear Benny Goodman's jazz as part of the soundtrack, and it's only later that we realize it's a record being played by Caravaggio for the Patient. The music becomes more than an outside force—it grounds the music in the actual scene. I think there were a couple of moments in Ripley that worked that way too.

  M: Yes. That's the great power of source music—music that comes from within the scene, either because an orchestra is playing and you see the orchestra or because somebody has a radio or record player on. It has a musical effect on the audience, but they are insulated from feeling overtly manipulated musically because the sounds are explained by the scene. It seems almost accidental: Oh! This music just happened to be playing while they were filming the scene; it isn't read as having anything to do with the subtext of the film. Of course, it does. But your conscious impression is that it doesn't. Sound effects work very much the same way.

  O: So it feels like a lucky accident.

  M: All source music and sound effects aim for that ideal of the lucky accident. We filmmakers didn't have anything to do with it! It just happened! And the audience appreciates it this way. It sneaks past their immune system, so to speak. Whereas a musical score doesn't. It has to pass through some sort of blood/brain barrier. When you hear it, you recognize that you are now being manipulated musically—and you reposition yourself slightly. A new voice has entered. Whereas source music can enter a scene without being perceived as a new voice. It just seems, as you said, a lucky accident.

  What we were doing in The English Patient was playing with the twilight zone between those two realms. We wanted you to hear the Benny Goodman as score, but then it collapsed, it condensed, the water vapour of that music became liquid when you saw that it was coming from a record player within the scene. That has a curious effect on an audience—almost the opposite of what I was saying. But I enjoy playing with those thing
s. Like all those techniques, there is a fine line: If you overuse it, then it becomes predictable and it's not so welcome anymore.

  O: I also remember that in the early drafts of the film you used a very good version of the Goldberg Variations when Hana is playing the piano, and later you had to change the recording to a not-as-good one—to make it more realistic. Or she would have been playing as well as Glenn Gould!

  M: Yes, and we detuned the piano, to imply that it had been exposed to the weather for months.

  THE MINOR KEY

  O: If you think about the characters in the films you've worked on—you've got Willard, Michael Corleone, Tomas from Unbearable, Ripley, and Harry Caul— it's a ne'er-do-well bunch! There's an almost insistent need in you to make us love such people.

  M: And the English Patient too.

  O: And the Patient, yeah.

  M: It's interesting, isn't it? I don't know whether love is the right word. Understand, sympathize, perhaps. I don't know how much of that pattern you've identified is my choice and how much is chance. Clearly everyone involved is fully aware of the problematic aspects of the characters….But that's what makes it interesting—there's a wonderful challenge in showing the deeper or less obvious aspects of people who, on the surface, are unlikeable or even boring. Everybody has a story, and people who are usually labelled “uninteresting” or problematic usually have the more interesting stories. There is a mystery about them.

  O: Even with a strong script about such deeply flawed characters, you as an editor also have to present them emotionally and intellectually in some fair way, so they are complicated and dangerous but cannot be dismissed easily or quickly…. It seems you'd need to have a real empathy for that point of view.

  M: I agree. To the extent that these are characters played in a minor key, I'm interested in the minor key. They come at you sideways, whereas major-key characters come at you directly—

  O: As in Spartacus.

  M: Yes. I guess I am drawn to stories where you have to get under the skin of rather unlikely and sometimes unlikeable characters.

  Source music in The English Patient: the piano was detuned to suggest that it had been exposed to the elements.

  How you do that, as an editor, ultimately comes down to selecting the shots, and moments within shots, where the character looks appealing yet problematic at the same time—conflicted, in other words. If you have a choice of seven different shots, which one shows that conflict best? There are many tiny but telling details the editor includes or eliminates in order to make the audience aware of the deeper aspects of character.

  For instance, if you are wearing a hat, as soon as you tip the hat slightly back on your head, it gets noticed—you're sending a message via the angle of the hat: I'm a happy-go-lucky guy. Or if you ram the hat down on your head, you're saying, I don't want to talk to anybody. Or if you tip it forward, you say, I'm aggressive…. But if you're trying to be earnest, the tipped-back hat doesn't quite send the right message.

  In film there are endless versions of this, where a look, an aspect, an attitude, a gesture is fortuitously correct or incorrect, and either amplifies or contradicts the message the filmmakers want to convey.

  I'm using “hat” as a metaphor: one moment is always going to be the most revealing, in the best sense, of the inner character, at that point in the film.

  O: I would forgive Harry Caul a lot of things for that moment when he looks at the paper mobile hanging on the string in front of him and just blows it, with a small breath. It's such a tender, intimate scene. So much is happening in that little moment, which is nothing really.

  M: That's a very good example. He comes into the scene, in a wide shot, and that little mobile is hanging at an angle, so it's almost invisible—you don't notice it. Then he bumps into it, his head nods forwards, and he hits it. It's right around that point that I cut to a slightly closer shot of that same action, where that little dangling thing pirouetted in the most interesting way. If I'd just held the long shot it wouldn't have been as interesting.

  O: I saw The Conversation when it first came out, and watching it again recently I was waiting for the last camera movement, when Harry Caul is pulling his apartment to pieces—

  M: The oscillating camera—

  O: Which I assume is where the bug he's looking for possibly is.

  M: It is and it isn't. I think if there were literally a camera in his room, he would have discovered it. But that camera movement does give you that effect of another alien presence in the room with him. The camera is definitely not a neutral “hat.” Most of the time the camera asks us not to think about the particular angle from which it's photographing, but to think about the action—it just happens that the chosen angle is the most revealing for this particular action. Whereas in that shot in Harry's apartment, the camera is aggressively a presence.

  O: We were talking last night at dinner about how in the last half of the film there's practically no dialogue, though it's something we're not really conscious of.

  M: Yes. From the moment the guests leave the party in Harry's loft, and we're left with Harry and Meredith, the woman who seduces him and steals the tape, the normal give-and-take of a dialogue film—where meaning is conveyed in words—begins to bleed into something else quite different. It becomes very spare in its use of dialogue. I think that encourages the audience to listen to sounds as if they are speech. In other words, you begin to search the soundtrack for meaning because there are no words “in the foreground” distracting you. You pay closer attention to the sounds that are there. There isn't a noticeable difference between the sound effects in the first half and those in the last half of the film. But what is different is the gradual evaporation of dialogue, leaving in the end just “the conversation” itself, and the sound effects. You pay attention to the stars on nights when there is no moon. When the moon is shining, all you can see is the moon. Dialogue is the moon, and stars are the sound effects.

  Curiously, I wasn't consciously aware of this when I was working on the film. But when it came out, and people started saying that it had an interesting soundtrack, I wondered, What are they talking about … ? Okay, it's about a sound man, and that encourages you to take his point of view. Still, I didn't fully understand until I realized that the absence of dialogue in the second half of the film makes you listen to the sounds and give them a significance they would not otherwise have. It seems obvious in retrospect.

  O: It's interesting how that awareness of an absence sometimes occurs subconsciously even while reading a book. In the middle of William Faulkner's Light in August there's a brief—just a page long—conversation between Joe Christmas and the woman, Joanna Burden. It's a very quiet conversation, and nothing much goes on, but I was in tears in that scene. And I didn't know why. It was only later that I realized that's the only time in the book when Joe Christmas has a real conversation with someone else. He is so utterly alone. He doesn't really talk to anyone in the book. So their talk feels shockingly intimate, and it emphasizes the absence around the scene. It would be like Harry Caul suddenly communicating openly with someone in the middle of the film.

  WHAT'S UNDER THE HANDS?

  O: Gene Hackman as Harry Caul gives a remarkable performance of a guy who won't reveal anything about himself, yet somehow we are magnetized by him. How does that work? I know when you were cutting The English Patient, you had a central character who was essentially in bed all the time—yet somehow you had to make him dramatic. I noticed that whenever you cut to him in the bed he'd be moving, in some small way, he wouldn't just be lying still, he'd be shifting within the sheet or leaning forwards to get something, so he was very active while supposedly bedridden and static. When you edited The Conversation, did you do anything similar to make Hackman's character so magnetic? It was a great performance!

  M: Yes, it was. The very smart thing that Francis exploited is the human hunger for mystery: if somebody says, I'm not going to show you what's under my hands, you become fixated
on what's under his hands. Even if your hunch is that there's nothing, you won't be satisfied until you've seen what is—or isn't— under his hands.

  And that's what happens when you present somebody, like Harry Caul, who won't tell you anything about himself. He has nothing in his apartment that will give any clue as to what's going on inside him. His girlfriend, Amy, tries to get him to talk about himself and he says he's a kind of a freelance musician. Then she says the worst thing she could have said, which is: “I want to know about you.” That's when he gets up off the bed and leaves.

  Revealing just enough of that secret dynamic was the real challenge for Hackman. He usually likes to play characters who have at least one opportunity to bust loose. But in The Conversation everything was constrained, hidden. The job of the editors, conversely, was to make things as clear as possible, because what Harry does—his work as an electronic eavesdropper—is hard to understand, by its very nature.

  Francis was very articulate about this at the time of shooting. He knew people were fascinated by process. So he dwelled deliberately on all the minutiae of Harry's work—and that's one of the things that suck you into Harry's life and get you to identify with him.

  O: I agree. It's like Bresson's Pickpocket, where he shows you the poetry in the details of the craft. There's nothing more interesting than that.

  M: Exactly.

  A detail and a scene from Robert Bresson's 1959 film, Pickpocket.

  O: Everything that happens in The Conversation is to do with communication, or noncommunication. Harry's obsessed with translating what people say intimately, in secret, but he himself says nothing, reveals nothing. The English Patient doesn't move, Harry Caul doesn't communicate.