M: Yeah….
O: All aspects of Harry's life, even his rooms—his apartment, the loft—have locks and distinct boundaries—
M: Harry's life is segregated into neutral rooms—the motel-like appearance of his home is identical to the hotel room where the murder is committed. Also, he has his costume—
O: The caul of a raincoat you were talking about before. But even his work space—which is his “heart”—ends up as a little cage, with this amazing DMZ of an empty loft around it. Was all this conceived beforehand?
M: It was developed as Francis wrote the screenplay and interacted with the various department heads—the costumer, Aggie Rogers, and production designer, Dean Tavoularis.
O: What was that interesting but rather bewildering element about Harry's relationship with the other people in the apartment building? His landlady puts a bottle of wine inside his door … ?
M: That was part of a subplot that was interesting but in the end superfluous. The bottle of wine is the only fragment of it left. In the shooting script, people in the apartment building discover it's Harry's birthday and invade his apartment with a birthday cake, then start complaining about the plumbing in the building and elect him to be their representative to go talk to the owner of the building about fixing it. We discover a further level of secrecy in Harry's character when we find out Harry himself is the owner of the building. He goes to see his lawyer and asks, What am I going to do? The tenants want me to complain to myself.
Coppola's notes for the script of The Conversation.
O: So this subplot was shot?
M: All that was shot. But it was cut for reasons of length. And to try to maintain that balance we talked about between the character study and the murder mystery.
O: I thought the love scene where he's seduced by Meredith after the party in his loft was remarkable. The only intimate touch we really see between them is when she kisses his ear! And all the love talk during their foreplay is really coming from the tape…. There's no conversation. And the minute the tape ends, the love scene ends.
M: That was all in the screenplay. Francis was interested in having things exactly as you describe them—a fragment of dialogue on the tape seems to comment on something we are seeing in the loft. The relationship between the tape and the visuals is musical. We hear the girl on the tape taking pity on a homeless man sleeping on a park bench—while Harry is lying on his cot, in agony about her fate. “I love you,” the girl says to the boy on the tape, as Meredith is whispering into Harry's ear.
These things are complicated to work out. They eventually depend on the exact orchestration of all the elements. How precisely things happen at any moment is determined largely in the editing, but Francis was very clear about what he wanted to achieve, and he shot the material in such a way to allow it to happen.
O: For me a similar and even more stunning moment occurs in The English Patient—which wasn't even in the screenplay—when Almásy and Katherine are caught in a truck during the sandstorm. It's part of a flashback and reveals the first awareness of their attraction for one another. He has touched her hair and she has not moved. She turns instead and puts her fingers on the glass of the truck window, the shot dissolves, slowly—into the present—and we briefly see Almásy's disfigured face under her hand. So it becomes her hand caressing his face across time in a tender gesture. It is emotionally haunting, because “in the present” Katherine is no longer alive.
“NIGHT WAS NIGHT”: RE-EDITING TOUCH OF EVIL
O: I often saw the original version of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil on late-night television, and I always drifted away from it. I recognized something strange was going on, but it never felt a consistently focussed film. There was “interference” taking place…. Then in the late nineties I heard you were re-editing the film. And—very exciting—that you were basing your work on Welles's famous memo written after he was fired by Universal, before he'd finished it. When I saw your new, reworked version of Touch of Evil, I found it a much darker, more radical film than the original. How did this project come into being?
M: It came out of the blue—a phone call from Rick Schmidlin, whom I didn't know. In fact, very few people at that time knew who he was. He'd done promotional films for Harley-Davidson, just enough story to get to see guys driving around, buying and riding Harley-Davidsons—“A Trip to the Rockies” et cetera.
But he loved film, and film history, and he particularly loved Orson Welles's work. In the early 1990s he read a fragment of Welles's memo in Film Quarterly, written in carefully modulated tones of suppressed outrage after Welles saw what the studio had done to Touch of Evil. The complete memo had been lost for some years, but the fragment had such a powerful effect on Rick that he made it his mission to find the complete, fifty-eight-page memo— which he did—and then convince Universal to recut Touch of Evil accordingly.
Rick had some contacts at Universal—he'd done some laser disc restorations for them—and he just walked in and kept banging on doors until he finally found someone high up enough in the executive food chain to know what he was talking about, to get excited about it, and to put it into production.
He called me and asked if I was interested. Well, I'd just finished a film, and I had no idea what I was going to do next, so I asked him: Was the original negative in reasonably good shape? (It was.) Was there a good magnetic master of the soundtrack, with separation of dialogue, music, and sound effects? (There was.) And, Let me see the memo! I was hooked as soon as I started reading it.
“As if Orson was sending us notes”by Rick Schmidlin
About three years ago, I was at the Los Angeles County Museum and heard Walter Murch lecture on sound. After the lecture, they presented The Conversation. That was probably the single most important lecture I had ever heard, and The Conversation inspired me to do what I would later do.
When I was given the green light to re-edit Orson Welles's Touch of Evil,based on his memo, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know who I wanted to re-edit this film. I got Walter's phone number through a friend and called him at home. I said, Walter, this is Rick Schmidlin. You don't know me, but I'm going to be producing a re-edit of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, and I can't think of any intellect that could match Orson Welles's better than yours. Would you be interested? Walter said, Mmm. Send me the memo and I'll take a look.
So I sent him the fifty-eight-page memo. About a week later I got a phone call, and he said, Can you come up to northern California and meet with me to discuss the project? I immediately drove up there. As I drove past San Francisco and headed up Highway 1, I remembered one of his instructions was, When you come to a crossroads and there's an X—that's where you make a left. Walter lives in a town that doesn't even have a marker to tell you how to get into the town! You fend for yourself.
I followed Walter's instructions and came to this beautiful 1880s farmhouse, with a lagoon that has the largest variety of birds in the world. I got there at lunchtime. I sat at the kitchen table with Walter and Aggie and their daughter Beatrice. And he talked about—of all things—a single reversed camera angle that he said existed in Raging Bull! And could I find out anything about a print with this version that he saw in Europe—it puzzled him what this reversal shot might mean to the context of the scene. I still haven't been able to find out about it.
At the end of lunch, Walter pulled out the memo and started reading it, from page 1, right down to the last of the fifty-eight pages. At the end, he put down the memo and said, I'll do it.
A month and a half later I was in Walter's converted barn next to the farmhouse. Over the weeks, it was fascinating to watch him work. Some mornings I would arrive and he would be standing at the Avid in his bathrobe—sometimes just pajamas—hair mussed up, and I knew that he had gotten an idea at four or five in the morning and had been editing continuously since then.
One of the most interesting things that happened was when we found that a twelve-page sound memo existed—and we were able to
locate it. The studio would fax the pages up to us. It was strange … as if Orson was sending us these notes!
To say the least, working with Walter was the most rewarding experience in my life. I learned about mathematics. I learned about patience, structure, discipline, creativity, passion, humanity, humility, family, poetry, prose. And also what it was like to be in a house that does not have a television set.
O: How did the famous memo get written?
M: Welles had been permitted only one screening of the film, after the studio had worked for months making many changes, straightening out his original crosscutting structure and writing and shooting four new scenes, directed by Harry Keller. They were supposed to explain the situation more clearly and make the film more accessible to the audience for a Universal B picture in the late 1950s. Welles wrote his notes during that screening. I can only imagine how he felt, sitting there, writing away furiously in the dark….
By the morning he had typed up fifty-eight pages of comments—astute, insightful, restrained, boiling with passion under the surface. But he was aware he was addressing his thoughts to the heads of the studio—notably Ed Muhl—who were his declared enemies. So you can see him trying not to express outright blame for what had happened, no matter what he thought privately. It's heartbreaking to read! Both for the obvious waste of talent and insight of one of our great filmmakers. And because, with hindsight, we know Touch of Evil was to be Welles's last film within the Hollywood system he'd so dramatically entered nearly twenty years earlier.
The memo is inspiring also for its raison d'être—which was to lay out the things Welles felt were wrong with the studio version of the film, and what he felt could be done to correct it, within its own terms. And it worked out to contain approximately fifty practical suggestions, beginning right away with the removal of Henry Mancini's opening music—“I assume the opening music is temporary”—and concluding with suggestions for how to treat Marlene Diet-rich's famous eulogy for Quinlan, played by Welles, as his body floats in the garbage-strewn stagnant water of the canal: “What does it matter what you say about people? He was some kind of a man.”
In the end, we were able to accommodate all fifty changes, even though all we had was the original negative and the magnetic soundtrack. None of the
One page of the fifty-eight-page memo Welles wrote during the screening of Touch of Evil, then typed up after being allowed to see the film only once.
outtakes had been saved, of course, though they were available when Welles wrote his memo. What helped immeasurably were some of the new digital techniques—unimaginable when the film was originally shot.
Shortly after I began, a friend asked, What are you up to these days? Oh, I said, I'm doing Orson Welles's cut of Touch of Evil. And he said, You're not doing anything, I hope, to the beginning of the film. I replied, That's the first thing I'm changing.
A choking sound could be heard … I explained I was following Welles's directions. There was a long silence. He said, That's like hearing that God just called and said he wants to change the Bible.
O: Did you alter the content of the shot?
M: Just the opposite. Welles wanted to remove the main titles that had been superimposed over it, and he wanted a different soundtrack, something composed of snatches of source music—from brothels, cantinas, car radios, tourist traps—that shift and blend into each other as the camera drifts through the streets of this border town. The aural equivalent of the camerawork, in other words.
We were able to remove the titles, since we luckily discovered a “textless background” in one of the cans of negative. This was then digitally rewoven into the fabric of the film, so you can't tell where the transition takes place.
The original Henry Mancini title music was perfectly good in itself, but the problem was that it set up a stylistic expectation that the film never followed. The music, full of bongos and brass, makes you imagine a Peter Gunn or James Bond–type detective, suave, handsome, effective—but nobody in the film is like that.
Instead, we were able to construct something that I hope is close to what Welles wanted: overlapping fragments of source music, a device the film uses throughout: Afro-Cuban interwoven and alternating with rock and roll. The music throughout the film goes back and forth as the action repeatedly crosses the American-Mexican border.
Touch of Evil is, in a way, an investigation of the idea of “borderness.” What is a border? What are our expectations of the people who live there? Welles plays tricks and upsets those expectations. In an earlier, non-Welles draft of the screenplay, the American detective was a Texas Ranger. He was upright and his Mexican counterpart was the corrupt, slothful, lecherous cliché. Instead, it's the
Welles directing Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil.
American detective, Quinlan—Welles—who is corrupt, overfed, shabbily dressed, reactionary, and racist. By contrast, Vargas, the Mexican narcotics investigator played by Charlton Heston, is square, liberal, uptight, moralistic, and a workaholic unable to consummate his honeymoon—with Susie, the luscious Janet Leigh—because of his commitment to solving the crime.
In many and various ways Welles was playing with oppositions, turning them upside down when it suited him. And what's nice about the new version of the film is that the opening shot now acts as a prelude to the events that follow. It settles you into your chair and presents you, in miniature, with all the themes and ideas that the following piece of cinema is about to investigate. So even if we'd made no other changes past that first shot, I think the film would be perceived as a different film, because you enter it in a different way.
O: That sense of erased borders is there throughout the film. Even the border between indoors and outdoors doesn't exist. When Charlton Heston is indoors making a phone call, you see what's going on out on the street: the two men he needs to talk with are actually outside, walking past. Or he's in the car when his wife, Susie—Janet Leigh—comes out above him onto a fire escape of a building he's driving by. So many times we move fluidly from indoors to outdoors and back again. It's the first film I've seen where that is so evident, and done in such a casual way. It isn't a case of cutting from A to B.
M: It was one of the technical breakthroughs of the film. In many cases they were using a handheld camera—a French Camérette—and shooting on real locations at night. Night was night, it wasn't fake night. This allowed a great freedom. Welles actually wanted to shoot in a real border town, but that presented too many logistical and economic problems for the studio. So he filmed it in Venice, California, reinventing it as a border town. Still, it was a real location and it really was as shabby and derelict as it looks. Of course, he emphasized that where he chose to: garbage blowing in the wind and floating in the canals.
O: There are also amazing similarities to Psycho, which followed two years later.
M: Yes. In fact, Welles was apparently bitter about Psycho's success. It was made by the same studio—Universal—and many of the same craftsmen who worked on Touch of Evil worked on Psycho. Janet Leigh plays the same kind of victim. She gets raped in Touch of Evil, and murdered in Psycho, in similar motels. The psychotic motelkeeper—Dennis Weaver—is harmless in Touch of Evil, but he's deadly in Psycho, as played by Anthony Perkins.
O: And Psycho was much more popular.
Welles was bitter about Psycho's success: Janet Leigh, left, played the same kind of victim in Psycho as in Touch of Evil, in a similar motel, in a film made by the same studio. Right: Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan and Marlene Dietrich as Tanya.
M: Which explains some of Welles's bitterness. Touch of Evil contributed all of these elements … yet Psycho created a sensation. They are very different films, on a certain level, but on many other levels they're similar. I'm sure that Hitchcock learned a lot, looking at Touch of Evil.
O: I loved that elevator scene in Touch of Evil. The elevator is too crowded and Heston decides to walk up the stairs, and leaves the group (and the camera) in the eleva
tor. We ride up and meet Heston again—two floors up.
M: It was a real elevator, and there was no way then to get a camera inside it and have people talk. Impossible. But he did it. The French Camérette was a portable 35 millimetre camera, and he got it into the elevator, handheld. The sound was unusable, because the camérette is not a silent camera, but they re-recorded the dialogue later.
I'm sure Godard and Truffaut, who were big fans of Touch of Evil, learned from that scene how they could achieve exactly what they wanted—at once both a fresh sense of reality and ingenuity.
O: Welles is also very careful in his use of specific time … beginning with the clock bomb being set at exactly three minutes and—
M: Twenty seconds—
O: And you know that at three-twenty something is going to happen.
M: I was giving a presentation of the recut version in Denmark, and somebody perceptively mentioned that a hidden advantage of this new approach to the beginning is that as long as there were titles running, and as long as there was title music, you knew, subconsciously, that the bomb wasn't going to explode. Whereas without titles and with a fragmentary soundtrack there's no knowing exactly when three minutes and twenty seconds is up. The bomb could explode at any time.
So the moments when the car with the bomb approaches the camera are much tenser now than they were in the earlier version. The bomb car also has a musical signature, a certain song on its radio, that helps to identify it and tell you it's getting closer even when you haven't seen it yet.
O: No last chords of music now, tick-tick-tick-tick, and then the explosion.
M: Right.
O: Was there anything in Welles's memo that you tried that did not work? A scene that might have worked theoretically, on the page, but in fact did not work in practice?
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film Page 17
