The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

by Michael Ondaatje

  M: The obvious example is Apocalypse Now. That opening eight minutes or so where Willard is alone in his room, with his demons, waiting to be given his mission. And you, the audience, are learning about him and the world he's in.

  O: And where he's been.

  M: And the demons that are pushing him into a very uncertain future.

  O: In The Godfather—that opening prelude, the long, slow, dark sequence in Vito Corleone's office—is that pacing something that Coppola imagined, or was it something that was discovered in the performance, or in the editing? To decide to pace it in that very low-key, quiet way?

  M: That was something Francis decided in the writing of the screenplay. That's how he saw it. That particular technique of starting with a slow zoom back, while a character has a kind of aria in which he states his position … this is very similar to what Francis did at the beginning of Patton, where George C. Scott stands in front of the American flag and says, This is what I believe. It's a very bold thing to do.

  O: He does the same thing at the start of The Godfather.

  M: The difference is that in Godfather, Bonasera, the undertaker, is an anonymous person, unlike Patton. We don't know who he is. Francis starts him out in limbo—just a head, in darkness, saying, “I believe in America.” A very strong thing to say at the beginning: “I believe in America” … and yet there's a problem. What you want is the audience to say, Yes, I too believe in America, and I too am frustrated by this problem, either I have experienced it or I know people who have experienced it. As we're feeling this, the context in which this speech is being given is revealed, and eventually the shoulder of the man who will solve the problem comes into frame. We're pretty sure it's Marlon Brando, and we're waiting for the moment he'll be asked the question, and have to give an answer, revealing himself.

  The opening of Apocalypse Now: not a zoom back but a rotation so that Willard is eventually right side up.

  The Conversation begins in an inverse way. That long, wide shot that slowly zooms in on Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, electronically stalking the lovers. We get the context of the world, and then we focus in on the individual. In Godfather, we focus in on the individual, and then we're given the particular context in which the story will work itself out.

  Remarkable to think that those three films—Patton, Godfather, Conversation—were made within three years.

  O: Even Apocalypse Now begins and pulls back from Willard's upside-down head.

  M: Yes. It's not quite the same, but it is something similar. The camera doesn't zoom back, but it rotates around so that the upside-down Willard eventually becomes right side up. We're given fragments—jungle, explosion, upside-down head, Cambodian sculpture, flames, helicopter—disjointed things. Then the disjointedness begins to congeal into a world. So, yes, that achieves, by editorial superimposition, a version of what's achieved by zooming in or zooming out, as in The Godfather or The Conversation, by showing us fragments and then puzzling us with the context in which those fragments could exist—eventually, in Apocalypse Now, giving us at least enough context to proceed with the story, at the point where Willard, standing at the window, says, “Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon.”

  O: Obviously there are various forms of introduction, so how strict is this rule about preludes? When I was at Zoetrope a few months ago, they told me that Godfather III had a different beginning at one point.

  M: Yes.

  O: And that you persuaded them to have another beginning. What happened there?

  M: I felt that the original beginning of Godfather III, in the script, was a duplication, in religious terms, of the beginning of Godfather I.

  O: It had the cardinal smoking a cigarette. It was comic, almost a parody of that first opening.

  M: And the camera pulled back from the cardinal and there was Michael, and they're talking about the deal that he wants to make with the Church—he wants a participation in Immobiliare, the Church's real estate arm, the business arm. This was followed by the scene at the church where Michael is being invested with the Knighthood of Saint Sebastian. And then there was a celebration party.

  I'd come into the project at a late date, to help them meet their deadline. So I was new to it, and that has its disadvantages—you don't yet know the ropes. On the other hand, you can see something clearly, sometimes, that other people who've been buried in the project can't see.

  What was clear to me was that the scene didn't take into consideration Michael's state of being at the end of Godfather II, which was extremely compromised. He's a little like Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation. He's sitting alone in a chair by the lake, but he's empty. So now we're picking him up many years later, and he's full again. The question is, What happened? How did he get so full after being so empty? I felt that a more interesting place to begin would be at the church, with all its associations with sin and redemption and confession.

  In that scene in the church, where Michael is being knighted—as we hear how wonderful a person he is—we could reintroduce the images of the death of his brother Fredo. Here is this person who is being given the Church's highest honour, who is in fact the murderer of his brother, Cain to Fredo's Abel. Here is somebody being knighted by the Church who committed the first sin there ever was—to kill your own brother.

  There's a tension in that, which I thought would be an interesting provocation for the rest of the film. Yes, Michael, you are now financially successful— but you're going to have to deal with this ancient, primal sin. I was also envisioning the moment that the three films would be played together so that each one would have to pick up, in a way, where the other left off—even if we didn't get around to doing that for twenty-five years.

  So the sequence now goes: church, party, and then the meeting at the Vatican, where the deal is consummated.

  O: I'm particularly fond of the prelude to The Conversation. That opening shot where the camera comes down through several stratospheres—a slow zoom shot—right down into Union Square, to the mime artist, and then as you get close to him you start to pick up the specific sound of his footsteps, something very intimate even though you've practically travelled from outer space. The use of that guy is brilliant: the way he follows on Gene Hackman's heels through the square in that first shot lets you feel the paranoia that is in Hack-man. He knows he's being followed, being drawn attention to, but he's trying not to make much out of it.

  M: It's funny—to watch how it's easy for the mime to mimic or mock other people, but he's stymied with Hackman. Harry Caul is so anonymous that even the mime doesn't know how to make a character of him, except by imitating the hold he has on his paper coffee cup. It's a wonderfully orchestrated shot because it's a long, automated zoom that moves very smoothly over a period probably about the same length as the opening of Touch of Evil. It just has the titles over it, three minutes or so.

  O: I realized only much later that although the whole film is singularly and fiercely made from Harry's point of view, in all the later scenes where Harry is playing and replaying the tape, we're watching—and rewatching—that opening scene, being given this extra visual narrative that doesn't actually exist in Harry's vision.

  Coppola talking to the mime from The Conversation.

  The screenplay from The Conversation.

  M: That's true.

  O: All Harry has got is sound.

  M: I guess the device works as well as it does because it implies that Harry feels himself getting so close to those two people that he can imagine the details of their walk around the square—going over those details again and again in his mind, just as we see them.

  O: Is it true that there was a problem with the sound in Union Square and that it had to be re-recorded?

  M: The film was begun in 1972, which was early in the evolution of radio mikes—which is what we use in film when we're very far away from characters who have to be speaking. We hide a little microphone about the size of a peanut somewhere on their clothes, and a radio transmit
ter in their pocket. It's the same technique that Vargas uses at the end of Touch of Evil: he plants a radio mike on Menzies.

  But the radio mikes we had back then were not that good, and they picked up miscellaneous static and the microwave transmissions that swamp a city like San Francisco. That meant that the actual soundtrack we were getting at the time of filming was about as imperfect as the track that Harry himself records in Union Square! Everything would be fine, and then suddenly there'd be the sweep of a microwave pulse across the track. You'd hear distortion and some garbled tonality that would obliterate everything else.

  I used some of that noise in the finished film: as noise, it's very good. But I had to have—as a resource—a complete recording of the conversation itself, without any interference. One day, while something else was being filmed, I took Cindy Williams, who played Ann, the director's young wife, and Fred Forrest, who played her lover, Mark, off to a quiet residential area of San Francisco. I didn't use radio mikes. I just had a Nagra tape recorder with a handheld microphone—like a “man on the street” interview. Cindy and Fred walked around a park—there was nobody else about, just some birds—and I walked in front of them with a microphone and recorded what they said. If you can get actors soon enough after they've done a scene, their rhythms will still be what they were in the scene. There's a little variation, but actually much less than you would think.

  I recorded that conversation three times. So the final soundtrack for the opening sequence is a mixture of the real conversation, filmed on location in Union Square with radio mikes, and this secondary conversation, which was recorded under acoustically more controlled conditions.

  The side benefit was that on the third take, Fred Forrest accidentally said, “He'd kill us if he got the chance.” Which I mentally filed away as being the wrong reading of the line, and only came back to eight months later, when I had the intuition that, if we used that inflection as the last reading in the film, it might help the audience understand that these two young people were actually the murderers, and that the Director, the man the audience may have thought was the murderer, was actually the victim.

  O: So that line wasn't planned to be said a different way at the end of the film, with that emphasis on “us”?

  M: No, that was purely fortuitous—one of those things that came out of our relentless search to make the film convey information about what was going on yet not violate the single point of view of the film, which belongs to Harry.

  The question is this: Harry Caul is a man on the fringe, who doesn't know—who initially says he doesn't even want to know—what's going on, so how do you convey, at the end, what actually took place? It was stylistically inconceivable to have a Perry Mason wrap-up, where somebody says, Well, Stan, this is what really happened! But we still had to get an audience to the point where they understood what had happened, and who the murderer was.

  It took some time to get there! We were trying out possible solutions, and inserting that particular reading of the line at the end was just one of many. It came very late in the process: when the idea occurred to me, I was mixing the film in San Francisco and Francis was already shooting Godfather II in New York. When I was finished, I took the mix to New York, and ran it for Francis. He liked the idea of the shift in inflection, so it stayed in the film.

  It was a risky thing to do, because it contradicted the basic premise of the film, which was to repeat the identical conversation over and over again. Because of the different contexts, the audience is supposed to hear different shadings of meaning in it each time. Even though the conversation itself remains identical.

  Then, at the very end, we tweak the conversation itself, and the emphasis of the line-reading shifts.

  Sometimes you can get away with violating your basic premise, which has the effect of throwing the premise into greater relief.

  A GREASE PENCIL AND REAL TIME

  And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the line? And when the line has, is, a deadness, is it not a heart which has gone lazy?

  Charles Olson

  O: Can you tell me more about how you cut film in real time?

  M: When you're putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding, over and over again, are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.

  For me, the most rhythmically important decision of the three is the last: Where do you end the shot? You end it at the exact moment in which it has revealed everything that it's going to reveal, in its fullness, without being over-ripe. If you end the shot too soon, you have the equivalent of youth cut off in its bloom. Its potential is unrealized. If you hold a shot too long, things tend to putrefy.

  O: You get Polonius.

  M: Indeed! For every shot, there is one specific place to end, and no other. A specific frame, and not the one before or after. So the question is, How do you decide which frame that is?

  A trap you can fall into—as I did in my very early editing jobs on Encyclopaedia Britannica films—is to scan back and forth across the shot, looking for the frame where, for instance, the door closes. You mark that frame and cut at that point. It works. But it doesn't work particularly well, and it doesn't help the film to do it that way.

  You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It's just that the line is full and ripe at that point, full of meaning and ripe with rhythm. By ending it where he does, the poet exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last frame an added significance, which we exploit.

  In film, at the moment of the cut you are juxtaposing one image with another, and that's the equivalent of rhyme. It's how rhyme and alliteration work in poetry, or how we juxtapose two words or two images, and what that juxtaposition implies. Either by emphasizing the theme or by countering it, modulating it, like an invisible Greek chorus. What's being stated may be one thing, but by juxtaposing two different images at the moment of the cut, and making them as striking as possible, we can say, Yes, but there's something else going on here.

  The trick is to make that flow an organic part of the process. Editing is a construction, a mosaic in three dimensions, two of space and one of time. It's a miniature version of the way films are made, which is an artificial, piece-by-piece process.

  To determine that end frame, I look at the shot intently. It's running along, and then at a certain point I flinch—it's almost an involuntary flinch, an equivalent of the blink. That flinch point is where the shot will end.

  O: So you hit the button. Or do you use a grease pencil?

  M: In the early days I marked the frame with a grease pencil when I was working on a Moviola. But on The Conversation, I reset a counter to 0 at that moment. Then I repeated the process. I would back up to some arbitrary start point and run the whole thing again and flinch again. Today, with the Avid, I hit a key. That's it. Cut.

  O: So your response then is: Enough! Let's look away.

  M: Exactly. Every shot is a thought or a series of thoughts, expressed visually. When a thought begins to run out of steam, that's the point at which you cut. You want that to be the moment at which the impulse to go to the next shot is at its strongest, so you are propelled into it. If you hold the shot too long, the impulse is deadened, and when you do go to the next shot, it lacks a certain energy. I'm always trying to find that balance point between fruition of the internal dynamics of the thought
and the rhythm of the shot.

  The key, on an operational level, is that I have to be able to duplicate that flinch point, exactly, at least two times in a row. So I run the shot once and hit a mark. Then run it back, look at it, and flinch again. Now I'm able to compare: Where did I stop the first time, and where did I stop the second? If I hit exactly the same frame both times, that's proof to me that there is something organically true about that moment. It's absolutely impossible to do that by any conscious decision. Imagine—there are twenty-four targets going by every second and with your gun you have to hit one of them, out of the twenty-four, every second.

  O: And that happens.

  M: Yes. If it doesn't happen, I don't make the cut at that point. I have to be able to hit that mark each time. That's the proof to me that I'm responding to something that is beyond my control, that has to do purely with thought and emotion, with rhythm and musicality.

  O: So if you flinch in frame 17 the first time, and then flinch in frame 19—

  M: Then I don't cut. That tells me something's off. If I can hit 17 twice, that's good. At least it certifies something. If I hit frame 17 first and then frame 19 the next time, that means something in my approach is wrong. I'm thinking the wrong way about the shot. So I'll ask, What's wrong? Maybe we need more time: I'm not giving enough time to absorb the fact that the actress in the scene is also taking off her coat. She says the line but she's taking off her coat. The line is a thought, but so is “taking off coat.”

  It takes time for an audience to understand and appreciate both the line of dialogue and the idea of coat-taking-off. I have to allow for that. I now realize I was thinking about only the line of dialogue and not the coat. All right, I will think now about the line and the coat, and cut at frame 26. That's where it happens this time. All right. Let me try it again. Zut! 26. Okay, good. That's the cut point. And so it goes.