The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

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Chapter 1
FIRST CONVERSATION SAN FRANCISCO
In the spring of 2000, Walter Murch, at the suggestion of Francis Ford Coppola, began to re-edit "Apocalypse Now, "afilm he had worked on back in 1977-1979 both as sound designer and as one of the four picture editors. Twenty-two years later, all the takes and discards and "lost" scenes and sound elements(carefully preserved in climate-controlled limestone caves in Pennsylvania) were brought out of vaults to be reconsidered. "Apocalypse Now "is a part of the American subconscious. And in some way this wasthe problem.Having dinner with the novelist Alfredo Veeacute;a in San Francisco, after spending my first day with Walter at Zoetrope, I mentioned what was happening with the re-editing of "Apocalypse Now, "and Veeacute;a immediately launched into Marlon Brando's monologue about the snail on a razor blade. This was followed, during dinner, by Vea's precise imitation of DennisHopper's whine: "What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a "wise "man? . . ." For Veeacute;a, who fought in Vietnam, "Apocalypse Now "was "the "movie about the war. It was the work of art that caught it for him, that gave him a mythological structure he could refer to, that showed him what he had gonethrough and would later write about himself in books such as "Gods Go Begging." So those working on the new "Apocalypse Now "were aware that there would be problems connected with theirdismantling and restructuring a "classic." It was now public property.
"It "has "become part of the culture," said Murch. "Andthat's not a one-way street, as you know from your writing. As much as a work affects the culture, the culture mysteriously affects the work. "Apocalypse Now "in the year 2000 is a very differentthing from the physically exact-same "Apocalypse Now "in the second before it was released in 1979."
The idea for a new version grew out of Coppola's desire toproduce a DVD of "Apocalypse Now "with a number of major scenes that were-for reasons of length-eliminated from the 1979 version. Also, 2000 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fallof Saigon, so it seemed appropriate to re-evaluate editorial decisions that had originally been made while the war was still a vividly painful bruise on the nation's psyche. But rather than have the restoredscenes appear in isolation, appended in their own chapter, why not integrate them into the body of the film as originally intended? The problem was that the editing and sound work on the excised material had never beenfinished, and one scene in particular was eliminated before it was completely shot. Fortunately, the negative and original sound for all this material were perfectly preserved in original laboratory rolls, and could beretrieved, two decades later, as if the film had been shot a few weeks earlier.
And so Walter Murch was now working in San Francisco, in the old Zoetrope building. Mostly he had to collect andreconsider the material for three large sequences that were cut from the film in 1978-a medevac scene involving Playboy Bunnies; further scenes with Brando in the Kurtz compound; and a ghostly, funereal dinnerand love scene at a French rubber plantation. In Eleanor Coppola's book about the making of the film, she