Trevor Hogg profiles the career of three time Academy Award-winning sound designer and film editor Walter Murch in the fourth of a five part feature… read parts one, two and three.
“It has become part of the culture,” observed Walter Murch on the Vietnam War saga starring Martin Sheen (Badlands). “As much as a work affects the culture, the culture mysteriously affects the work. Apocalypse Now, in the year 2000, is a very different thing from the physically exact-same Apocalypse Now in the second before it was released in 1979.” The New Yorker revisited the movie as a film editor and re-recording mixer at the behest of American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola who wanted to produce a DVD version with a number of major scenes which were eliminated from the original theatrical release. “The film acquired a body in the absence of these limbs. Now we’re trying to sew them back on,” stated Murch of the project titled Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) which saw him insert the medevac scene involving the helicopter-stranded Playboy Bunnies, more scenes with Marlon Brando in the Kurtz compound, and the ghostly French plantation sequence featuring a burial, a politically charged dinner conversation, and a love scene. “[They] were casualties of the hallmark struggle in every editing room; how short can the film be and still work? Even though Francis had the final cut, he was as acutely aware as anybody of the strictures of getting a film into the theatres as lean as it could be. With the new version, that particular drive – for compression above all – is not as compelling.”
Searching for the proper visual and audio transitions between the original and new material called for a lot of creative ingenuity on the part of Walter Murch. “The burning helicopter – which before was just a passing scene – is the thing that causes the boat to stop at the medevac station, where we discover that the impresario Bill Graham, played by himself, and the three Playboy Bunnies are stranded. Willard negotiates with Graham, who needs fuel for his own helicopter. The problem was that the negotiation was never filmed – a typhoon hit with full strength on that day, and they had to abandon filming for a month or so.” To fill in the visual gap Murch decided to provoke the audience’s imagination. “We’re treating the moment elliptically. You see Willard wandering through the desolate camp, and we intercut his wandering with a fight that’s beginning amongst the crew of the boat. Then Willard is beckoned into one of the tents by Bill Graham. The fight escalates, Willard returns, stops the fight, and tells them about the deal he’s made; the crew can spend a couple of hours with the girls in exchange for fuel.”
Another challenge was the inclusion of film footage which Eleanor Coppola lamented being cut from the original picture. “Probably the trickiest thing in this version of Apocalypse Now has been the French Plantation sequence and how to get into it – even trickier, how do we get out of it?” revealed Walter Murch. “It was something that completely foxed us back in 1978. Structurally, the scene always happened too late in the film; once the boat passed beyond the nightmare of the sampan massacre and Do Lung Bridge, it seemed to enter another world, and there wasn’t the physical, temporal, or even psychic space for a dinner-table discussion about the French involvement in Vietnam in the early 1950s. The viewer needed to arrive at the Kurtz compound as quickly as possible.” In the process of speeding up the pacing of the story, a major plot hole was incurred. “An important element of the French plantation is the burial of Clean – Larry Fishburne – who has just been killed in a firefight, the first crew member to die. If the scene came earlier, the burial would have to be eliminated. But burying Clean is one of the reasons for the boat to come to shore. It was a dilemma.” Murch added, “In the original version of the film you never know what happened to him, which is a little strange, and out of keeping with Chef’s obvious grief at losing someone who was like a son to him.”
Having never seen any of the raw footage for the sequence since his responsibilities for the original project had ended with the sampan massacre halfway through the production, Walter Murch discovered that Francis Ford Coppola had shot the approach to the plantation in two different ways. The first was a formal dockside introduction and the second involved “French soldiers materializing, bedraggled, out of swirling mist, as if they were ghosts.” Choosing that latter version, Murch had to figure out how to construct the departure. “I found a shot with Martin Sheen – Willard – and Aurore Clément where she gets out of bed, undresses, and closes the mosquito netting all around the bed. There was something beautifully evocative about her seeing her silhouetted against the mosquito netting, and I thought, ‘She looks like a ghost, and the mosquito netting looks like fog.’” The three-time Oscar winner experienced an epiphany. “When I discovered that transition, which was not intended in the script, something unlocked for me. I felt that I was beginning to grasp the language of this new version.”
Looking back on the extended cut of the picture, Walter Murch remarked, “This is the funny, sexy, political version of Apocalypse Now. Willard has a romantic interlude at the French plantation; Lance and Chef have theirs at the medevac station. There are political arguments about the French involvement in Vietnam, so similar to ours. And Kurtz questions the accuracy of how the war is being reported back home.” What terrified Murch the most was doing the final mix of the soundtrack. “We had to go back to the original masters, and find a way to reweave the fabric of the sound – so not only will the transitions into and out of the new material be perfectly undetectable but also the quality of the sound of the new sections will coexist on friendly terms, both artistically and technically.” To make the audio transitions as seamless as possible, original crew members Michael Kirchberger (The Sixth Sense) and George Berndt (The Usual Suspects) were recruited to help with the new soundtrack along with actors Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall (Thank You For Smoking), Albert Hall (Ali), and Sam Bottoms (Sugar Hill) who came back to re-record their dialogue.
Shifting from movies to publishing, Walter Murch authored In the Blink of an Eye (2001) which analyzes the craft of film editing. “From my early editing experiences I became convinced that there was a connection between the patterns of a person’s eye blinks and the patterns of their thoughts. That blinks are the equivalent of mental punctuation marks – commas, periods, semicolons, et cetera – separating and thus providing greater articulation to our thoughts. I owe the equation Cut = Blink to the director John Huston [The African Queen] – he put forth the idea in an interview with Louise Sweeney in the early 1970s….In arranging the sequence of shots, the editor is in effect “blinking” for the audience, and the resulting cuts will seem most natural and graceful when they fall where the blink would fall in an exchange between two people in conversation.” Murch was also the subject of interest to novelist Michael Ondaatje who composed The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002). “This book began, as all my books do, with sheer curiosity,” explained Ondaatje. “I had met Walter Murch during the filming of The English Patient. I saw a lot of him during the months of his editing of the film, and we became friends. Walter was simply always interesting to listen to.” Leaving behind the world of literary fiction, the Booker Prize-winner commented, “The Conversations focuses on the art and the act of filmmaking through the lens that belongs to one of the essential talents on a film – the editor. For such a crucial craft, the editor’s art has been mostly unimagined and certainly overlooked.”
Delving into the realm of historical events, Walter Murch doubled as a film editor and re-recording mixer for the underwater action-thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) titled K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). In 1961 the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ballistic submarine experiences a reactor malfunction while on a sea trial in the North Atlantic. “It’s very difficult to get a sense of space in an enclosed [environment] like a submarine,” remarked Walter Murch. “If it’s not lit and art-directed right, everything just sort of blocks up.” Murch was impressed with the visual sensibilities of Bigelow. “There’s always somebody deep in the scene either looking at Liam Neeson [Taken] and Harrison Ford [Blade Runner] having an argument or doing a job.” The impressive sound effects were recorded afterwards. “You get a fantastic sense of the dynamics of a series of people moving in a real space, which is almost impossible to match. You’d have to spend so much time mixing the Foley to duplicate that you’d easily treble the budget of trying to record it on location.”
Mixing the audio for the picture was not an easy task. “It’s a delicate balance. The equivalent in cooking would be balancing the economics of how much fresh ingredients you use and how much canned or pre-cooked. You have to be careful that the pre-cooked stuff doesn’t overwhelm the fresh ingredients, that the fresh ingredients are always dominant.” Walter Murch carried on to say, “If you did everything fresh that’s wonderful, but you might put the price of the meal up so high that you’re going to go out of business.” Kathryn Bigelow is a big fan of the post-production veteran. “He’s a legend,” praised the Oscar-winning director. “He is someone with a tremendously strong intellect. You initially begin with the writers, sifting through this massive amount of information, then the story is refracted through the filmmaker, then further refined working with the hands and eyes of an editor like Walter Murch. It is a life-altering experience.”
Cinematically adapting Charles Frazier’s best-selling debut novel, Cold Mountain (2003), was a sixteen-month editing effort for Walter Murch who had to go through 600,000 feet of film, amounting to 113 hours of material for a 2 hour and 30 minute movie. Wounded Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law) abandons the American Civil War battlefields and embarks on a perilous journey to reunite himself with his true love Ada (Nicole Kidman). “I did read the book before I read the screenplay, which is my normal procedure,” stated Murch who served once again as a film editor and re-recording mixer for his third and final Anthony Minghella helmed production. “Generally, I try to immerse myself in the world of the book/film as deeply as possible, even reading secondary research material — things that the author used to help write the book. Once I start editing, however, I let all of that go, and don’t even refer to the screenplay very often — I just respond to the story, images and sounds that are on the screen in front of me.”
Assembling the story was no simple matter for the movie industry veteran. “It was clear just from reading the script that there were going to be very interesting challenges in the editing, because for the most part the film has a parallel structure. You’re following the Inman character, traveling across a vast landscape trying to get home while Ada is struggling back home with a desperate situation, so we’re alternating back and forth.” To help set the right tone for the movie Walter Murch adopted a certain attitude toward the Civil War era tale. “One strategy I worked with on Cold Mountain was the idea that Inman was actually killed in the battle, and that it was his ghost — a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead — who goes through all these adventures trying to get back home,” confided Murch. “It’s contradictory, of course, because the Inman we see is a solid physical being who interacts with everyone he meets. But the overtones of that idea are always hovering around the edges of each scene, informing in subtle ways where the cut points are, what reaction shots we used, and so on.”
Visiting a movie set is something Walter Murch intentionally avoids. “I prefer to stay away. I like to see only what the audience sees. I don’t like to be reminded too much of how it actually got made.” For the acclaimed post-production specialist music and film are intrinsically linked together. “Film — any film — is a kind of visual music – the alternation and development of individual shots being the equivalent of the alternations and development of phrases in music.” The theme of renewal features prominently in the Civil War epic. “There’s the visual repetition of reflected images; the film begins and ends with an image seen through water, and there are crucial moments in the story where this reflected imagery comes into play. Then there are the larger thematic alternations and repetitions of humor, anguish, cruelty and love throughout the film. Beyond that, it’s up to the audience to enjoy the discovery.” Award laurels were plentiful for Walter Murch who contended for Best Editing at the Oscars, as well as the American Cinema Editors’ Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature Film. In the UK, Murch was nominated for Best Editing, and co-nominated for Best Sound at the BAFTAs.
Like novelist Michael Ondaatje before him, author Charles Koppelman penned a book titled, Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema (2004). The shift from editing with Avid to Final Cut Pro was a natural creative evolution for Murch. “Over the last 30 years or so, it seems to be a pattern with me that I will plunge into a new technology, both for the benefits that it can bring me directly, but also because I’m very interested in systems, and how they work within a creative environment. I was one of the first people in the U.S. to use flatbed editing machines in the late 1960s, after having used the upright Moviola. At the time that was seen as a radical departure.”
“A real detective story, involving a forgotten, broken sound cylinder found at [Thomas] Edison’s lab in Menlo Park,” referred Walter Murch to the origins of the Dickson Experimental Sound Film (2003). The mislabeled device turned out to be a soundtrack for a Kinetoscope that the famous American inventor made in 1894. Patrick Loughney, the head of film and television at the Library of Congress, approached Murch about syncing the sound and the picture featuring Edison’s assistant Edward M. Dickson playing a violin into a huge recording horn. “Edison’s rationale was that people might be interested to see the faces of people who sang on his records. Cinema began as a music video! That was about the extent of its appeal, as far as he was concerned, whereas Dickson was clairvoyant about the potential of motion pictures. He wrote a book in 1895, which has been reprinted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it’s astonishing how many of his predictions have come to pass.” Assembling the seventeen-second long picture was a historic opportunity for Walter Murch. “I had my assistant, Sean Cullen, digitize the film at normal speed and then find various sync points with the music. I tried dozens and dozens over a period of a couple of hours, until I found the one that worked. The soundtrack and the picture were finally in sync with each other for the first time in 106 years!”
For his next feature length assignment, Walter Murch partnered with an Academy Award-winning British filmmaker to bring a Middle Eastern war involving U.S. troops to the big screen.
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film:
Continue to part five.
For more on Walter Murch, be sure to visit FilmSound.org and NPR, while
Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film provides a comprehensive analysis of Murch’s career.You can also show your appreciation and discuss his body of work on the Walter Murch Facebook page.
Walter Murch lecture – part one and part two.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
