Trevor Hogg profiles the career of three time Academy Award-winning sound designer and film editor Walter Murch in the second of a five part feature… read part one here.
“I try to choose projects that dovetail my own interests,” remarked New York-native Walter Murch. “That’s a significant part of the process – where you are really casting yourself, in much the same way actors cast themselves for a role. In an ideal situation, such as Vanessa Redgrave in Julia, an actor chooses a part that represents an emotional truth to her as an individual, which pushes her somewhere she has not gone before.” Sharing the same name as his painter father, the sound designer established himself as a film editor with the 1977 picture about a young woman (Jane Fonda) who risks her life aiding her childhood friend (Redgrave) help the French Resistance by smuggling money during WWII. Still considered a rookie at the time, Murch was not the only newbie involved in the production as an up-and-coming actress was making her feature film debut – Meryl Streep (The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
“Matthew Robbins phoned me and told me that Fred [Zinnenmann] was asking who had edited The Conversation [1974],” stated Walter Murch, referring to the conspiracy thriller which saw him co-nominated for Best Sound at the 1975 Academy Awards. “I was out of work at the time, so I wrote a letter to him saying I’d heard he was making Julia, coincidentally I had just read Pentimento [the fictional memoir the movie is based upon], Lillian Hellman’s book, and I’d love to edit it if he would like to meet. So I flew to New York, in the spring of ’76, and we hit it off. He was shooting Julia in England and France, so for the first time I would be working outside the country on a studio project with people I didn’t know beforehand.”
Working with a filmmaker from a different age group was a pleasant change for Walter Murch, who saw it as “a great privilege for a young person, as I was then, to link up professionally with someone as talented and experienced as Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity).” Murch added, “Zinnemann’s nickname among the English crew on Julia was “The Iron Butterfly”; he was courtly and polite, but he had a strong idea of who was in charge and from whom the ideas should come. There was a particular struggle between him and Jane Fonda [Barefoot in the Park], who was used to more give-and-take between the director and the star. On the other hand, he had the documentary side to him, that wild element, and he did set things up so that a rawness would occasionally happen.”
Concerned about the prow of the camera barge entering into view on a particular shot, Walter Murch approached his director in regards to fixing the image; to his dismay Fred Zinnemann decided to leave the picture unaltered. “That was very characteristic of Fred’s approach,” admitted Murch of the mistake which went unnoticed by preview audiences, “but for the life of me I couldn’t see what advantage there was in having this thing come into frame.” Murch remembers fondly the three-time Academy Award winning moviemaker; their working relationship resulted in him receiving a co-Oscar nomination for Best Editing with Marcel Durham (The Odessa File). “We remained friends after Julia, seeing each other when I was in London or he was in Los Angeles…Although there were parts of him that were mysterious to me, I feel a special kinship with Fred. I do love control. And I do love randomness.”
Heading back to America, Walter Murch was recruited to help out on another revived Zoetrope project to be produced and directed by his good friend Francis Ford Coppola (The Outsiders). “It seems strange now, in hindsight, but the spark of Francis’s desire to do Apocalypse [Now] was an understandable attraction for a big, formulaic action film with bankable stars,” recalled Murch who was a sound designer and one of four film editors on the project. “So Apocalypse rumbled down that unlikely road for about a month until Francis, to his regret but also his credit, must have realized, ‘I can’t pull of this distanced, formulaic type of filmmaking, I have to get intimately involved in it.’” A radical revamp of the production caused Coppola to replace his leading man Harvey Keitel (Bugsy) with Martin Sheen (Badlands); Walter Murch agreed with the casting decision. “Marty has an openness to his face, a depth to his eyes, that allowed the audience to accept him as the lens through which they were able to watch this incredible war. Keitel is perhaps more believable as an assassin, but you tend to watch him rather than watch things through him. And if he doesn’t do anything, it’s a frustrating experience.”
Loosely based on Heart of Darkness by novelist Joseph Conrad, Apocalypse Now (1979) unfolds during the Vietnam War when an American military assassin (Martin Sheen) travels down a river to Cambodia with orders to terminate a U.S. Colonel (Marlon Brando) believed to have gone insane. “He [Brando] arrived in the Philippines in September of 1976 and claimed to be dissatisfied with the script,” stated Walter Murch of the notoriously temperamental and idiosyncratic performer. “The discussions that followed were exacerbated by the fact he was heavier than he said he would be, and therefore couldn’t reasonably do what his part called for. When they reached an impasse in these discussions Francis would say, ‘Well, just read Heart of Darkness. That is where you can see what I’m talking about.’ And Brando would answer, ‘I’ve read Heart of Darkness and I hate it!’ And Francis would think, ‘Oh my God.’ The production shut down for a week or so while Marlon and Francis battled it out. Finally, by chance or design, a copy of Heart of Darkness was left on Brando’s houseboat. The next morning he appeared with his head shaved and said, ‘It’s all perfectly clear to me now.’ All along, he had thought that John Milius’s original script was Heart of Darkness.”
Originally intended to be completed by December 1977, the production troubles of the picture became so legendary they are chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). “I had the responsibility from the beginning of the film till the end of the sampan massacre,” explained Walter Murch, “with the notable exceptions of the whole helicopter/Valkyries attack, which was being edited by Jerry Greenberg (The French Connection), and the Playboy concert, which was edited by Lisa Fruchtmann (The Right Stuff). Richie Marks (Broadcast News), who was the supervising editor, had responsibility for everything after the sampan massacre. Jerry left the film in the spring of 1978, and then I took over I took over the helicopter sequence. I worked on that and everything else in the first half of the film for another six months. All told, I was editing the picture for a year and then working on the sound for another year. Two years – kind of like enlisting in the military!”
Oscar glory awaited Walter Murch as he co-received the Academy Award for Best Sound and was honoured with a co-nomination for Best Editing. At the BAFTAs, Murch was a co-contender for Best Sound and Best Editing, while the American Cinema Editors co-nominated him for Best Edited Feature Film.
“I’ve always collaborated on what I’ve written,” said Walter Murch. “THX [1970] with George Lucas [American Graffiti], and then the original Black Stallion [1979] screenplay with Carroll Ballard [Harvest] and Gill Dennis [Walk the Line]. Outside of helping to adapt the renowned children’s story about a boy and his horse by Walter Farrey, Murch re-recorded the sound for the fantasy tale Dragonslayer (1981) which features British acting legend Ralph Richardson (The Heiress).
Consulting an L.A. Times film critic, who compiled a list of people who were not directors but who could soon be, Disney approached Walter Murch who proposed the idea of doing a sequel to the Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (1939); collaborating again with Gill Dennis, he co-wrote the script built around the premise, “What if the first story, The Wizard of Oz, had really happened?”. Other questions emerged such as whether or not people would believe Dorothy’s story or would they dismiss her tale as being the fantastical ravings of a tornado survivor gone mad? Would Dorothy be prepared to deny what happened to her?
Sent away to a mental institution by her aunt and uncle, Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) is saved by a natural disaster that transports her back to the magical land of Oz. To develop his sole directorial effort Return to Oz (1985), Murch combined his love for the cult publication Wisconsin Death Trip (a collage of photographs and newspaper stories from 1890 Wisconsin) and his childhood fascination with the Oz series of books by L. Frank Baum. “There is a beautiful picture I have from Wisconsin Death Trip of a girl standing by a river, with her back to us. I always thought of her as the real Dorothy,” remarked Murch who also sought to examine the profound issues dealt with by Baum, like, “Where is the Self? Can the Self survive the dismemberment of the body?”. The dark philosophical undertone of the story backfired for Murch as audiences found the film to be disturbing. “Because Return to Oz was trying to explore these same issues head on, without the relief of songs and the more openly artificial, vaudevillian approach of the 1939 Wizard, I think it suffered at the box office. I was tapping into the same kind of opposition Baum himself encountered.”
Magazine film critic Richard Schickel of Time wrote, “Any movie in which the Midwestern prairie looks more attractive and more interesting than the enchanted land over the rainbow is in big trouble.” Schickel’s colleague at the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr, was more conciliatory with his review, “In the vein of such underground classics as Invaders of Mars [1953] and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T [1953], it’s bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying.” Walter Murch found his experience behind the camera to be enlightening. “I learned something during the process, which is that I’m not temperamentally interested in directing for the sake of directing,” confessed Murch. “It’s a completely unnaturally state of being, for me anyway. The closest is probably what a general goes through in organizing troops in the middle of combat. You as a writer and I as an editor are allowed, in fact obligated, to sometimes step away. It’s not an indulgence, it’s an absolute necessity. But a director cannot step away.”
Teaming up with Francis Ford Coppola (Peggy Sue Got Married) and George Lucas again, Walter Murch edited a seventeen minute long 3D science fiction musical Captain Eo (1986) starring Michael Jackson. The short film screened at Disneyland Park from 1986 to 1997 and was re-released in February of 2010 as Captain Eo Tribute after the death of the famous singer.
Filming a tale which follows the life of a sexually and emotionally carefree young Czech doctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) on the eve of the 1968 Soviet invasion of his homeland was not made easy due the narrative nature of the source material. “The struggle on that film,” began Walter Murch who served as the supervising editor for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987), “was that the novel has the structure of somebody cross-country skiing across a landscape. Milan Kundera takes the story a certain distance, from one’s character’s point of view, and then he switches to the other ski and goes backwards in time – not all the way, but maybe a third of the way – and then goes forward again with the story, from someone else’s point of view, taking it farther than the first character.” The task of distilling the essence of the book into a screenplay fell to Jean-Claude Carrière (The Obscure Object of Desire) and the director of the movie, Phil Kauffman (Rising Sun). “[They] created a very fine first draft that ironed out the time structure and told it continuously, from an omniscient point of view,” recalled Murch. “I anxiously awaited the next draft, which was going to be where they rediscover the episodic different-point-of-view structure in filmic terms but that never happened. It became clear that there was so much to deal with that the narrative line had to be continuous.”
Other complications arose as the Cold War was still alive and well in 1986, which made shooting on-location in Prague impossible. To address the problem, over forty hours worth of film, in various formats, capturing the Soviet invasion were collected from around the world. “I particularly like the invasion scene in Unbearable Lightness of Being – what we were able to achieve by integrating all kinds of documentary footage from 1968 with the new material shot with our actors, Daniel Day-Lewis [My Left Foot] and Juliette Binoche [Chocolat],” stated Walter Murch who had a major creative challenge in assembling the dramatic sequence. “How do you reduce the key moment in a nation’s history, for which you have so many hours of material, into fifteen minutes? It was a question of time, simply spending time with the material and selecting striking images. Not just visually striking, but striking in all the senses. Then finding ways to put those images together so they enhance one another, both by resonance and by contradiction.”
A technique Walter Murch has continued to use since working on the project involves taking and labeling printed representative stills (two to five) from each camera position for a designated sequence and placing them on their own separate foamcore board. “There may be several “iconic” frames within each shot. Essentially I am trying to answer the question, ‘Why did the director shoot this shot?” explained Murch. “As I’m assembling the film, I’ll be trying to find the exact moment each shot reaches its optical maturity. I want to hold each and every shot on screen long enough for it to deliver the goods, but cut it off at a moment when it also has the potential to lead to somewhere else.”
Returning to the genre of science fiction, Walter Murch cut together the twenty-nine minute long Call from Space (1989) which included Hollywood stars Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur) and James Coburn (The Magnificent Seven) as well as Bill Campbell (The Rocketeer).
“In the middle of a fight scene, you want to abuse the audience’s expectations,” instructed Walter Murch. “You want to send their eye off in one direction, then cut with something going in completely in the opposite direction. That induces in the audience the sense of visual disorientation you get when you’re really physically fighting with somebody.” Then there is the matter of portraying deeply-felt human emotions which Murch effectively accomplished when assembling a famous cinematic moment. “In a passionate love scene there’s actually an advantage to be gained by crossing the stage line as many times as possible. If you look at the dance scene in Ghost [1990], after Sam [Patrick Swayze] and Molly [Demi Moore] have been playing with clay and start to dance to the music on the jukebox…that’s full of cuts that cross the stage line. Each cut, once the dancing gets passionate, puts the characters on the “wrong” side of the frame. Visually, I’m taking care of the eye, it’s rhythmically and sensuously done but – wait a moment! Isn’t she supposed to be on the left and he’s supposed to be on the right?…What that does is put you in the state of mind of making passionate love to somebody – disorientation, spacelessness…By fracturing the grammar of film in that way, you induce in the audience a little of the same mentality.”
Rumours of a third installment of the Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark Italian gangster saga turned out to be true with the release of The Godfather: Part III (1990). Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is on the verge of becoming a legitimate businessman only to be tragically drawn back to his mobster ways in order to survive. “I think there was a fundamental problem that surfaced during production,” revealed Walter Murch who was a co-film editor and a re-record mixer for the picture which is seen by many as being inferior to its two critically-revered predecessors. “Francis’ original intention was to make the story revolve around the death of the fourth Corleone brother, Tom Hagen [Robert Duvall]. He got the script to a certain stage and in this preliminary form sent it to Duvall with words to the effect, ‘I’m still working on it, but they’ve only given me six weeks to get to this point. I ask you to have faith in me and come along fro the ride.’ And Duvall agreed but he wanted financial parity with Al Pacino, who played Michael, but Paramount wouldn’t go along with [that request]. It became a real battleground, which Francis wasn’t able to solve so Duvall was not in the film. It knocked the legs from under what Francis wanted to accomplish, which was to make each of the three Godfather films about the death of a brother: Sonny in the first, Fredo in the second, and Tom in the third – a beautiful symmetry, like a fairy tale. Once upon a time there were four brothers…and the one who didn’t want to be part of the family at the beginning is the one who survives at the end. And yet at what cost.” Contemplating further, Murch reflected, “It was one of those missed opportunities and it meant that the balance Francis wanted to achieve for the trilogy could not be achieved…The character who would satisfy all the logical and emotional requirements lay outside the “room” of the film.” For his cinematic efforts on The Godfather: Part III and Ghost, Murch received two separate Oscar-nominations for Best Editing.
Subsequently, assembling the three pictures into one major opus titled The Godfather Trilogy: 1901 to 1980, Walter commented, “I prefer them as separate films myself, though there are many who prefer the story in chronological order.”
Next on the agenda for sound designer and film editor Walter Murch were a series of Hollywood movies – House of Cards (1993), Romeo is Bleeding (1994), I Love Trouble (1994), and First Knight (1995) as well as a documentary on the life of an infamous cartoonist called Crumb (1994).
Approached by British filmmaker Anthony Minghella (Truly Madly Deeply), Murch found himself entering into a creative partnership that rivaled the one he had established with Francis Ford Coppola.
Continue to part three.
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.
Short Film Showcase – Captain EO (1986)
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
