By Mel Lambert
Walter Murch, ACE, is a filmmaking phenomenon. Now in his early 80s, he has worked over the past six decades on many landmark films that have benefited from his insightful film editing and sound design skills, often simultaneously.
His first publication, “In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing,” written in 1995 and based on a successful lecture he gave at Spectrum Films in Australia in October 1988, became an essential textbook for students and aficionados alike. His second offering was published earlier this summer. Titled “Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design,” the book comprises a journey through past successes with a focus on helping readers come to terms with the challenges of editing image and sound.
With Oscar and BAFTA nominations for such films as “The Conversation” (1974), “Julia” (1977), “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “The Godfather Part III” (1990) and “Ghost” (1990), plus director Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” (1996), Murch knows whereof he speaks; this latest book is a master class on motion pictures and how they are made. His emphasis is on both how to use sound and image to best effect and also why decisions are made to include or modify material. Recruited by director/producers Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch left Hollywood in 1969 and relocated to San Francisco where he and other film school associates helped found American Zoetrope, which embraced a unique vision for a new style of cinema appropriate to an emergent generation of filmmakers and filmgoers.
Murch also co-wrote and edited the award-winning documentary “Coup 53,” which chronicles the remarkable story of Operation Ajax, an Anglo-American plot in August 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister and reinstall the Shah as absolute monarch. Murch subsequently won the Best Documentary award at the Milano International Film Festival.
In “Suddenly Something Clicked,” Murch invites readers to join him on a voyage of discovery through film, using a mixture of personal stories and meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies together with reminiscences from working on “The Godfather” films, “Apocalypse Now,” “American Graffiti,” “The English Patient,” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
THE PUBLISHER’S PRODDING
What prompted Murch to write this new book? “I was prodded into it by Walter Donahue, an editor at Faber & Faber, the book publisher. He’s been in charge of their film division for the last 30 or 40 years,” Murch said. “He approached me about 10 years ago, asking about writing a new book. My previous publication, ‘In the Blink of an Eye,’ was written in 1988 at the transition from analog editing, which I’d been doing for 30 years, to digital editing, which I’ve since been doing for 30 years. It seemed like a good idea because so much has changed in film construction, with advantages and peculiarities of digital editing.
“When Walter asked me what kind of book it was going to be, I said he should think of a twisted, three-bladed rope. It will be a mixture of history, science, tips, tricks, and metaphysics, I told him. It alternates between the ridiculous and scary things that happen when you try to make a movie and deeper thoughts about why we do what we do — and how we can make it as good as it can be.
“As frequently happens, once you start writing, you are no longer in complete control of where you’re going; things start to pop out of your subconscious. I had been taking notes on a potential book starting in 2013. So it all dovetailed together with Walter as the trigger.”
As readers learn from the book’s preface, Murch soon realized he had more than one book and decided to break the manuscript into three volumes. “Yes, ‘Suddenly Something Clicked’ is Volume One, focusing on post-production, with Volumes Two and Three looking at production and cinematic philosophy — writing, casting, direction, and aesthetics. And there’s no duplication of content with ‘Blink of an Eye,’ which was based on a lecture right at the midpoint of my film career. In general, editors don’t tend to write about what they do while they’re in the middle of doing it! So I broke that rule with ‘Blink.’”
Murch also states within the book’s preface that planning is the most critical step. How did he envisage the final product? “I would quote Dwight Eisenhower, speaking about D-Day. He said: ‘Planning is everything; plans are nothing,’ meaning how you’re going to beat the Germans or how this book is going to be put together — that’s the important thing. But once you actually engage in battle — or once you actually start writing — other things take over, and you have to abandon some of your plans. But you’ve had the backup of thinking about it. If you didn’t do that, you’re more subject to a tornado of events.”
Of the book’s 30 chapters, distributed pretty much equally between film editing and sound design, Chapters 7 and 8 illustrate the author’s creative background and attention to detail. Subtitled “Tetris 1” and “Tetris II” after the popular video game with falling shapes that sort into piles, these two chapters reveal the complex challenges faced during post-production of writer/director Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-nominated “The Conversation” (1974), a film about a surveillance expert, Harry Caul, hired to record the private discussions of a young couple walking around San Francisco’s noisy Union Square. The film’s well-deliberated conclusion hinges on the interpretation of a single ambiguity. Starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, and Allen Garfield, the film won the 1974 Cannes Festival Palme d’Or.
THE CIRCUS RINGMASTER
“Francis casts all his heads of departments pretty much the same way as the actors,” Murch said. “Once cast, as far as Francis is concerned, 98% of the work is done; he’s a great believer in the collaborative nature of filmmaking. His definition of a film director is ‘The ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself.’ ‘The Godfather’ (1972) had just come out, but we were already moving towards making ‘The Conversation.’ Francis said to me: ‘You’re a sound man, as is Harry Caul [played by Hackman]. Since you know this person inside out, you’re also the perfect person to edit the film [with Richard Chew as associate editor].’ At that time, I had picture-edited some documentaries, commercials, and educational films, but not a feature film, although I’d seen it happen on ‘Godfather’ and George Lucas’ ‘THX 1138’ (1971).”
The film’s core is the protracted Union Square scene, with a gradual reveal of the recorded conversations and what they really mean. “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” we eventually hear, but without knowing the emphasis. The new book states that Murch had seven-and-a-half hours of material shot over five days: seven 10-minute complete takes from different cameras, maybe 40,000 feet of film comprising 10% of the shot film. He took eight weeks to put it all together and achieve a 4½-hour first assembly. But there were also many missing scenes; Murch didn’t have everything to tell the story. They were never shot, we learn, because Coppola had to move on to directing “The Godfather Part II.” So Murch had a Tetris-like patchwork that he had to fit together by taking scenes from other sections. Planning that process took a long while.
What was the editor’s overall strategy? “Francis didn’t completely disappear,” Murch said. “Over the summer of 1973, while doing pre-production on ‘Godfather II,’ he would come back to San Francisco [from New York locations] roughly every three weeks. We’d screen the film in whatever state it was at that time, talk about it, and generate a series of notes. Then he’d be off again; his parting words would be: ‘Surprise me when I come back!’ In other words, ‘Do what’s on that list, but if something occurs to you, follow your instincts.’ Those were our marching orders. The main challenge was how to take a 4½-hour assembly and shorten it to a release length of around two hours. And how to cope with the fact that roughly a fifth of the screenplay was never shot. It was an intense and nerve-racking time. Fortunately, Francis gave us the freedom and enough time.”
DISASTERS ON SET, AND OFF
Murch likens a screenplay to an architectural drawing. “It must be capable of surviving multiple disasters during the shoot — the death of the actor, for example, or a typhoon that destroys the sets. Or because we couldn’t shoot a fifth of the screenplay! Screenwriters also treat each word as sacrosanct; don’t change a word. It’s a paradox,” Murch conceded. “In creating a first assembly, you absolutely have to respect the screenplay because you don’t know how it’s all going to go together. So you may have certain feelings during the first assembly of the film, which is happening at the same time as shooting. And you think: ‘I don’t know that the scene is going to work.’ But you have to give it everything that you can because, frequently, something that you think in the middle of the chaos of shooting might not work turns out to be the essential thing that makes everything work.”
The director also had Gene Hackman wear the same costume almost the entire time while shooting “The Conversation.” “So now we could move scenes without clanging up against the fact that, ‘Wait a minute, where did that shirt come from?’ Costume designers want to look good, so they will take any opportunity to change an actor’s clothing to add variety. And if they’re good designers, each costume will reveal something about the internal state of that character. Francis wanted the same, planned character — the blandness of Harry Caul’s character. Also, the film takes place over several days and was only supposed to be two hours long; somebody doesn’t change clothes in two hours. It’s a weird intersection of real life and the fantasy of film. In this particular case, it allowed us to do these transpositions of scenes without hesitation” and no continuity clashes. The book’s two chapters provide more details of how that challenge was overcome with great success.
“Unlike a theatrical play, which is locked, ‘The Conversation’ had a flexible screenplay,” Murch explained. “You need something that has a tensile strength but has creative redundancy in it; that redundancy can be maneuvered and manipulated, as you need to do. Yet the director is ultimately responsible. My intuitions guide me when I’m making a first assembly. But I’m ready and willing to be proven wrong about these things. The very nature of filmmaking is that we’re always trying to compress things. It’s like Formula One racing, where you try to reduce weight without sacrificing structural integrity. We’re always poking the film to find out if we can remove a scene without weakening it.”
While beholden to the director’s vision and the screenplay, “an editor is not in command of these things. You have an influence, but you cannot second-guess the assembly until you have seen the whole thing put together. It’s only at that moment when you can step back from the entirety of the film that is now perhaps three hours long, and you have to get it to two hours. That’s where you can start to have editorial opinions about where a scene should be in the film. Or removed.”
In terms of sound design, for Murch, the primary aspect of re-recording and preparation of the film’s spine is dialogue. “You have to put all your guns into making the spoken word as understandable and as electric as possible. That’s the golden rule for me. For overall film balance, clarity in the interaction of sound effects, dialogue, and music — what I would call density or impact — remains key. If a scene is clear but lacks impact, I will try to find a sound that gives it more ‘heft’ than it seems to have. On the other hand, some scenes are so full of heft that they’re not clear. What can I shift out that will render it clearer?”
Out of curiosity: Which film that he neither edited nor sound-designed is the one he admires most?
“Milos Forman’s ‘Amadeus’ (1984),” he quickly replied. “I love the film [about the life and work of classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]. It gives me great pleasure every time I see it, on all levels.”
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