Assembly Required: A Walter Murch Profile (Part 5)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of three time Academy Award-winning sound designer and film editor Walter Murch in the fifth of a five part feature... read parts one, two, three and four.

On the matter of returning to the director’s chair, American filmmaker Walter Murch remarked, “I've thought about it and I tried for a number of years to get projects off the ground and just ran out of luck and went back to what I love, which is film editing.” Describing the criteria he uses to determine what will be his next assignment, Murch stated, “When I am considering a project, I read the script, take notes, type them up, and give them to the director. I would include both what I think is good about the script – what attracted me to it – and where I think there may be room for improvement.”

For Jarhead (2005), which is based on the 2003 Gulf War memoir by U.S. Marine Anthony Swofford, Walter Murch served as a film editor and re-recording mixer for British moviemaker Sam Mendes (American Beauty). “This was such a very different film from any Sam had shot before,” observed Murch. “He was shooting handheld multiple-camera stuff. If you’ve seen his other films, they’re much more classically composed, whereas in this, there are scenes where he just let things happen. He had an overall sense that he’d gotten the coverage he wanted, but seeing it cut together gave him the confidence to continue and to be even more adventuresome in that direction.” Walter Murch is keenly aware of the major advantages that cinema affords storytellers. “Film is really a kind of theater of thought. “You’re watching people think in movies, which is the fascinating and completely unique experience of film versus other kinds of theater where the thoughts have to be expressed in words. In film, of course you have words, but mostly you have thought and attitude, and that attitude is mostly expressed in the eyes of the characters.” The New York native added, “How much detail I see around the eyes of the characters subconsciously determines my choices. The lower the resolution, the more I tend to use close-ups. With higher resolution, I feel confident using a wider shot, or a longer shot, because you can clearly see what a character’s eyes are doing, which is to say what the character is thinking.” At the Satellite Awards Walter Murch contended for Best Editing, while the Hollywood Film Festival lauded him with the Editor of the Year trophy

Venturing into the realm of documentaries, Walter Murch was the sound mixer for Seeing in the Dark (2007) based on a book by Timothy Ferris; the one hour film which was aired on PBS explores stargazing. In the same year the San Francisco International Film Festival premiered a documentary featuring the movie veteran talking about his profession in Murch: Murch on Editing. “In film, there’s a dance between the words and images and the sounds,” observed Murch. “As rich as films appear, they are limited by two of the five senses – hearing and sight – and they are limited in time – the film lasts only as long at it takes to project it. It’s not like a book. If you don’t understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again, at your own pace. With a film, you have to consume at one go, at a set speed. But if a film can provoke the audience’s participation – if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work. How each moment gets completed depends on each person. So the film, although it’s materially the same series of images and sounds, should ideally provoke slightly different reactions from each person who sees it.”

Youth Without Youth (2007) marked the reunion of a working relationship that started in 1969. “I like the way his mind works,” stated Walter Murch of American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now). “I like the adventuresome areas that he goes into. He once described directing as "being the ringmaster for a circus that is inventing itself." That kind of circus is very interesting to me, and by the same token I think he likes the way my mind works in complimentary form to his. I'm adventuresome also, but very systematic. I think the two sides -- adventuresome and systematic -- compliment each other.”

Walter Murch’s involvement with the cinematic adaptation of the novella by Micrea Eliade about a seventy year old professor (Tim Roth) who discovers he is growing younger after being struck by lightning was delayed. “I was still working on Sam Mendes’ Jarhead so I didn't join the film until all the material was shot, although I did meet with Francis at a kind of midway point. He took a break from shooting in Romania and he came for Christmas to the States. We met to talk about the screenplay and he said, ‘Are there any other scenes we could shoot?’”. Responding to the question, Walter Murch suggested the insertion of the mirror scene that takes place near the end of the picture.

“It's about this person who is youth without youth,” explained Murch, “he's young, objectively in his early to late 30s or early 40s but he still has all the knowledge that he had when he was 70 years old. It examines the tension of that situation which really is the tension Francis finds himself in.” The re-recording mixer and film editor for the tale that unfolds in 1938 Romania added, “There are times when it's a reincarnation movie, a sort of a Mummy film, if you will. There are other times when it's like Frankenstein. There are other times when it's sort of a split personality movie like The Portrait of Dorian Gray [1945]. There are times when it's a Nazi movie and people are running through alleyways like in The Third Man [1949]. All of these come in some form from the original novella, but once they're visualized they have a weight and an impact that is different than the printed word. [The challenge was] to find ways to integrate and balance these, while still being respectful of the original novella and Francis's adaptation of it.”

“I hope it finds an audience that's congenial to it,” said Walter Murch. “I'm very happy it was made. It got Francis directing again after an absence of 10 years.” Murch is impressed by the ingenuity of his friend and colleague. “Francis has gotten himself into a place where, because of his success with his winery, he can afford, if the budget is low enough, to self-finance these films and get them off the ground.”

Two years later the first original screenplay composed by Francis Ford Coppola since The Conversation (1974), had him working again with Walter Murch. “Francis funded Tetro [2009] in the same fashion as his previous film Youth Without Youth, “revealed Murch who served as a film editor and re-recording mixer on the project. “He has personal money in it from his Napa Valley winery, as well as that of a few other investors. This lets him make the film the way he wants to, without studio interference. Francis’s directing style is process-oriented – he likes to let the film evolve during the production – to make serendipitous discoveries based on the actors, the sets, and the atmosphere of a new city. Many directors work this way, but Francis embraces it more than any other. In Coppola’s own words: ‘The director is the ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself.’ I think that’s why, at age 69, he was enthusiastic about jumping into a country that was new to him and working with talented young local filmmakers.”

Travelling to Buenos Aires, Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) searches for his long lost older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo). “Ideally everything needed to make a Zoetrope film on location should be able to be loaded into two vans,” revealed Walter Murch. “The Buenos Aires building that was our base of operations reminded me of the Zoetrope building in San Francisco 40 years ago. The central idea was to break down the separation between tasks and to be as efficient and collaborative as possible. In other words, to operate more like a film-school crew. Zoetrope has always embraced new technology – the classic ‘early adopter’ profile. Our crew in Buenos Aires was full of young, enthusiastic local film technicians and artists; on a number of occasions, rounding a corner, I felt like I was bumping into a 40-year-younger version of myself.” The film was originally shot in colour. “The footage was already desaturated before I started cutting, so I was always looking at black-and-white material. However, a few times when I’d match-frame a shot, the color version of the source media would pop up and then that was quite a shock!” There was a certain perk attached to the production. “My cutting room also doubled as the screening room and, as we were using the Sim2 digital projector, I had the luxury of being able to cut and look at a 20-foot wide screen as I did so.”

When American filmmaker Joe Johnston (October Sky) needed a fresh pair of eyes in the editing suite for The Wolfman (2010), he turned to Walter Murch. “I sort of rediscovered what the movie was all about with Walter,” Johnston said. “He wrote the book, literally, on film editing [In the Blink of an Eye]. Walter believes in trying things that are a little unorthodox. If there’s a scene that you, as a director, know is central to the film and that you can’t live without, he’ll say, ‘Let’s cut that out.’ A film at that point is a liquid medium and it’s amazing how the loss of one shot or a piece of one shot will change an entire film. . . . With Walter, it was a good experience for me.”

In the remake of the 1941 classic horror picture, Benicio Del Toro (Traffic) plays a nobleman who is tragically bitten by the cursed beast. “I create my first assembly without reference to the sound,” confided Walter Murch. “I view everything with sound, and I take detailed notes about what the sound is like. But when I’m actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it’s a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying. I then refine it as a silent movie, and when I feel that it’s telling itself as a series of images, then I’ll light up all the tracks, and see what all of my cuts have wrought.” Joe Johnston was impressed with the work of Murch whom he has known for two decades. “Walter did what became the final cut of the film. He shortened it by about twenty minutes and rearranged a lot of it. I don’t think he left any scene intact.”

There are certain cinematic truths which Walter Murch keeps in mind when assembling a picture. “If you were to think of the audience’s focus of attention as a dot moving around the screen, the editor’s job is to carry that dot around in an interesting way. If the dot is moving from left to right and then up to the right-hand corner of the frame, when there’s a cut, make sure there’s something to look at in the right-hand corner of the next shot to receive that focus of interest.” Crosscutting between storylines makes the movie viewing experience more dynamic. “Films with a single point-of-view are on borrowed time if they are more than two hours long. Since there’s only one point-of-view, there’s no relief if the audience is not one hundred percent with the film, and it can subsequently seem too long even if it isn’t objectively so.”

Outside of movies, Walter Murch is an avid beekeeper. “A film is a very rich distillation of a tremendous amount of work,” reflected the New York-native whose son Walter Jr. (Goya’s Ghost) has followed him into the edit suite. “I forget exactly what the ratio is for honey but the honey you put into your tea -- that teaspoon represents a gallon of nectar that had to be refined and brought down to size. So there is a similarity on that level.” Having worked with a number of renowned filmmakers over a career spanning four decades, the entertainment industry veteran observed, “If you crudely divided directors into two types, you could say there are result-oriented directors like the Coen Brothers [Fargo] or Guillermo [Pan’s Labyrinth] and there are process-oriented directors like Francis Coppola or Anthony Minghella who delight in making discoveries along the way; during shooting, opportunities will present themselves and they will seize those opportunities.”

Contemplating the future of film editing, Walter Murch remarked, “I think Avid and Final Cut will continue to be the two primary editing tools. Four years from now, who knows? I see more possibility for sooner changes in the area of sound editing and mixing.” As for the latest theatrical craze, Murch stated, “3D certainly has excellent box office numbers right now, but there is still a fundamental perceptual problem with it. Through millions of years of evolution, our brains have been wired so that when we look at an object, the point where our eyes converge and where they focus is one and the same. But with 3D film we have to converge our eyes at the point of the illusion [say five feet in front of us] and simultaneously focus at the plane of the screen [perhaps sixty feet away]. We can do this, obviously, but doing it continuously for two hours is one of the reasons why we get headaches watching 3D. If we can somehow solve this problem and if filmmakers use 3D in interesting ways that advance the story, and not just as gimmicks, then I think 3D has a very promising long-term future.”

While in the edit suite, Walter Murch adopts a certain cinematic point of view. “We hope to become better editors with experience! Yet you have to have an intuition about the craft to begin with; for me, it begins with, ‘Where is the audience looking? What are they thinking?’ As much as possible, you try to be the audience. At the point of transition from one shot to another, you have to be pretty sure where the audience’s eye is looking, where the focus of attention is. That will either make the cut work or not.” Murch carried on to say, “The key is just to follow your interests wherever they may lead - keep the audience in mind; don't abuse the audience unnecessarily - but also, follow your interests and then just keep going. Don't let anything stop you because then that would be the real crisis.”

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.