Walter Murch - Editing the Sound and Music

updated: November 11, 2009

Walter Murch: Editing the Sound and Music Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Walter Murch was born in New York in 1943, and began working with Francis Coppola in the late 1960’s on films like The Rain People, and with George Lucas on THX 1138 and American Graffiti. He was first nominated for an Academy Award in the spring of 1975, for his sound work on The Conversation, and two years later received another nomination, as film editor, on Julia. His greatest successes have been in collaboration with Coppola (The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, for which he won Oscars for both sound and editing, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain).

Peter Cowie: I think it was in 1971 that I first became aware of Walter's name. I saw George Lucas's maiden feature THX 1138 and there came up on the credits the name of Walter Murch. There was something about the film, the glaring whites, the use of the scope screen and the editing of the chases through tunnels and this name Walter Murch seemed to have such resonance, such authority that it stayed in my mind.

It wasn't until The Conversation came out in 1974 at Cannes that I realised how important a man Walter Murch was and would become. Of course he's now really the benchmark of editors and sound designers in our modern ken. He is, I think, someone who's respected equally well in Europe as he is in Hollywood, where, as you well know, he's won Academy Awards for Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and he has been nominated again this year [2004] for his editing of Cold Mountain. Walter, you began your career with Francis Coppola on The Rain People and then with George Lucas on THX 1138. Did you already feel that you were outside the Hollywood system? And how many short cuts could you take on movies like that that you couldn't have done in a studio environment?

Walter Murch: In 1969 we had just graduated from film school – Francis Coppola, George Lucas and myself, Francis being a couple of years ahead of us – and Francis had enjoyed a certain amount of success. One of the reasons that we moved to San Francisco to work on Rain People and then on THX 1138 was that we had found two things in Hollywood at the time.One of them was that film students were not welcome – in fact there was really a reverse prejudice against film students because people in the industry thought that we may know too much theory and not enough practice – so if there were any jobs, of which there were very few, they would not go to film students.

The other thing was, we found that – contrary to how we had all experienced it in film school – that the jobs in the industry were very much separated. We didn't want to do that. We just wanted to continue working the way we had worked in film school and to get out of Hollywood and to go to San Francisco, where the union restrictions were far less onerous, and where we could easily cross from one area to another. It was a gamble that just seemed worth the taking.

Certainly Rain People and THX were very modest films even by the standards of that time. The goal, I remember, was that no film would cost more than $777,777.77, so it was just a whole row of sevens. And that certainly was true of Rain People and THX. It was a deliberate decision to really go outside of what system there was. PC: Did you already do both editing and recording chores on Rain People as you went across the country? WM: Actually I was not on Rain People during the shooting.

I was working, doing some freelance film editing at a place that did commercials. I got a call one day from George Lucas, who I had gone to school with, and he said, "Do you want to move to San Francisco? We're thinking of starting this new company and we want you to be part of it because we discovered when we were making Rain People (which was a road movie) that we could make films out of a little shoe-store in Ogalalla, Nebraska. So we thought, if we can do that, then the chances are good that we can do it anywhere. So why stay in Los Angeles? Why not go to San Francisco?" I thought that was a great idea.

Peter Cowie: You worked as a cameraman on Gimme Shelter. Would you like to talk a little about working with the Stones?

Walter Murch: The Maysles brothers, documentary makers, had come to San Francisco on that leg of the Stones tour and they just wanted as many cameras as possible at the Altamont, which was really just a racetrack that they'd modified into a concert hall. We had a 1,000mm lens which we were going to use on THX1138 and so we got as far away from the stand as possible and just trained this lens on the stage. As it turned out, I think the last shot in the film, which is somebody peeing against the sunrise, is something that I shot!

The Godfather

Peter Cowie: The Godfather proved a breakthrough for everyone concerned with it, but I think you really only entered the picture on Godfather II. Was that a huge challenge because of the way the picture was shot over so many weeks and there were so many locations, Santo Domingo, Sicily and so on? Did you travel with the production at all on Godfather II?

Walter Murch: No. I supervised the sound effects on Godfather I, but we mixed the sound in Los Angeles. I wasn't a part of the union in Los Angeles, so, although I'd mixed a couple of films in San Francisco, I wasn't able to mix Godfather. But partly because of the success of Godfather I, Francis had more power on the sequel, and he was able to make sure that all of the post-production for Godfather II was done up in San Francisco, so I was supervising sound effects and being the re-recording mixer on that picture.

I didn't start editing features until The Conversation, which was right after Godfather I. It was in between Godfather I and Godfather II.

Peter Cowie: What kind of equipment did Francis gather together at Zoetrope Studios on Folsom Street? Did he invest a lot in new equipment, sound equipment?

Walter Murch: He'd had – probably in 1967 – a six-month period where he knew he wasn't going to fit in in Hollywood and he didn't know what to do, and he'd had some success at Cannes with his film You're a Big Boy Now. He wandered over Europe and there was an electronic equipment fair in Germany that he went to and he got very interested in the machines that KEM in Hamburg were making. They made not only editing machines but mixing consoles and film transports for mixing. When Zoetrope was set up in San Francisco, Francis's biggest investment was this mixing equipment from Germany, from Hamburg, which shows you how much all of us loved sound.

We received these pieces of equipment in boxes and we tried to figure out how to put them all together, and make all the connections between the mechanics and the electronics and set up a mixing studio, really in an empty room. It was a very crude situation, with fibreglass panels on the wall just to try to make it sound somewhat acceptable. That was by far the biggest piece of equipment that Zoetrope invested in, and it was for sound. On the idea that you can do more with sound, if you have a dollar to spend on the sound of a film you can get a tremendous creative return on that dollar. A simple sound, a microphone recording some kind of crackling sound, if it's put in the right place, can have an enormous effect upon the film. You think,
"What does that actually represent in terms of financial investment?" It's just this. So it's the idea behind it that is more important almost than what it actually is. What kind of sound are we going to put with what image? Although it was a big investment, comparatively speaking, we also saw it as something that more than paid for itself very quickly.

Early Days as an Editor

Peter Cowie: So many film students want to become directors or writer-directors. Comparatively few want to commit exclusively to editing or sound or even cinematography. What led you to the editing table? What was it that made you feel that could be something where your skills would be best developed?

Walter Murch: I think it has to be something that happened to me when I was ten. I had absolutely no knowledge of how films were made but it was my very early love affair with the tape recorder itself, which was just then becoming available. This was 1953, so they were just becoming commercially available. The father of a friend of mine had one (we lived in New York at the time) and so I would go over to his house to play, but playing always meant dragging this tape recorder out and I somehow knew instinctively not only what it was but how it might be used. I would dangle the microphone out the window and bang on it and do exactly this kind of stuff. Then, because tape is a plastic medium, I was able to cut it up and splice it together not in the order it was recorded.

I could take things out, I could turn things upside down, I could play them backwards and get some kind of unusual effects.Very early on my mind just seemed to go in that direction. Ten years later, in 1963, I was a student in Paris, studying the history of art and literature, so I'd wandered away from sound and editing. But then I fell in love with film. That was right at the height of the whole New Wave movement in France. When I got back to the United States I discovered that there were such things as film schools and I applied to go to school. Aggie and I got married that summer [1965] and we zoomed across the country on a motorcycle for our honeymoon and arrived in Los Angeles.

I immediately put together the fact that editing images was simply a version of what I'd been doing when I was ten with editing sound.

Peter Cowie: That immersion in European film culture affected your generation particularly, think. Films like The Seventh Seal and Breathless and so on.

Walter Murch: Yes, very much so. I saw The Seventh Seal when I was fifteen, I think, in 1958. I wandered back home – it was about four miles from the theatre to my house and I just walked back home – thinking about it, because it was so clearly the work of an individual person compared to films from Hollywood at the time. I really made no distinction then between Hollywood and "foreign movies." They were all just cinema or film, but what struck me so clearly about The Seventh Seal was that somebody, some person made this film and if some other person had made it, it would be a different film.

As simple as that sounds, it was a revelation to me, and I took it to that next logical step, which is: if a person made a film, then I'm a person, therefore I too could work on a film. I didn't take it any further at that point. I didn't think, I'm going to be a filmmaker. But that was the little seed that got buried under the ground, and the next three or four years watered it. Then suddenly when I was 21, it burst forth and I decided to take a crack at working on film.

The other film that influenced me greatly at that time was Godard’s Breathless, similarly a very powerful, individual voice. If you compare The Seventh Seal to Breathless, they're both relatively inexpensive films to make – but Breathless shook cinema technique. It said, I don't have to do this, I don't have to do that. It said, I can make jump cuts, I can repeat action, the camera doesn't have to be smooth, it can jump around. The very fact that Godard was shaking the technique of cinema showed me first of all that it could be shaken and somehow what he did told me on almost a subconscious level: "Oh, then you can do this and you can do that, this is how it works."

If we make the analogy with a suit of clothes, Godard was exposing the seams and showing me how things were knit together, whereas with Bergman the coat is very nicely pressed and you don't reveal how the things are actually put together – unless you know how films are made, then of course you can see. But for an innocent, which is what I was, Godard was a revelation on the level of just the mechanics of how things get put together.

William Dickson’s Experimental Film

Peter Cowie: You've brought with you today a very unusual film, which most of the people in the audience will not have seen. Do you want to want to talk about it – going right back to the birth of the movies?

Walter Murch: This dates from 1894, so this is a piece of film 110 years old. It's the first fusion of image and sound in the history of cinema, so why don't we take a look at it? You'll notice that the man playing the violin was right next to a big structure rather like a trumpet, which is the thing that was collecting the sound, and the cylinder which was recording the sound must have been out of frame over to the left. So here, even in the first sound film ever, the microphone was in the shot.

Just some technical things about it. The image itself has never been lost – we’ve always known about the image. But, as the text explained, this lost cylinder was unknown (except as a dim, enigmatic catalogue record) until 1998, when it was uncovered possibly. The dilemma that the Library of Congress had was that they possessed the film, which was shot, they think, at 40 frames a second, and a three-minute long cylinder which they think turned at 120 rpm, but nobody knows for sure even today. We're not sure what speed Edison shot his films at, or at that time exactly what the speed of the cylinders were.

So they had a dilemma. They didn't have any way to synchronise them, because they were two different systems operating completely independently of each other, and nobody knew what the standards were. The head of the Library of Congress was explaining this in a lecture, and Rick Schmidlin, who I worked with on the restoration of Touch of Evil, was in the audience. He came up afterwards and said, "Just send it to Walter. He'll know what to do."

One day, when I was working on Apocalypse Now Redux (the expanded version of Apocalypse), in the mail I got a VHS tape of this image and a cassette tape – just an ordinary cassette tape – of this scratchy violin sound. Luckily I was working on an Avid at the time and I was able two digitise both of these things, the sound and the picture, and once things are digitised then they're infinitely expandable or contractable.

My assistant Sean Cullen and I squeezed the picture down to what seemed like a normal speed or close to it. Then it was left up to me to simply find some possible sync points between this violin and the image. It was exactly the situation, where you have an image and a soundtrack which don't have a clap together and the synchronisation is off and you just try to find something that looks reasonable and then hope for the best.

After three hours of doing this and countless attempts, none of which worked, I was just about ready to give it up, as always is the case, and I said, "Well, I'll just try one more time." And Oops! I found a good-looking movement of the violin bow at the beginning that seemed to work with something on the sound, then found another thing at the very end, then figured out what the slippage was between them and worked that into the sound – and it snapped into sync.

It was just a jaw-dropping moment to see this thing , which frankly had become annoying to me after three hours – and I think everyone else in the building was being driven crazy by it. And then suddenly there it was! And as I was in the middle of enjoying this moment, I also suddenly realised that this must have been the first time it had ever been in sync. Back then in 1894 they had no idea what was involved in making things in sync. Life is in sync – you talk and the words come out and they seem to be reasonably close – so I think they just assumed, "Well, we'll shoot it and record it and somehow it will magically work."

Well, it didn't, and this early experiment never really took off. Edison came back to try to do film sound about twenty years later. I felt a great kinship with these young people, really, who were doing this experiment like that.

The Conversation

Peter Cowie: Can we leap forward maybe eighty years to The Conversation, which we will see a clip of? Before we do, I'd love you to tell us the peculiar circumstances surrounding this production. Godfather II was out and about. Francis was shooting. He'd written the story, I think, for Conversation in '67 already, then for the Directors Company, got the money after Godfather, shot the film but then had to go into production on Godfather II and essentially left you in San Francisco to be essentially a co-director, a co-creator of the picture.

Walter Murch: The unusual situation, first of all, was that it was a film about a sound recordist, which is simply an unusual thing to make a film about. I was the sound recordist Francis, and he knew that I had edited some commercials and documentaries. The next unusual thing was him thinking, "Well, Walter, you've done sound on features. Why don't you edit the film on this feature?" It was the first film that I'd edited the image as well as the sound and doing the mix on the sound.

At least, this is what he was proposing to me and of course I thought it a wonderful idea, because, again, it got back to what we'd been doing in film school, where we tried to cross as many bridges as possible. And the technology that was beginning to emerge at the time, via the transistor, which has since developed thanks to things like the Avid and Final Cut Pro and ProTools and just all of these computerisations of post-production, made it feasible for one person to tackle both sound and editing. Whereas I think ten years earlier the technology would have been so cumbersome that it really wouldn't have been considered possible.

Peter Cowie: The clip we're going to see occurs in the first half of The Conversation. For those of you who haven't seen it, Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, who's working on assignment for a rather shady organisation spying on two people in Union Square. He has a team picking up all the sound and the scene we'll see shows him trying to work out what these people are saying and then coming up with a rather terrifying conclusion.

Walter Murch: That particular section was very much the way it is in the screenplay. The structural difference earlier in this scene was that in the screenplay as it was originally written Harry assembles the tape and discovers that this line is hidden in the tape right away. It seemed to be, when we looked at the whole film, that it was too much to ask of us or an audience to understand this strange alchemy that he does and the leap of story that this represents is a significant line.

We pulled the scenes apart. There was an earlier scene where you just saw him doing what he did as if everything was normal. Then he goes and visits his girlfriend and then he hands in the tape. That's when the Harrison Ford character says, "You've heard that tape. You know there's something going on." As far as Harry's concerned, "No, I didn't think there was anything." So he goes back, and now that we're primed to listen for something strange, that's where this uncovering begins?

Peter Cowie: Is it true that Harry Caul was based really on the character of Hal Lipsett, a sound engineer who was reputedly called in when the eighteen minutes in the Watergate tapes became apparent and they wanted someone to try and resurrect Nixon's expletives?

Walter Murch: Yes.. Francis had been directed to an article on Hal by Irving Kershner, the director. Kershner said, "This is an interesting person." Francis replied, "Yes!" and was really fascinated and he thought he would maybe make a film about this type of person. As it turned out, this real-life individual, Hal Lipsett, lived in San Francisco and was one of the national experts in this kind of activity. When the crisis with Watergate broke, Hal was one of the people called in to examine the tapes that seemed to have been tampered with. He was an adviser on the film. He was looking at a film being made of his life and advising people what was correct behaviour.

Bond between Editing and Sound Rerecording

Peter Cowie: Before we go to the next clip, let me let you loose on a subject I know that you like to expound on, which is the bond between editing and sound rerecording. Is it just by chance that you like to combine the two disciplines? Or do you feel there really is an organic link?

Walter Murch: I think anyone who is either a picture editor or a sound editor, or a sound mixer, certainly has felt those moments where mysteriously some sound that seems quite innocuous suddenly can be placed in the right juxtaposition with the image. Some chasm seems to open up, and possibilities that you hadn't even thought of suddenly are unleashed. Clearly from my experience as a ten-year-old I'd begun to think that way already, so I naturally feel that resonance myself.

I'm a little mystified why I'm the only person – in Hollywood, anyway – doing both film editing and re-recording. They do appear so closely related. One is the shadow of the other. They seem to complement each other in so many ways that I'm surprised there hasn't been more activity in that area. I think what will happen – certainly in the next ten years – is that I will get more company in this area, because the technology is simply moving very much in that direction.

Those of you who have mixed films know that the borders between sound editing and mixing are beginning to dissolve, to such a degree that sound editors today working on a computer are doing things that normally were in the domain of the mixers, and vice versa. Mixers are frequently scooting over and moving tracks and deleting tracks or performing other things within a soundtrack that formerly sound editors were doing. I think inevitably there will eventually be just a single platform. The idea that you use a separate system to edit sound than you do to edit picture is, I think, a temporary phase.

Peter Cowie: I spoke to Alan Parker for Dolby a few weeks ago and he said that Gerry Hambling, his editor, and Steven Spielberg and his editor were literally the last people to edit on real film – to cut on film – and he was very worried because Hambling was retiring and he would no longer be able to edit on film. Everyone is using Avid or LightWorks or similar. Have you found that easy to adjust to over the years?

Walrer Murch: Yes, I have. Just a word about Steven and Michael Kahn, his editor. Michael is, let's say, ambidextrous. He doesn't want necessarily to work on Moviola. If he works for another director, he will work on Avid or whatever system he's comfortable with. But Steven Spielberg insists on film. It's a paradox, because here's somebody who obviously is at the forefront of so many technological changes, but he simply likes his films to be edited on film.

He's bought up, I think, six or seven Moveolas – the old upright Moveola, which really fundamentally hasn't changed in design since the 1940s. He's bought up spare parts and he's hired somebody full-time just to take care of these machines. I think film is not going to be with us very much longer. I think the flip into a completely digital world is probably five years away. As computers go, five years is an indefinite period of time, because they move so fast. I just don't see celluloid as such staying with us much longer. I've always leapt at new technology as soon as it becomes available – maybe too soon.

At Zoetrope we were the first place in the United States to start using the German Steinbecks and KEMs when I don't think anyone else in the States was using them at that time – 1968. Apocalypse Now was the first film ever to be mixed using a computer, which is very common now but certainly in 1977, when we started doing it, it was not considered usual... people just hadn't done it yet.

I've always jumped and in that free-form leap hoped that, by the time I hit the ground, things would stabilise themselves somehow. No, I'm very comfortable with that kind of change.

The Ride of the Valkyries Peter Cowie: The next clip is from Apocalypse Now and it's fairly self-evident when we see the clip, and then when the lights come up perhaps you'd like to tell us how you chose the Wagner music for that particular sequence.

Walter Murch: We thought the rights were ours, but of course the lawyers knew otherwise. Decca, the recording label, was contacted and they very quickly said no. At that point panic set in. We developed a three-prong attack: one approach was to start preparations with the San Francisco Symphony to try to re-record it in as close to the Georg Solti tempi and mood as possible; another was to continue to batter away at Decca; and then a third path, which fell to me, which was to go to Tower Records and find all the recordings of the Valkyries that existed, which I think were nineteen at that time, and find one which was close to the Solti tempi and see if we could get the rights to that.

It was actually a very interesting exercise: I had to take a stopwatch and measure out exactly what Solti was doing in this recording. Like all great conductors there is this rubato effect where what seems like a regular metre is in fact not so. He's doing things all the time with the music for emotional, dynamic effect. I had to chart all of these on a graph and then take this graph and compare it with these other nineteen, half of which it was immediately obvious were not right, and almost all the other ones on closer investigation would be disqualified.

I finally came up with one, which I think was Erich Leinsdorf and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and as far as the graph went, it was actually very close. I had it transferred to 35mm film – this was long before computers. I put it in sync at the beginning of the section, ran forward and was kind of thinking, this is all right, this is good.

Suddenly I knew it was not going to work. It wasn't because the metre was wrong – the metre was actually very close – but it was because of the musical coloration Leinsdorf used in his recording, and the way he had balanced the instruments. He had emphasised the strings in sections where Solti had emphasised the brass. Everyone was playing the same notes, but you were hearing more of a string sound than a brass sound. There was a synergy – I just remember a particular case, it was before the clip that we just ran, where the camera was looking down over a soldier's shoulder on to the ocean.

There was something about the blue of that ocean and the brass of Solti's recording that worked together to make the blue more intense and the brass more intense. One fed upon the other. When you took that away and had strings, there seemed to be the reverse: each one of them seemed to unwind each other. The blue looked dead, it didn't have any snap to it any more. The violins also sounded muted and dull. I went back up to Francis and I said, "This is not going to work. I don't think there's anything." He grabbed hold of the phone and somehow got a direct line to Solti himself, who was very amused by this dilemma and said, "Of course, dear boy, why didn't you phone me first?"

But it happened so late in the process that we were never able to get the master tapes, so what's in the film is actually just lifted off of the LP record -- which presumably would have been what Kilgore would have played it from anyway in the first place.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Peter Cowie: We're now going to show a clip from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Phil Kaufman's masterpiece from 1988. I've chosen this clip because I'd love you to tell us how you managed to meld archival footage in with footage shot by Sven Nykvist during the occupation of Prague by Soviet tanks.

Walter Murch: The decision, right from the beginning of writing the screenplay, was to use documentary footage in the film. Like the idea of using the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, this was well established and deeply considered long in advance of shooting. In fact, I was working on the film for a couple of months before filming started, going through documentary footage and visiting various capitals in Europe such as Stockholm, Brussels, London, Rome, and going to the film libraries in these countries, asking if they had any footage from this event, which was the Soviet invasion of Prague in '68.

In the end, I think we had probably thirty hours of material, that was then filtered down. We picked out the most likely of the images that would mesh with locations we had scouted in Lyon in France, which is where the modern-day equivalent unfolds. Whenever you see Juliette Binoche or Daniel Day-Lewis, it's a scene taken in Lyon; if you don't see them, it's something that was taken in Prague in 1968 – by students, really.

This was when the invasion happened. Frank Daniel was the head of the film school in Prague. He didn't know what was going on, nobody knew, this might have been the beginning of World War 3 for all we knew. Film students came to the school, because this was their second home and it was around four o'clock in the morning when the tanks came in. Frank handed out cameras to everybody and said, "Just get out there and film it." Within half an hour this was one of the most fully documented military operations up to that point.

Frank also said, "As soon as you've shot a roll of film, find somebody who's leaving the country and give it to them." You didn't want to be caught with undeveloped film on you. Within an hour Czechoslovakia was leaking film in all directions and it wound up in Stockholm, Brussels, London... Wherever this person happened to be going, that's where it wound up – as undeveloped film.

The BBC would develop it and show it as breaking news. This was all long before the kind of stuff we have today, but it was the beginning of that process. In a very poetic form, this event, which had exploded Czechoslovakia, or imploded it, and caused all this film to leave the country, had prompted Milan Kundera, in fact, to leave the country to write this novel, which, in a kind of reverse gravity, created a film that brought all these images back together again.

There were many times when I would be cutting between two different angles. One of them would be imagery that I'd found in Stockholm of a bus being turned over. Then I would have the reverse angle shot by some other student, and that was a piece of film that had come from Toronto. There was an incredible depth of coverage to this whole series of real events. Just a tiny word about the sound. This is a film that obeys all of the normal conventions of film reality before this section and after this section.

Sven Nykvist is the cinematographer of these beautifully lit and composed images, and then right in the middle is a ten-minute section which is the entire spectrum of what is possible in film, both for positive and negative. Some of the images are very heavily degraded, many of them in black-and-white, as you can see, some of them in colour, so we had to balance all of this.

In the image you'll see in this section, many times I've left in the flash frames at the head of a shot or the tail of a roll with those funny dots on them, and I tried to find the equivalent in sound. Again, this is back in 1988; it's different now. When a Nagra is turned on suddenly in the middle of an event, you get a very funny screeching sound as the tape comes up to speed and also lots of the noise of mike handling. Either of those things – the flash frames, the end-of rolls, the Nagra turning on too late, the mike handling – these would be completely inappropriate in the rest of the film, but by some strange alchemy, they were the things that made this section look even more real.

It's a very strange transition from one reality to the other, where the rules are inverted: what is up is down and what's down is up.

Peter Cowie: A second clip from The Unbearable Lightness of Being illustrates the idea of music not being composed for a film but taken perhaps from a composer who was working decades, even a century earlier. It's the very poignant ending of the film and there's wonderful use of the music by Janacek.

Walter Murch: The decision seemed inevitable to use Janacek's music in this film because Kundera's father was a music professor in Czechoslovakia and knew Janacek and taught Janacek, and so Kundera grew up in a household just drenched in Janacek. He himself, if you've read any of his commentary about his own writing, is deeply influenced by music, so it just seemed to be a natural thing to put the two together.

We were able to get wonderful recordings of Janacek by Czechoslovakian orchestras on Supraphon, which was the national label. Over and over again you see this deep affinity between film and music. There’s this miracle that is not unique to Unbearable Lightness, which is that a piece of music written probably in 1920 or 1910, performed by an orchestra with no intention of its ever being in a film somewhere in the 1950s or the 1960s, is then put up against a series of images which were not edited with reference to this particular piece of music. The decision to use which piece of music always came after the fact.

Invariably there would be very little editing to do, either to the music or to the image. I think it has something to do with an identity between the musical phrase and the filmic shot. The length of time that a composer decides and a conductor decides, "That's the right length for that phrase," is a very similar mental process to the film editor and the director saying, "This is the right length of this shot, not any longer and not any less."

Of course, it's not just a question of one shot or one phrase but a whole series, and they somehow seem to interlock with each other: once you've started down a certain path in film construction and in musical composition and performance, you have to complete that. It's this uncanny situation where, if you start a piece of music in the right place and it seems to work for the first ten or twenty seconds, the chances are extremely high that it will still be working a minute and a half later. We're just taking advantage of this natural resonance between the structure of film and music.

Working with Anthony Minghella

Peter Cowie: Walter, you've worked three times with Anthony Minghella on The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, and now Cold Mountain. Could you tell us a little bit about his attitude, his approach to editing and sound?

Walter Murch: We obviously get along very well with each other on both a personal and a professional level. I had worked with Saul Zaentz, who was the producer of Unbearable, and Saul was also the producer of English Patient and so he suggested that I work on the film with Anthony. Although shot in Europe, The English Patient was being put together in the United States.

We hit it off. He's a director who gives a tremendous amount of latitude to the various heads of departments who work for him. He's very much like Francis Coppola in that regard. Whether there's an Italian connection there I don't know. The parallel would be with the way a director works with an actor, which is that you don't tell the actor exactly how to read this line and how many steps you take before you pick up the glass of water, you talk about what's on the character's mind and then allow the actor to find out how many steps and find out how to read it. By the same token, Anthony allows me to find out what the basis of a scene construction will be.

He doesn't give me any detailed advice such as, "Use this shot," "Use this take for this line reading and see if you can get out before she turns" – none of this kind of instruction. On the other hand, he does leave, like Hansel and Gretel, a trail of breadcrumbs in the way he shoots, so that I am being led gently – as of course an actor is being led gently by the construction of a screenplay – into how [it will all come together]. But he still will allow that final degree of freedom in exactly when and how.

Questions from the Audience

Question: I know you re-edited Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and I'm wondering if you could talk about that and about how you got the original notes from Orson Welles?

Walter Murch: The film Touch of Evil that Orson Welles wrote and directed was taken away from him by the studio after they saw the first cut of the film in 1958. They even went so far as to hire a new director, and they wrote three or four new scenes which were inserted into the film. Of course, they were nonetheless obliged to show Orson this version and he saw it. He was not allowed to stop it, he simply had to watch it, and meanwhile he was writing away in the dark.

After it was over, he went home and wrote up a 58-page memo about what he thought was wrong with this version. To his credit, he had every reason to be furious at them, but he knew that if he were simply furious there was no chance that anything would happen. So he was very diplomatic, although you could tell the emotion going on. He said, "Just think of me as somebody who has a lot of inside information. This now is not my film any more, it's your film, but I can help you make your film a better film if you do these things."

To Universal's discredit, they didn't do any of those things. They simply wanted to wash their hands of the film at that point. They rushed it to completion by their own lights, and that was thought to be the end of the matter. This memo was notorious, but nobody could ever seem to put their hands on it. But a fragment of it appeared -- I think, in Sight and Sound – in the early 1990’s, and that inspired Rick Schmidlin, who was a film restorer, to see if he could find the whole memo and do right by Orson Welles. Against all odds, he succeeded. With this memo as a guide, he and I just broke the memo down into a number of points, which were about fifty-eight (about one per page).

We put the film on an Avid – on a digital editing machine – and did what we could. We obviously didn't have the resources that Orson Welles had in 1958, because all of the extra film had long been destroyed. We just had the original negative.

Peter Cowie: Did Universal pay for this restoration?

Walter Murch: Yes. To their final credit they did pay for it. And by an irony of fate Beatrice Welles, who is Welles's daughter, fought against the release of this version. Who knows what strange things go on?

Question: How can one escape from the risk of sound saying the same thing as image? Where to look or where to hear around the scene?

Walter Murch: Good question. How do you free yourself from the ice that seems to form between the sound and the image? Early on, when you're looking at a film, how do you not simply duplicate what it is that you're looking at? There is no single method, but just as a way of revealing my thought process I can say that I never think about the scene in question; I think about the transition between the previous scene and the new scene, or out of this scene into the next scene.

In my mind, or just on an editing machine, I run the transition from one to the other. I think, "What do I want? What would it be good for that to sound like? Or, even less than sound, to feel like? How do we want to go: from brittle to soft, or from cold to warm?" I try not even to think in sound terms, but some other analogy.

Then I try to see, is there any sound like that, that's reasonable to put as a background or as a sound effect in this scene – Scene A, let's call it – and then I ask myself, is there any smooth sound that would go with this image? Then I will try to push that as far as I can push it. It's always amazing to me how far you can push these things. In a way, it's the flipside of what we were talking about with music, that music and image seem to cleave together almost like an organic crystal, but as far as sound effects and image goes, of course there's a resonance there, but it's always amazing how far apart you can make them and still retain some provocative sound-image collision.

In fact, as a general rule, the further you push the sound, as long as that tension between them doesn't break, the resulting idea, or the resulting feeling, is going to be ever more-dimensional. If you simply duplicate what we're looking at, then of course the result is one-dimensional. Just as if both my eyes were in the same place, the world would seem very flat. The world has dimension to me because my eyes are in different places. If I was able to move this eye further to the left, this theatre would become hugely deep – or would seem to be very deep.

And yet there's a breaking point. If I move too far this way, then the images are so disparate that the mind can't resolve them any more, because it's the mind that is giving us this depth. The depth doesn't really exist in the sensory feeling. It's out there, of course, in reality, but our impression of it is the result of the way our mind works. If you have an image and a sound that are not exactly duplicating what we're seeing but further away from the image, then you're asking the mind of the audience to resolve these two things, just as in life you're always asking your mind to resolve your left eye and your right eye, and the result is three dimensions. The consequence of this is a kind of three-dimensionality of sound and image.

Peter Cowie: Walter, you've been immensely kind to come as host all this way to the Talent Campus this year – maybe we should call you more appropriately "the godfather".