O: Did you do anything to try and evoke distance or space, as well? A distant camel-bell? Or a voice?
M: Mainly through voice, through the placement of voice. That depended on how Anthony shot the scene. But if somebody was fifty feet away, we paid very close attention to how that voice would sound fifty feet away. If that didn't happen to be captured on the original soundtrack, we created an acoustic envelope around the voice to make it feel like it was fifty feet away.
O: Was that done during the mix?
M: Yes.
O: So there wasn't an earlier stage, before the mix, when that quality was put in?
M: No. All those additional fine-tunings of acoustic space happened at the mix, because not only is everything together then, but you're physically in the space of a theatre and can now tune it all exactly as you want it to be in the theatre when it is being shown to audiences.
O: In an early film like American Graffiti, when you were doing the sound, that kind of effect—the use of source music—was created by you and George Lucas at the time of the filming, wasn't it?
M: No. That was all created afterwards. After the filming but before the mix. We produced the radio show just as if you'd happened to tune in radio station XERB in the summer of 1962: it had Wolfman Jack talking, it had commercials, it had songs, it had people phoning in to request music. And then we took a tape of that radio show into different sonic environments, out in the real world, and played it back and captured what we heard on a second tape recorder. It was a process I nicknamed, for obvious reasons, “worldizing.”
In the mix I had separate control of both the original radio show and the “worldized” version. By fading up the first track, I could emphasize the power and clarity of the radio show and the music, if that's what we wanted. If we wanted to push the sound into the background, we could shift the balance and emphasize the second track and, in fact, the third track. We did all the worldizing twice, which further randomized the sound so that if we wanted to we could make the sound into almost a mist, like a rainy mist, in the background. Almost not there at all, and yet filling the space around the characters. It's the sonic equivalent of photographic depth of field. If I'm taking your portrait, I don't want the background to be in focus, because I want to concentrate on your face. So I adjust the lens's depth of field to throw the background out of focus.
This had not been done so fully before in sound. It was the breakthrough on American Graffiti.
WATCH HOW THEY SAY IT
O: I'm intrigued by what you call “metaphorical sound” … the idea of emphasizing the visual by artificially focussing on a possibly disjointed or unrealistic layer of sound. Especially because there's also, simultaneously, such “authenticity” in the sounds you use in your films. You've described this as “the reassociation of image and sound in different contexts.” How did you first become conscious of the possibilities of this?
M: I remember Roman Polanski coming to my film school, USC, in '66. He talked quite passionately about sound, but he talked about it in terms of celebrating the authenticity of the sound itself. An example he used was the drip of a faucet and what that tells you about a person, about the apartment they live in, about their relationship to many other things. The fact that that drip is there says many different things. I agreed with that.
It's always a balance for me, between something being authentic, and celebrating that authenticity, and yet at the same time trying to push the sound into other metaphorical areas. Think of the screech of the elevated subway train in The Godfather when Michael Corleone murders Sollozzo and the policeman, Captain McCluskey, in the Italian restaurant. It's an authentic sound because it's a real subway train and because it seems authentic to that neighbourhood of the Bronx, where the restaurant is located. We don't wonder what the sound is, because we've seen so many films set in the Bronx where that sound is pervasive.
But it's metaphorical, in that we've never established the train tracks and the sound is played so abnormally loud that it doesn't match what we're looking at, objectively. For a sound that loud, the camera should be lying on the train tracks.
In the restaurant scene in The Godfather, the wine bottle being uncorked was the only sound in a tense moment.
O: I was watching that scene again recently, and what's wonderful about it also is that it begins with the intimate noise of a cork being twisted out of a wine bottle. It's such a perverse celebration of a minor detail at a tense point, that bottle being uncorked at the start of the fatal meal … and about four minutes later, there's the manic, screaming train sound and a double shooting.
M: That was very deliberately done, to make you pay attention to a tiny realistic sound and then have an overwhelming sound that you have to interpret in a different way—all on a subconscious level.
O: And after the gunshots you get opera! It's like the sequence has three or four musical acts. The whole composition of the scene is remarkable.
M: Another element in that scene is Francis's use of Italian without subtitles. It's very bold, even today, to have an extended scene between two main characters in an English-language film speaking another language with no translation. As a result you're paying much more attention to how things are said and the body language being used, and you're perceiving things in a very different way. You're listening to the sound of the language, not the meaning.
O: What was the word you used last night? Not aphasic but …
The scream of a train preceded the double shooting that follows.
M: Yes, that's it: aphasic. You don't know what they're saying, so the only way to understand what the scene is about is to watch how they say it, through the tone of the voice and their body language. The sound exercises the mind in much more complex ways than appear on the surface of the scene, which is otherwise just a dialogue scene between three people. The use of unsubtitled Italian is making you pay attention to sound, setting you up for what is about to happen.
O: We are a limited viewer. We're not being told everything.
M: And also all this is predicated on Francis's decision not to have music during the scene. In the hands of another filmmaker, there would be tension music percolating under the surface. But Francis wanted to save everything for those big chords after Michael's dropped the gun. Even after he shoots, there's silence, and in your mind you hear Clemenza saying,“Remember, drop the gun. Everyone will be looking at the gun, so they won't look at your face.” So Michael shoots them and then there's this moment of silence and then he drops the gun.
O: He doesn't even drop it, he tosses it! It's a much more extraordinary gesture than a subtle drop.
M: Yeah, it's as if to say: Look at this gun! The gun hits the ground, and then the music finally comes in. It's a classic example for me of the correct use of music, which is as a collector and channeler of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion. Music in The Godfather is almost always used in this way. I think in the long run this approach generates emotions that are truer because they come out of your direct contact with the scene itself, and your own feelings about the scene—not feelings dictated by a certain kind of music. The Godfather is a good film to study for its use of music.
Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids. There's no question that you can induce a certain emotion with music—just like steroids build up muscle. It gives you an edge, it gives you a speed, but it's unhealthy for the organism in the long run.
So after being plunged into that astonished silence before the gun is dropped, the audience is confused emotionally. Is Michael a bad guy? A good guy? Here's somebody who has done the very thing he said he wouldn't do, which is to work for the family. Now he's killed somebody for the family. Are we going to watch this Kennedyish character now trample over the ideals he espoused at the beginning—
O: So the music comes in to guide us out of the scene….
M: The music at that point says, This is an operatic moment. Michael is a character in
an opera. Young, idealistic, now of his own volition going deep into the centre of the darkness and doing the thing that none of the other members of the family can do—he's sacrificing his own innocence. Because everyone knows him to be an innocent—the police, the other mob families. This kid is the last person that Sollozzo or McCluskey would expect to pull out a gun and kill them. So Michael trades in his innocence and commits these murders in order—he believes—to save the family. In the previous scene, where Tom Hagen and Sonny and Clemenza and Tessio are sitting around talking about what to do, nobody suggests, Let's kill them both. In fact, when Michael says it, they laugh: This is crazy! You can't kill a police captain in the middle of New York! But Michael, uncoiling the power of his will—which has lain dormant— explains in that wonderful scene where the camera moves in on him, slowly, how he's going to do it, and you see a kind of snake unfurling out of this Ivy League character, a snake that will remain draped around his neck for the rest of the film. And in the subsequent Godfather films as well.
O: Wasn't there a story about a Mafia henchman who thought the sound in the restaurant murder scene was very realistic?
M: Yes—there was an interview a couple of years ago in The New York Timeswith Salvatore Gravano, who had killed a number of people for the Mafia and then turned state's evidence. The interviewer was asking him whether Mario Puzo had ever had Mafia connections. And Gravano felt that definitely Puzo either had connections or had been in the Mafia himself. As proof he cites the scene where Michael kills Sollozzo and McCluskey: “Remember how Michael couldn't hear anything as he's walking up on them? Remember how his eyes went glassy, and there was just the noise of the train in the background, and how he couldn't hear them talk? That's just like I felt when I killed Joe Colucci…. Somebody who wrote that scene had to have a feeling for that. I mean, I felt like I was pulling the trigger myself.”
Gravano thought that only somebody who had actually killed would know that subtle piece of emotional information, therefore Mario Puzo had to have killed somebody, or had intimate contact with people who had killed. But, as it turns out—aside from the fact that Gravano was confusing the book with the film—it was just my attempt to fill in a sound space that would normally be occupied by music—something that came from a kid from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and had absolutely no Mafia connections anywhere!
I remembered the interviewer went on to ask Gravano if The Godfather had influenced the way he behaved.
“Well,” he answers, “I killed nineteen people.”
What did that have to do with The Godfather, the interviewer asked.
“I only did, like, one murder before I saw the movie.”
“KA-LUNK”
O: I find it fascinating that you feel that with such “metaphorical sound” you can reach a deeper truth about the atmosphere of the scene. Can you think of other examples?
M: What immediately comes to mind is the use of sound in transitions in The English Patient. The transition from the Patient, after Hana has finished reading Herodotus to him … She leaves Almásy alone and subsequently she's playing hopscotch downstairs. You hear her throw the metal spile she's using to mark the square, and you hear the sound of her feet as she jumps. That sound continues, but it seems now to be much too much. And with the audience in that slightly confused state of mind, the film dissolves through to the scene where the explorers, in an earlier time, are sitting around the campfire and the Berber guides are playing their music and you realize that elements of this drumming have infiltrated their way into the hopscotch, and that that's probably what triggered this memory within Almásy. That he too heard the sounds of hopscotch, and there was something about its rhythm that took him back to the past.
O: Speaking of specific everyday sounds that can be made metaphorical, there is the famous use of the sound of the door closing at the end of The Godfather.I believe you spent a good deal of time testing doors….
M: That's a small but interesting example of the kind of stuff that happens routinely. Something as innocent as a door-close. If you approach it coherently and seriously, you understand that there are many door-closes that would have been wrong for that scene. First of all because this is the last sound in the film—other than the music—and second because it is the decisive moment in which Michael is closing the door on his wife, and on a whole part of his emotional life, which ultimately leads to the tragedy of Godfather II, where you see the results of that decision on a very large scale.
The door-close, in the sense of what Polanski was talking about, has to be true to what we perceive objectively: the physicality of the door and the space around it. But it also has to be true to the metaphorical impact of that door-close, which is, “I'm not going to talk about my business, Kay.” That ka-lunk,that articulated sound of solidity, has to express something of the finality of the decision.
O: What governs your decision to make that moment of sound symbolic or metaphorical as well as realistic?
M: The cork you mentioned in the restaurant scene in The Godfather is a good example. That just happened, but the way it was cut and the fact that nobody was talking at the moment the cork is being drawn from the bottle made us decide to emphasize it. One could have chosen not to emphasize that small sound, and to concentrate instead on the expressions of the diners. But something about the insistence of that little sound—the screw winding itself into the flesh of the cork—seemed to help structure the larger context of things and set us up for the shock and noise of the train and the shooting only minutes later. So I remember recording that squeak and pop with great attention to detail….
NOVELS AND FILMS—THE REDUNDANT ABUNDANCE
O: The writer and filmmaker Henry Bean told me a story of a writer who had been approached by someone who said, “Can you believe what that film producer did to your book!” And the writer replied, “He did nothing to my book.” Still, books and films often make bad marriages. What are the problems in adapting novels into films?
M: The most frequent problem is abundance. The amount of story in a novel is so much more than a film can present. In general, short stories are easier to translate into films than novels are.
As a rule, when you're adapting a novel to film, you have to ask, What's the short story of this novel? And then make certain fateful decisions. The obvious truth about film is that it's highly redundant visually. In Madame Bovary,Flaubert describes Emma Bovary's eyes and refers to their colour perhaps three other times. On film, every single frame of Isabelle Huppert's eyes says, This is the colour of her eyes, or, This is how her hair is, this is her costume.
There's a tremendous power in that, but if you have that kind of redundancy on top of the story abundance of the novel, you get … whatever the combination of abundance and redundancy is. We'll have to coin a new word. It's overwhelming, anyway. If the filmmakers are overly respectful of the way the novel tells itself and of every novelistic detail, it's a recipe for filmic trouble.
The kind of novel that makes a good film has a certain motion—whether that's physical motion across the screen or emotional motion, moving from one state to another. Or, one hopes, both.
O: I know you usually read the original novels that the films you work on are based on. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, the Oz books, and, in the case of The Conversation, Steppenwolf. And you also do research around some of them. So you begin your work long before the filming happens.
M: Yes. I try to expose myself as early as possible, not only to the novel but, if possible, to the author's source material. I try to get as far back as I can into the roots of the material.
O: Anthony Minghella did that when writing the script of The English Patient.He read up on desert exploration, finding some of the realities on which I had based my fiction. The different kinds of shelters the expeditions would construct in the desert, et cetera.
M: I also try to choose projects that dovetail with my own interests. That's a significant part of the process—wh
ere you are really casting yourself, in much the same way actors cast themselves in a role. In an ideal situation, such as Vanessa Redgrave in Julia, an actor chooses a part that represents some emotional truth to her as an individual, which pushes her somewhere she has not gone before.
O: This is very precisely what writers do, or should do.
M: You want the correct balance of those two things—if you place an actor in a situation in which there is no emotional resonance with anything in her life, you get a false performance. On the other hand, if somebody merely does what she's already done ten times, you get a formal, stylized performance that's very easy for an actor to fall into. The same would apply to film editors.
O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's—“I write to discover the next room of my fate.” In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits—or future self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.
M: Somebody once asked W. H. Auden, “Is it true that you can write only what you know?”And he said,“Yes it is. But you don't know what you know until you write it.” Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
O: When you worked on The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a supervising editor, making the final selection of the material, was it a difficult editing process? I ask this partly because it's a film that in a way remains a novel. It doesn't really have that short story line you said is so important to find.
M: The struggle on that film—it's a wonderful film, I saw it again a year or so ago, and it holds up very well, I think—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 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 forwards again with the story, from somebody else's point of view, taking it farther than the first character. Back and forth and back and forth, but always ultimately moving forwards, using different people's points of view like a pair of skis.