The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

  I remember one scene where we were shooting inside a train. A real train car, on a soundstage, so there wasn't a lot of room to move around because Fred wanted that sense of confinement. Since the camera operator could not use the large geared control that he normally used, he had a smaller tripod, with a little handle on it, to move the camera.

  There was to be a close-up on Jane Fonda, who played Lillian Hellman, seated. She gets up to reach for a hatbox, and the camera was supposed to follow her as she moved to that second position, and then hold on her for a line of dialogue. In the middle of this move, the handle of the tripod came off in the operator's hands. With Zinnemann, the only person to say “Cut” was the director. So Chic, the operator, grabbed hold of the camera—put his hands on the camera itself—wrenched it up into the second position, and managed to get it into place for the line of dialogue. But the middle of the shot was all crazy, because the handle had come off.

  Zinnemann seemed oblivious to this. He said, “Cut. Print that. Let's go on to the next one.” Chic came up to him, with the handle in his hand, and said, Sir, I'm afraid there was a problem—the handle came off in my hand. Zinnemann's eyes narrowed and he repeated, “Cut. Print. We're going on to the next setup.” I happened to be on the set at the time, and Chic looked at me and rolled his eyes as if to say, You're the editor! You're going to have to fix this one!

  You had the feeling that Zinnemann was so intensely dedicated to people being prepared that if they weren't he was willing to use a faulty shot in the film to teach them a lesson: I will damage the film so that forever after you will remember the time the handle came off in your hand! Of course, in the end, he didn't do that. I found a way to cut around the problem, as Zinnemann knew I would. But I was amazed. If you'd worked with him before, you might know what was going on in his mind, you could find ways to anticipate it—but for the people who were not used to working with him, it was a little mysterious! But he made wonderful films so clearly it worked for him.

  Later he confided to me. He said, My problem is that I began as an assistant director. It's an unusual path to being a director. And I'm like a fire horse: when it hears the alarm it responds with a snort. So when I'm directing, a large part of me is still an assistant director: How are we doing with time?

  Every director has to think about this, but there's a trade-off between being on schedule and getting the right material and creating a collaborative, convivial atmosphere on the set.

  Also, early in his career he had made a number of documentaries and documentary-type films, like The Search and The Men. In the early thirties, he had apprenticed with Robert Flaherty, the director of Nanook of the North, the first feature-length documentary. And he loved it when actors bumped into the furniture, when they were not yet familiar with the scene and didn't know where they were going. He loved that kind of randomness. He said, In life, events are always happening for the first time, they're not happening for the seventh time. What he particularly hated was a too-well-oiled performance, where everything was working too perfectly.

  O: I remember in The Nun's Story a scene in the African hospital where one of the nuns gets killed…. It's a terrifying scene. It feels as if things are genuinely going out of control in front of your eyes. It's documentary-like in the middle of what is quite a classical film.

  M: The two approaches are not contradictory, but they are creatively opposed—the way a thumb and a forefinger are opposed. 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. This was a particular struggle between him and Jane Fonda, who was used to more give-and-take between the director and the star. On the other hand, he had that documentary side to him, that wild element, and he did set things up so that a rawness would occasionally happen.

  We were shooting some of Julia in the Lake District of England—part of the idyll between Lillian and Julia when they are in their early twenties. The two of them are on a beautiful sailboat, on a sunlit lake. We were filming it from a barge that was typically full of coffee mugs and half-eaten sandwiches, coiled wires and all the paraphernalia of filming—totally out of keeping with what we were looking at.

  At a certain point, in one of the most beautiful shots, the prow of the barge came up into the frame. Right when you were thinking 1920s, beautiful boat, two girls—suddenly, half-eaten sandwiches and creosoted wood rise into the scene. What to do? On my own, I asked for an optical to be made of the shot. Because the boat was always moving, it was very easy to optically compress the image, removing the offending barge, and then pull back out.

  Shortly afterwards Fred came into the editing rooms and said, I heard you've ordered an optical. Why? I explained that the beautiful shot was spoiled when the barge came into the frame. I showed him the optical, then the original shot. He said, I like the original better! People will never be looking at the barge, they will be looking at the two beautiful girls on the boat.

  I argued back that the optical was invisible, why take a chance on ruining the sequence, it's a period film, what if someone does notice it, et cetera. It became one of those little creative tugs-of-war.

  He studied me with a kind of impatient amusement and then said, All right, because you're so invested in this, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll finish the film my way—without the optical—and show it to Dougie Slocombe—the director of photography—when it's all finished. If he mentions it, then we'll recut the negative and put your optical in.

  Zinnemann in a sailboat with Jane Fonda, who played Lillian Hellman, and Vanessa Redgrave, who played Julia, in the Lake District of England.

  At that stage we had three or four months to go before we were finished, and every time I saw that shot, I cringed. We previewed the film for audiences—no one commented on the barge, which was ominous—then we went to the lab to make the final answer print, which is the reference standard for all subsequent copies of the film. After screening the print for Dougie, Fred asked him, What did you think of the scene on the lake? Marvellous, marvellous! We were so lucky with the weather. Was there anything you'd like to change? Change? No, no! Absolutely marvellous, I just love it. Fred looked at me, I looked at him, and that was that. To this day, if you screen the film, the tip of that camera barge comes up into the frame.

  That was very characteristic of Fred's approach, but for the life of me I couldn't see what advantage there was in having this thing come into the frame. Why did he like it better? He liked it better because … something … I'm still chewing over that one!

  O: I think Coppola has that similar quality of bringing opposites together—the thumb and the forefinger…. The shape of his stories appears classical, yet within them there are things tipping over. He's described himself as the circus ringmaster. I love your story of Coppola getting Mickey Hart and his drummers to watch Apocalypse Now and drum their way live through the whole thing—it's a perfect example of how he gets everyone to participate.

  M: Exactly! From the assistant director's point of view, it's a tremendously wasteful process. Why do you spend all that money and time—for what? You may get something that's a small percentage of that effort.

  I remember talking to Zinnemann about Francis's approach. On The Conversation, he would shoot many takes—sometimes going into the twenties. I told Fred about Francis's reasoning: Yes, actors do get familiar with the scene by Take 7, then you go through a long number of takes where they become bored with it. Eventually, out of that boredom comes a frustration and the scene gets reinvented in an interesting way. You do go through a middle passage, but Take 25 may have something wonderful that's the result of this crucible.

  O: Stanley Kubrick did a lot of that.

  M: Yes, even more—sometimes eighty takes. And Fred said, We're after the same thing, I just like to achieve it earlier … by shooting rehearsals!

  We remained friends after Julia, seeing each other when I was in London or he was
in Los Angeles. He died a few years ago, at almost ninety. 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.

  FAMILY LIFE

  O: It seems to me that many of the conflicts that exist in a great director like Zinnemann exist in many artists of our time. That strange mixture of the radical and the conservative, the documentary and the classical. It's funny, I was telling a friend of mine, David Bolduc, an artist in Canada, about interviewing you, and he said, Well, there's another Walter Murch, you know…there's a wonderful painter called Walter Murch. He knew your dad's work well. He noted that in several ways your father's work as an artist contains those opposites.

  M: Yes, my father was driven similarly by contradictions in his painting. He was a representational painter, so he acknowledged the authority of the object, which definitely was a minority position in the New York art world of the forties and fifties. He was saying something by his choice of objects and how they interacted with one another, and he deliberately chose objects that contra-punted each other in sometimes humorous, sometimes ambiguous ways. Your first impression on looking at any of his paintings, particularly from a distance, is that they have a kind of photographic reality to them.

  Walter Tandy Murch, far left,painting: “…The air that exists between the object and my eye … that's the only thing that I want to paint”—and standing on his canvas to distress it and create texture. Murch remembers his father's canvases being in the halls for weeks with cats, children and visitors walking on them. His father called the distress marks “hooks”—focal points around which he would plan an image.

  The closer you get to the paintings, however, the more they completely fragment. If you get close enough and look at any square inch of them, they look like Jackson Pollocks, with all kinds of drippy paint techniques. He would even stub his cigarettes out in paintings. You can see the fragments of tobacco covered over with oil paint. Or he'd put a painting down and set cans of paint on it, so you see the rings of the cans on the canvas. Or he would stand on a painting, and grind dirt into it.

  Before he ever started on a painting, the canvas would have to go through a period of abuse. We lived in an old apartment on Riverside Drive in New York, and the long hallway of the apartment was frequently carpeted in unpainted canvases for weeks at a time. The life of the apartment, with cats and people and kids, would just continue. People would be tramping back and forth on the canvases, accidents would happen, things would get spilled on them. Then he would go through them and find the most interesting section of—

  O: Distress.

  M: Distress, right! Then he'd put that up on the easel and on top of that he'd paint these realistic still lifes. But somehow the ghosts of those random events would work their way into the objects. He called those distress marks “hooks.” A canvas for him, without that distress, was a canvas that had no hooks on it and without them the image was in danger of simply sliding off the canvas. But if these unplanned events were already on the canvas, they provided focal points around which pictorial events could happen—even though it all looks very deliberately planned.

  So the distressing was there right from the beginning and it continued all the way through the process of painting.

  O: It seems to me that you as an editor are dealing with a similar blending of the rough, raw material you've assembled and the formal shape it needs to reach at some stage within the work. You have to order it in some way, in spite of the fact that you've got forty thousand fragments and miscues, and somehow also keep that dangerous element in the film.

  M: You can't be completely open to outside influence, because then everything falls apart, it doesn't have any spine, it can't endure. But if you're not open to any outside influence, then your work is in danger of being too hermetically sealed, trapped within a preexisting vision that renders it ultimately not lifelike, in the deepest sense.

  O: Your father clearly seems to have had an influence on you, in terms of the kind of artist you've become. Did you respond to the example of him as an artist?

  M: He certainly showed me that it was possible to live a life of both order and excitement, as an artist, and be a good father and husband. He worked at home, so when I came back from school every day, there he was, painting away. I went through a period in my life where we were comparing dads at school. The other kids would say, My dad runs an office. Or, My dad drives a truck. My dad runs a big piece of machinery. My dad is the head of a corporation—the implication being that the kid could go into the office and use all the staplers or ride the truck: there were fringe benefits to having dads. I kept thinking, My dad works at home. There is no office…. Of course there were huge benefits—but I saw that only later.

  And it certainly had an influence on me—I guess what Rupert Sheldrake would call morphic resonance. If only because that's the world I grew up in, and you tend to perpetuate something of that in your own life.

  My father came from a musical family in Toronto. His mother, father, and three brothers were musicians, professional and amateur, and there was the assumption that everyone in the family would be musical. He played the violin until his teenage years, and he was good enough that he was on the radio in Toronto in the 1920s. But it wasn't him, and he went through a period in his late teens when he didn't know what he was going to do. His mother observantly suggested art school. So he went to the Ontario College of Art. Took one step across the threshold, breathed in the atmosphere of turpentine and pigments, and thought, This is it! There was no question from then on. It's probably a unique example in the history of twentieth-century art of a painter who became a painter because his mother suggested it. But she was right.

  O: Are your father's aesthetics something you feel close to? Or that you needed to react against?

  M: No. Very close. He painted still lifes, and when you went into his studio, the little models, the objects themselves, were probably two feet away from him. But he tended to paint them as if they were monumental. Even though the paintings themselves are small, you get the sense of a monumentality to the objects in them. I think that was a result of his keen awareness of space. Even though in this case the space was only two feet.

  The two Murches at work: Walter Tandy Murch in New York at the easel and Walter Scott at his Avid in California. This is a customized setup using an architect's table so Walter Murch can stand. The Radio, 1947, oil on canvas, Walter Tandy Murch, and The Lightbulb, oil on canvas, 1961. overleaf, The bomb from Hitchcock's Sabotage, 1936, a film based on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.

  He said to me once, I don't paint the object, I paint the space between my eye and the object: that space contains the object the way the mould of an object contains the object. I am painting space and I am also constructing something on a two-dimensional piece of canvas that has its own dynamics, irrespective of the objects that are being painted.

  And that's exactly the way I think about sound recording. If I go out to record a door-slam, I don't think I'm recording a door-slam. I think I am recording the space in which the door-slam happens.

  O: It's the context for that noise.

  M: Yes. I put it in a context. And try to have that context work within the implied space of the image, and also the larger implied space of the story.

  THE UNANTICIPATED COLLISIONS OF THINGS

  O: As an editor you, like your father, appear to be very traditional, classical, and yet you're constantly celebrating the new technical possibilities of your craft— whether it's digital or something else. You're always interested in the new. Especially in this time when we are straddling film and digital techniques, what you call “the double-chandelier phase”—half gaslight, half electricity. And yet earlier, you said we're still in the Middle Ages as far as film is concerned, we're only halfway there.

  M: Well, the Middle Ages was a time of great innovation. Technology is certainly in a period of transition, and you have to hold on to some of the ol
d things because that's the only way you can do it right now. Yet you have to welcome in the new, whether you like it—which I do—or not.

  Also, interesting things frequently result from hybridization, awkward though they may sometimes be at first. To many people in Europe—in France particularly—English is an awkward language. It's the bastard child of the Romance and the Germanic languages and has elements of both in almost equal proportion. Yet to those who love the English language, its particular strength is that very historical hybridization. You can choose to tilt your style towards the short, single-syllable, Germanic, Celtic end of things, as Hemingway did, or you can tilt it, the way Henry James did, towards the Romance-language roots. And you can vary it as you will.

  Obviously there are frustrations in hybridization, but at the same time there's an incredible richness that comes from the unanticipated collisions of things. On a day-to-day working basis, for instance, my photo-board system gives me visual juxtapositions that I find very provocative.

  O: When did you conceive of the idea of using photo boards?

  M: On The Conversation, in the early seventies. Personal computers didn't exist then but I had index cards, which are a simple form of database. But writing out the details of each shot took more time than I wanted. I thought, Wouldn't it be nice if I could attach a little frame of the shot, in the upper corner of the card, to remind me. I never carried the idea further, but it occurred to me then. I didn't start the process of using photos until I worked on The Right Stuff in the early eighties.