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“I find it interesting on every film to try and shift some variable of the technology which also forces me to re-examine the way I work.”
eyes and ears
Award-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch reveals some of the tricks of his craft to Quentin Falk
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Photos top: Walter Murch at work; above: a scene from Apocalypse Now; opposite page: the poster image for The English Patient
You’d think Walter Murch had seen and heard it all. As the industry’s most acclaimed film editor and sound man – curiously, the hyphenate is still very rare – his 30-year career would seem to have encom- passed every variety of moving image and auditory challenge.
But that was before a 17-second long VHS was mailed to the man who has put his award-winning mark on films like Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ghost and The Conversation.
The short tape was famously his- torical footage from a Kinetoscope made by Edison in 1894 showing his assistant William Dickson playing
a violin into a large recording horn. More remarkably, in that same package sent to Murch by the head archivist of Film & TV at America’s Library of Congress was a two-and-a-half minute long audio cassette.
This was the purported record- ing on cylinder of that late 19th Century filmed session at Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey studio which had been tracked down and eventually retrieved after eagle-eyed perusal of the Edison database; more specifically, a quaintly-titled sub-section called, ‘The Inventory of Broken Things’.
Murch’s Mission Improbable, “for fun and love”, was to try and
bring that century-old session at Edison’s legendary Black Maria – a large hut covered in tarred paper – back in sync.
Already hard at work on the Apocalypse Now restoration (now known as Redux), Murch “loaded in the tape and the cassette and spent the morning collapsing the image because we think it was photographed somewhere around 40 frames per second.”
The sound and the picture were both digitised with the result that film was rendered normal speed. It was then a question of trying to find various sync points with the music.
Some four hours later – and with Murch still feeling a bit guilty because he was ‘moonlighting’ (“actually sunlighting,” he laughs) from Coppola’s project – the result was suddenly the first-ever piece of synchronised sound for a movie... by about 10 years.
“When I was down to the last sock in the bottom drawer of this whole effort I finally got some-