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thing. It was like finding that last piece of the jigsaw which makes the puzzle complete. It was a very satisfying ‘clunk’ feeling of something engaging with itself after 106 years.
“Their’s had been probably the first time human beings had ever confronted the issue of taking a motion picture photograph, recording a sound of the same event and then trying to fuse them.
“As we all know from working in film, it remains a perplexing issue even today. We’re still frequently
scratching our heads saying, ‘Oh, is this 30 fps, with pull-down or non- drop? Is it NTSC or PAL or 24fps? There are still so many variables. Things can easily drift out of your control. Edison and Dickson proba- bly assumed that because life is in sync, their work would be too. Of course, it’s so much more compli- cated than that.”
Sitting in London where he’s currently working on Anthony Minghella’s latest film, Cold Mountain, Murch recalls that morning’s work back in Northern California with a disarming mix- ture of awe and ordinariness.
“Always interesting to listen to”, Michael Ondaatje writes with some understatement of New York-born Murch whom he first met while they were filming his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient.
In a fascinating series of tran- scripts, collected together as The Conversations (Bloomsbury), the author becomes rather more effusive: “He is a true oddity in the world of film. A genuine Renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with filmmaking and his whole generation of filmmakers.”
That generation includes the slightly older Coppola and George Lucas, who was Murch’s
classmate at USC’s film school. So it’s not really surprising that his first feature steps were taken with them after having first worked as a film editor on edu- cation films and documentaries. Although he’d studied both editing and sound at school, it was with the latter skill he got his first break in 1969 on Coppola’s The Rain People. It would be another five years before he received joint credits – and his first for film editing – on the same director’s bugging master- piece, The Conversation.
Murch’s aural contribution, effectively as ‘sound designer’, helped him win a pair of BAFTAs in 1974, a double repeated more than 20 years later at the Oscars for his dual duties on The English Patient.
Did Murch, who will be 60 in July, have, I wondered, a prefer- ence for either craft? “I see one as the flip side of the other’s coin. They are very complementary dis- ciplines. I wish more people would do both as I’m a little lone- ly out here. I think, just by the nature of the work itself, I tend to lose the greatest sense of time and location when I’m doing mix- ing. I can sit down at the desk and you can tap me on the shoulder 16 hours later, and say, “Walter, it’s two o’clock in the morning...’ That’s less true when I’m editing.
“I find mixing is more like play- ing a musical instrument when all the elements have been laid out for you, rather like a score and the notes. With a score, it’s marks on a page; in the mixing theatre, it’s the tracks of it you’re going to build. You can work for longer stretches too, whereas with edit- ing it tends to be in shorter bursts.”
Amid all the acclaim and the awards, there has been the odd reverse, notably a less than suc- cessful single directing and co- writing credit, Return To Oz, in 1985. He was fired after five weeks then re-hired three days later following the personal inter- vention of his old friend, George Lucas. Murch describes it as a “tough” and “unyielding” experi- ence, one which, despite later attempts to generate some new projects, he will not, repeat not, now try again.
Editing film and sound remains for him a constantly challenging job with endlessly shifting bound- aries. “Every project you do, and the more worth doing the more unique they are, has a certain genetic code about it.
“In musical terms, it would be a conductor confronting a work that’s never been performed before, trying to find out the tonal and temporal signatures. The
thing we have in editing is this tremendous compression the film goes through. Invariably the assembly of the film is much longer than we want the finished version to be.
“What you remove and why you remove it is the challenge of being a surgeon on a form of life or organism you are as yet unfa- miliar with. The challenges are always fresh, and seem each time to be as present as they were the first time.
“I am always interested in new technology. For Cold Mountain, we’re editing on Final Cut Pro, the Apple editing system, which has never been used before on a film this big.
“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. Also, I hope to push the art and science of what we do a few inches further along.”
Aside from his fascinating reflections in the Ondaatje book, Murch has also written his own respected volume on the art of editing. I asked him
to reflect on the divergence between his two skills.
“When I migrate back and forth between the two, at a certain stage I’m doing both things. When I come to editing from mixing, I’m always startled at the brutality of the editing process. We hold an image on screen and then we snatch it away in-the-blink-of-an-eye and replace it with something else.
“That happens occasionally with sound but mostly you’re doing more subtle transforma- tions. Your movements as a mixer are more fluid; with editing you are hitting things harder. In a sense mixing is the opposite of the blink-of-an-eye.”
Murch called his book, In The Blink Of An Eye. Could he sum up the art of mixing in a similarly snappy title? He thinks about it for a while, then smiled a little ruefully. For the first time, he’s stuck for an answer.
◆ Walter Murch gave an illustrat- ed talk about his career at BAFTA at the end of May.
JIM SHERIDAN’S MONTAGE Part of the Filmstock International Film Festival Luton // 1-15 June 03
For our inaugural Montage season we welcome acclaimed director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father) who will curate a season of his favourite films and influences to screen alongside his own work.
An interview with Jim Sheridan will open the festival on Sunday 1st June
Please contact us for further details:
01582 752908 or contact@filmstock.co.uk
www.filmstock.co.uk
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