Walter Murch

It’s been my good fortune to look over the shoulder of a film editor on several occasions and learn a little about what this utterly vital but slightly arcane craft does in assembling a film.  Most of the occasions when I could eavesdrop were in the making of documentary or industrial films, and yet I still got some sense about how decisions about apparently trivial matters—just where, within a framework of a few seconds, a scene should end; just when music should come in or drop out; how to choose among several apparently identical takes—could be enormously influential in shaping a film (for good or ill).

     I come somewhat late to The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Knopf, 2002), for which Michael Ondaatje gets the authorial credit, but since Murch speaks at least half the words transcribed in the book, I take it to be a joint project.  Better than not getting to it at all, though; it’s fascinating and informative.  Ondaatje is a novelist, memoirist, and poet, fiercely intelligent and knowledgeable about film, in part because he’s made a couple of small documentaries, in part because he was apparently closely involved in the film version of his best-known novel, The English Patient (1996),  on which Murch did the film editing and the re-recording mix. 

     Murch got into the business through film school at the University of Southern California (along with fellow student George Lucas; Francis Coppola was at UCLA, across town, at the same time).  Murch started out in sound mixing and design, then worked into film editing; with connections like he had, not to mention the quality of his efforts, he didn’t have much trouble getting assignments.  What impressed me about his answers to Ondaatje’s (always informed and interesting) questions was how carefully he seems to have thought through every dimension of the craft, and having done so thought through it once again.  The book is illustrated with all manner of stills which demonstrate what he’s talking about, and there is a lot of detail about why this choice or that choice was made, what they hoped to achieve with it, unintended results they also got, and so forth.  You have to have a fairly strong film jones to find this stuff absorbing for more than 300 pages, but if you fit the bill, you should love it.  Stuff on The Conversation (1974), a film which Coppola threw in between the first two Godfather films, is especially good; after thirty years, I know now why an apparent cheat in that film (from “He’d kill us if he got the chance” in an early scene to “He’s kill us if he got the chance”) is not cheating at all, and the film completely changes for me.  Murch also got the task, both intimidating and enviable, of doing the 1998 re-edit on Touch of Evil (1958) using the fifty-eight-page memo Welles prepared after being allowed to see the studio’s cut—one time only—before they completely removed him from any authority over the film.  Priceless.