Walter Murch

With a filmography consisting of such celebrated films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The English Patient, Walter Murch has worked with some of the film industry's most talented directors-and stood alongside each one as an equal collaborator in the success of these films. His careful rendering of image and sound (often simultaneously) proves his definition-and understanding-of cinema goes deep beneath the surface. He displays an unerring ability to capture each movie moment with honesty and realism; with each gesture displaying a powerful emotion and each sound furthering the story. With eight Oscar nominations to his credit and three wins-including an unprecedented double Oscar in 1996 for editing and sound on The English Patient-no one could argue that Walter Murch is not one of the all-time great masters of his craft.

In this conversation with MM, he talks about the digital revolution that has taken over his craft, the benefits and challenges of having a dual career and how his experiences on Apocalypse came to define his career.

Jennifer Wood (MM): You just released the second edition of your classic editing book, In the Blink of an Eye. There have been a number of changes in your craft since the book's initial release in 1995, most notably the use of digital technology. Previous to 1995, what were your own experiences with digital technology?

Walter Murch (WM): I'd done The Godfather trilogy-which is all three of The Godfather films together. We did that on the Montage system, which was an analog system. It used many, many, copies of VHS tapes all controlled by a computer, but the image itself was analog. I'd done a few music videos using the Avid and I'd done a montage sequence for a film using an Avid. I'd been an interested observer of all of this since the '60s when I saw the first CMX system that was capable of doing five minutes of film at a time in black and white.

MM: But The English Patient was the first feature film you edited digitally?

WM: It actually started out on film and we switched to digital-probably the only time that ever happened-and now, obviously, nobody will ever do that again. It was quite a thing to, in the middle of shooting, switch from one system to another.

MM: You were in California doing the editing at this time. The challenges of learning of a new system coupled with the fact that you were 7,000 miles away from the director, Anthony Minghella, must have been posed a number of challenges.

WM: The learning curve was very steep, which in computer language is very good. I was up and running in a couple days-not operating at maximum efficiency, but operating. Edie Blyman, my assistant, had experience on the Avid so if I had any questions I'd just lean around the corner and ask her.

MM: This may seem like an archaic question, but as someone who's had great success editing both digitally and mechanically, what are the advantages and drawbacks to digital?

WM: As a complete system-meaning you shoot a film and 10 months later you have the film in theaters-it takes about the same time now as it did then. Our schedules haven't really changed that much. It takes a certain amount of organizational and human resources to get film into the Avid. Once it's in there and cataloged and databased, then certain parts of the editing can go much faster, but then you have to get it out at the other end and that also takes a certain amount of time. When you're editing film alone, you look at dailies and you can come right back to the room and start editing the very footage that you just looked at. And as soon as you've edited it, you can take it immediately to a screening room and look at it. In other words, there's always a lag with the Avid because the film needs to be telecined and then digitized before you can cut it. And then once having cut it, if you want to look at it in a projection room, you have to conform the film. So certain parts of the process-the part that I concern myself with-move much faster if you're working in a completely digital world. But if you look at the whole system from the outside, there isn't really that much of a gain.

Because we have to operate simultaneously in the digital world and in the analog world, we hire just as many, if not more, people. The advantage, of course, is great flexibility-in the middle of a cut you can suddenly switch from reel six to reel four and then go to reel five and jump around, You can save those versions and then create a whole other version. You can go instantly where the spirit wills you, whereas with film, once you've started on editing a reel you really have to stick to that and get it done; it doesn't make any sense to jump around. You can follow your creative impulses with digital, as there's less furniture to move around.

I was always a believer in following that little voice that whispered 'why don't you try it this way?' It just meant in the old days that I had to push furniture around to do it, and it took a little more time to file the trims and to put away all those rolls and bring in the rolls for the next reel, but I would do it. The disadvantage of digital systems, from a creative point of view, is that it is so effective at random access that it inhibits the browsing that you had to do by necessity if you were editing on a KEM or a Steenbeck. By browsing I mean putting up a 10-minute roll of film and scanning down through the roll to find something that you wanted. Invariably, when I would do that in the old days, I would find three or four other things that would flick by that would be different or in some cases better than the very thing that I was looking for.

MM: Do you think that it's a good idea, then, for those who are just starting out in the craft to learn to edit mechanically, then advance to digital?

WM: Probably not. It is a disadvantage, but there are so many other advantages to digital and the whole purpose of being young and starting a new technology is that you're going to discover things that I never knew. So if it happens that you edit a film normally, it's not a bad experience to have under your belt. On the other hand, the wind is blowing so irrevocably in the digital direction, I think you just have to be aware that the creative process should push you in directions not necessarily that you want to go but that you need to go. Doing what you want is not always the best thing. What I've done to compensate is come up with techniques such as printing a frame or two or three from every setup and mounting those on boards and putting those boards up on the walls of my room as I cut a film. In a sense, that compensates for the lack of browsing because I'm browsing with my eyes over these images always. They're always saying 'Don't forget about me.'

Eventually, we will find the digital solution to my problem. But it's a fairly deep problem because it relates to the way images are played on a computer. When you thread up a roll of film on the KEM and run at high speed, you're actually seeing every frame of the film as it goes by very fast, whereas if you ask any of the digital systems to go fast, they do it by deleting material. If you want it to go 10 times normal speed, it will show you one frame out of every 10, so you're just not seeing 90 percent of the material. It's a very different kind of experience-and not a pleasant one for me at least. That's why I don't browse so much in the digital world-it just isn't as rich an experience.