The Godfather of cinema sound and picture editing shares the secrets of his groundbreaking work.
For Walter Murch, whose work editing sound or picture includes The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, the jury is out on the impact of AI.
“AI is good at doing the grunt work but you have to know something about the language of cinema - about what the film is trying to say - in order to modify and improve it and change certain mistakes,” he says.
The three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker says he was consulted by Google over a decade ago to help build a computer program that would automatically edit home movies into polished highlights.
“Now there is the option of throwing material at an AI and asking it to create a first assembly,” he says, “but that’s one of probably several different pathways.”
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The 80-year-old would be revered among professionals were his output confined to sound mixing on The Godfather (Parts I and II plus editing part III) alone but he has achieved so much more.
“Editing was noisy, complicated, time-consuming and repetitive. Like surgery without anaesthetic” Walter Murch
For pioneering the use of 5.1 sound on Apocalypse Now, he became the first person to be credited as a sound designer. He co-wrote THX-1138, the feature debut of George Lucas. He is the only artist ever to win Oscars for both film editing and sound on a single film (The English Patient, 1996). Students and pros alike regard his 1992 essay ‘In The Blink of An Eye’ as the bible of editing. Directors from Francis Coppola to Steven Soderbergh recognise Murch as a sound and image guru.
Now he has made a new documentary Her Name is Moviola, about the machine on which classic Hollywood movies were cut. In it he demonstrates the chaos of the cutting room but also how the art of editing was forged by slicing and splicing frames of celluloid.
“Physically cutting film was like blacksmithing in comparison to digital,” Murch said at Sheffield Documentary Festival where the film premiered. “Editing was noisy, complicated, time-consuming and repetitive. Like surgery without anaesthetic.”
Murch learned to cut on a Moviola which “like a lathe” demanded that the user remain standing up. Even when digital arrived in the mid-90s he bought an architect’s table to put the keyboard on so he could continue to stand.
“Somehow it got into my DNA,” he said. “Your whole body is involved in a kinaesthetic movement of rhythm. The finished film is a kind of frozen dance or choreography of all those decisions.
“Then again, it’s a personal thing. I know many talented editors who wouldn’t dream of standing up.”
Murch has physically cut film on flatbed KEMs and Steenbecks and used all the main NLE software including Blackmagic Resolve and Avid, tending to prefer Adobe Premiere.
He subscribes to the view of The Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming who said ‘good editing makes a film look well directed but great editing makes the film look like it wasn’t directed at all’.
“He means that if it’s good you admire the craft but you are aware that you’re looking at a crafted object, whereas great editing transports you and you are simply there with the events that are unrolling on the screen,” he says.
For Murch, editing is part mechanical, part intuition, and part accident. “I can’t tell you how many times over 60 years that things just seemed to fall into place almost accidentally. When that happens, I realise it’s much better than anything that I could have consciously put together. As editors, we live for those moments and preserve them.”
Discovering a passion
Born in New York the son of a Canadian painter, Murch was aged 10 when he encountered a tape recorder at a friend’s house.
“It was love at first sight. A fever came over me. Nobody had to explain that you could record sound on it and then cut the sound up into little pieces and paste them together backwards, upside down, or play the sound through the bass. I discovered the fact that you could manipulate reality in a sort of frenzy.”
In Paris studying art and literature in 1963, Murch found himself at the height of the Nouvelle Vague of cultural experimentation. “You couldn’t be a young person in Paris at that time without getting infected with the film virus,” he says.
Back in the US, he studied film at USC and met Coppola who invited Murch to mix the sound on the 1969 film The Rain People at his new production company American Zoetrope. Located in San Francisco, Zoetrope was inspired by the French new wave to break from the rigid rules of Hollywood’s studio system. Its first production was THX 1138 (1971). Two years later Murch was the sound editor on Lucas’ breakthrough movie American Graffiti. In between, he sound-designed The Godfather landing the first of nine Oscar nominations.
“In a fiction film, there is an abundance of interpretation but a paucity of events,” he says. “The events are just those that are in the screenplay. Every lineup dialogue is repeated dozens of times. A character saying this line with a certain inflection from a certain camera angle with certain focal length. The editor’s job is to find your way through those slightly different shadings of interpretation.
“Documentaries are the opposite. There’s an abundance of events. In general, when something happens, it only happens once from that angle. The editor’s task is to find their way through this particular maze. What events are we going to show, in what order and then because this moment only happens once, how do we present it in the clearest, most understandable and emotionally engaging way?”
Technique and innovation
“It’s the editor’s job to anticipate what the audience wants to see next - even if they don’t know it yet”
Murch’s solution was to develop a technique for non-linear editing decades before digital. It is a technique he uses on every film to this day and finds it particularly useful for assembling scenes shot with multiple cameras.
“I take four to five representative still frames of every setup [shot],” Murch explains. “I number each one and pin them up on a large board on my wall. Each board holds about 50 photographs. The entire landscape of the raw material is laid out in front of me.”
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He evolved the collage to give each card a colour conveying an emotional ‘temperature,’ and a different size and shape suggesting the scene’s role and importance.
“As I’m cutting the scene, I’ll be looking at my monitor and then turn around to see this wall of photographs for the whole sequence. My eye will just magnetically go to some image that seems to be the thing that we would want to go to next. It’s the editor’s job to anticipate what the audience wants to see next - even if they don’t know it yet.”
He notes that many scenes in Coppola’s films are shot as if they were a documentary. The wedding at the start of The Godfather, for instance. The covert recording of a meeting between two people in a crowded square in The Conversation, the ride of the Valkyries attack in Apocalypse Now.
“All are covered by multiple cameras shooting simultaneously. Sometimes the cameras are hidden. The camera is trying to catch the moment. In the edit room, I’m looking for chance juxtapositions to tell the audience what the scene is trying to say.”
More broadly he describes the editorial process in three stages: plumbing, performance and writing.
“Plumbing is simply the workflow,” he says. “In the mid-60s the workflow was pretty well established and stayed the same for the next 30 years. The introduction of digital from the mid-nineties threw that up in the air. On every film now we have a meeting that lasts a week to figure out what the workflow is going to be. You have to make sure the pathway of information is as smooth as possible and nothing gets lost.”
Performance means interpretation. “It involves asking ‘what language does the film want to speak? What’s its rhythmic signature? What is possible in this film which would be impossible in another film, and so on.”
Writing, for an editor, begins when the whole film has been assembled from beginning to end. “Now we ask ‘Does it work?’ and ‘How can it work more effectively?’ We play around with the structure. We search for redundancies. Maybe there’s a scene written to show that a man loves a woman but in the previous scene we know from the looks between the actors that they love each other, so now you don’t need the scene where love is declared.”
Editing is supposed to be an invisible art “but are there times when we’re too invisible?” he ponders. “Maybe there are times when editors should step up and show some of our editorial juggling acts that reveal to the audience that this film is indeed a construction.”
In his new book on filmmaking ‘Suddenly Something Clicked’ (which refers to the first time somebody noticed the sound of spliced frames passing through a projector) Murch says he never stops re-examining his work.
“Rules are useful,” he writes, “but they should be broken at the right moment.”
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