I just left the Telluride tribute to the master editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, The English Patient). So much wonderful filmmaking knowledge came from his lips. If it were not prohibited to record these sessions, I would have podcast the Q&A. But I’ll share the highlights I found most meaningful.
As an editor, the hardest thing to do is to remember the emotional resonance of a scene after viewing it day after day. To maintain that emotion, when Murch first sees the shots he’ll be working with, he writes in free association anything he thinks or feels while watching. He then keeps those notes open as he goes into the process of editing those shots over and over again into various scenes.
Murch is always looking for the visceral moment. He shared a quote about how if the novelist is smarter than the novel, they should move on to another profession. The work should always be beyond the reach of intellect. One way of identifying these visceral moments is to watch a shot and stop it at a moment he strongly reacts to. He then marks the time code and watches the shot again. If he hits stop again and it’s at the exact same spot in the time code, he knows there’s something there to be included in the film.
As any good editor, Murch’s thinking wanders back and forth between the technical and the creative. The result of one study he’s done across many films shows an average action sequence having a minimum of fourteen different camera angles, while dialogue scenes have about four. Four camera angles in an action sequence is too slow, and fourteen angles during dialogue would distract from what anybody’s saying.
In speaking about the various modes of viewing film now (from theater to video iPod), Murch defined the “cinematic experience.” At home, the viewer is king and the television is a jester coming into the room; if the king doesn’t like what he sees, off with the jester’s head. However, the cinematic experience is uncontrollable. The film starts when it starts and ends when it ends and the viewer has no control. It’s also collaborative viewing where one person’s laughter in one corner of the theater can infect the experience of everyone else. In short, the cinematic experience, Murch said, fulfills an innate human desire to open one’s mind to the uncontrollable.
A good film must also have its own unique “grammar.” It can’t feel like anything seen before. Although Murch may have opinions regarding a scene, he’s very careful not to pass judgment until he’s intimate with the work as a whole and has learned the language of that particular film.
Finally, in a serendipitous moment, Murch screened the scene in The Godfather when Woltz awakes to the severed horse head in his bed. This has always been my favorite blend of film and score, which I’ve attributed in the past to the composer, Nino Rota. However, the music in that scene was originally much too over the top and gave away the horror too early. So Murch took a solo trumpet piece Rota had written for elsewhere in the film, and blended it with the original music Rota intended for the scene. That’s the piece that’s in the film as we know it. Who knew?
