Walter Murch
Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murchis an American film editor and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins, he has been referred to as "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEditor
Date of Birth12 July 1943
CountryUnited States of America
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There's a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage - every voyage is a story. I wonder if film would have been invented without the train.
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There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.
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Film is really a kind of theater of thought. You're watching people think in movies, which is the fascinating and completely unique experience of film versus other kinds of theater, where the thoughts have to be expressed in words. In film, of course you have words, but mostly you have thought and attitude, and that attitude is mostly expressed in the eyes of the characters.
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Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.
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One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
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My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.
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I would be happy if they just gave out nominations and there weren't any Oscars. But winning them is definitely an experience - to get up there and make a speech. Every film is hard work, and a few lucky people do get Oscars for what they do, and it's recognition for all that hard work on a certain level.
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I re-mastered 'The Conversation' a few years ago for DVD. 'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way. Truth be told, I couldn't.
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Blinking is some way of tabulating - a kind of carriage return, click, or save to disk - that helps the process of 'Okay, now change the subject.' Every time you move your eyes, there's an interruption in the visual field - you go momentarily blind when your eyeballs are moving.
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Sound is a huge influence on peoples' attention.
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I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery.
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Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.
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If you want to freak your cat out, stare at your cat. If you want to reassure your cat, stare at your cat, then very deliberately and very slowly blink. Like that. The cat will also deliberately, slowly blink back at you, and I almost guarantee that she will start to purr. That's a feline reassurance.
avid cut edited final interested machine using
'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way.