By Quendrith Johnson
Sometimes you forget how intricate filmmaking is based on how easy it all appears on screen. And along comes someone like Oscar winning editor/sound-pioneer Walter Murch who throws light on every aspect that makes cinema loved worldwide. On the nuances of sound design, Murch off-handedly lays down the fundamentals of an art he actually helped shape.
“My mantra is: ‘clarity and density.’ If something in a film is too dense (too rich or intrusive), find a way to clarify it - make it simpler without sacrificing subtlety. If it is too clear, too simple, find a way to ‘densify’ it. Then search out the correct balance of these two values (clarity and density) which will be slightly different for every movie, and slightly different for every scene in every movie.”
Then Murch gives away the secret formula for filmmaking without a moment’s hesitation: “I have a list of six criteria for what makes a good cut, they are hierarchically arranged – most important at the top - and it is important to hold on to the values at the top of the list but, if necessary, jettison the values at the bottom of the list. Emotion is the top, Story next, Rhythm next.”
With a resume replete with American Cinema Classics, his career began at the University of Southern California where he met buddy George Lucas.
From there, Murch went on to the epoch-shaping sound design of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now," for which he won an Academy Award, and is among a rarified few who have won Oscars in different categories in the same year.
“I met George at USC when we were both film students there. We had heard about Francis (Ford Coppola) at UCLA, he was a couple of years ahead of us. He’d done this incredible hat trick of not only making a commercial feature film (“You’re a Big Boy Now”) but turning that film in for his degree.
From Lucas to Coppola, Murch's innovative explorations in film sound and editing have informed much of Francis Ford Coppola's work from "Rain People" to "The Conversation" to "The Godfather" and sequels.
For "'Apocalypse Now,” Francis had four basic things to say about what he wanted for the sound, two technical and two artistic aspects. One, he wanted the sound to surround the audience - the helicopters in the film should be able to fly all around the audience, so we needed to have more than one surround track Two, he wanted the explosions to be felt as well as heard. So we needed to create a system that would get down into infrasound frequencies, to feel these sounds in your gut.
That basically is the recipe for what has become the standard film sound format, 5.1 sound. Artistically, Francis wanted the sounds to be faithful to the reality of the war: the weapons should be true to the period, a real AK-47 -- not just some sound library gun -- and then he wanted the overall sound of film to start realistic and get stranger and stranger, more metaphysical, as the film progressed."
"At the time we started making the film, there had not yet been any big film about the Vietnam War." Murch revealed, "it took us so long to make the film, that by the time we finished “Apocalypse” “Deerhunter” had come out. We were very aware of the responsibility. It was also probably the first, and maybe only, large-scale war film involving Americans that did not have the cooperation of the US Military. So tanks, helicopters, and all of the hardware was courtesy of the Philippine government.
"What was curious though," he recounts of being on location for "Apocalypse Now" is, "that when word got out, that it was being made without cooperation of the US government, a lot of veterans who had fought in Vietnam -- who had gone AWOL or missing in action, who were living quiet lives -- they came and started advising...”
When Murch collected two Oscars for film editing and sound mixing one evening in 1997 for "The English Patient" (1996), a collective gasp could be heard not only from members of the one-billion-plus viewing public, but from a few Hollywood insiders as well, those who had no idea who'd pulled off this double dip.
For "The English Patient" (Kristin Scott Thomas), directed by Anthony Minghella, he not only won Best Sound and Best Editing, but accolades from BAFTA and others. This adds to Walter Murch’s place in film history as writer and designer of its sound montage for George Lucas's first film "THX 1138". (He also lent his skills to all three of Coppola’s “Godfather” films, "American Graffiti," "The Right Stuff," as well as two films for Jerry Zucker: "Ghost" and "First Knight.”)
In 2004, working again with Minghella in both disciplines, he received a ninth Academy Award nomination for Film Editing for "Cold Mountain," which also received BAFTA nominations for Best Sound Mixing and Film Editing. Murch also edited "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Romeo is Bleeding," "Ghost," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Kathryn Bigelow's "K-19 The Widowmaker," and "Jarhead" for Sam Mendes.
"In the Blink of an Eye” is his seminal book on film editing. “The ‘blink’ is a metaphor for the ‘cut,’ a moment of transition from one state of mind to another,” he notes. He is also the subject of Michael Ondaatje’s “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing”
More recently, the multi-talented editor/filmmaker directed an episode of "Clone Wars" for Lucas Animation, edited the 2012 HBO feature "Hemingway and Gellhorn" for Phil Kaufman, which received an EMMY nom for editing. In 2013, Walter Murch edited "Particle Fever," a feature documentary on CERN's Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson has been in the news lately as the fabled “God particle” said to unite the Universe as some kind of primordial ‘subatomic building block.’
Scientific pursuits have ignited the imagination of Walter Murch since boyhood. Suffice it to say, he is always making discoveries. When he directed “Return to Oz,” he made a connection between L. Frank Baum and Nikola Tesla.
"Tesla was a big presence at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, where Tesla demonstrated his invention of alternating current; it was a triumph that got him selected as the person to install generators at Niagara Falls sending the first electricity long distance to New York City. L. Frank Baum lived in Chicago at the time and took his kids to the fair, where they must have seen Tesla. Tesla was called a wizard at the fair, and he lived up to that name. It is very likely that the Emerald City was based on the World’s Fair and the Wizard was based on Tesla."
Incidentally, both Baum and Tesla were born in the year 1856, which makes Murch’s take on the connection even more interesting since it was the Age of Wizards - Edison, Tesla, Baum.
Walter Murch turns 71 on July 12. Who knows what the film editor/sound designer/filmmaker will do next? Chances are, it will be an eye-opener.
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