Craft Summit 2017: The Art of Editing with Walter Murch

thank you very much just credit where credit is due we are many was made made by my brother Amir Amir ani I was just a tea boy under-production it took him nine years to make but we are as a company very proud of we are many so where do we begin for start let me tell you with the crazies rainy weather outside and the political tsunami sweeping across the country within these solid walls we're going to give you something very stable and very strong where do I begin with a Walter Murch master class let's go back to June 2013 hussein crumb boy the lovely programmer at the time had found out that somewhere in a cutting room in New York Walter Murch is editing a film called particle fever a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider and discovery of the Higgs boson being a huge Walter Murch fan he went into a hot frenzy he immediately selected the film and invited Walter and the team Marc Levenson the director to Sheffield for the world premiere of particle fever he then once that went one step further and organized the special screening of Apocalypse Now and also put on a master class at The Crucible Theatre so for me Sheffield 2013 was in fact not the documentary festival it was the Walter Murch festival particle fear had standing ovations and went on to win the audience prize and it went on to have an amazing journey through the world more accolades and even did business at the box office the masterclass that voted it remains to this state with the highest number of hits and the most popular video on the doc first YouTube channel so welcome to Walter Murch the sequel or part two now I know sequels get a bad name is just that what kind of a lame effort to cash in on sort of franchise but if you know Walters work The Godfather and Apocalypse Now which incidentally always score very high on the greatest film lists always in the top five top ten 50 there up there the film aficionados sometimes claim Godfather 2 is even better than Godfather 1 based on that Walter Murch part 2 at Sheffield now I have been a student at the Walter Murch University for the last four years when I did my intro to his master class at Sheffield in 2013 I rehearsed my intro in the shower at 5 a.m. over and over again and I thought I'd nailed it I thought I'd completely captured as much as it's possible Walter Murch in a five-minute intro it had information it had talked about his awards it had some laughs it also had political commentary I now realize I was just scratching the surface of what Walter Murch is you know his work you know his place in kind of the folklore the mythology of great movies but for me for all of us the World Wide Web is a resource of information and knowledge and crazy cat videos but for me www is the wonderful world of Walter he is not just the master film editor a great sound designer incidentally he invented the term sound design and the credit and the actual job for which he won an Oscar by the way of my introduction had a mistake in 2013 I'm here to correct it I said two Academy Awards he's won three Oscars three BAFTAs too many nominations to mention I think a couple of his films with Palme d'Or tie no chance sounds like a shopping miss get me a couple of Oscars some BAFTAs and while you're at it get me a couple of Palm doors but Walter is a writer translator amateur astronomer historian he's an amazing human being he's an incredible grounded person I am honored and privileged to call him my friend my guru my master he's an amazing father and a beautifully loving husband and I'm glad to say Agee his wife is here I'm grateful for many things she's done as so strong and stable please welcome mr. Walter Murch to part two the master class [Applause] thank you I'm a little microphone challenged can you hear me all the way back there sure cuz I don't have a that one thank you while we're doing this remember after Godfather two was finished but it wasn't in the theaters we had a screening of it and Agee my wife was at the screening and Francis said to Aggie what do you think and she said it's it's a better film that Godfather one but it won't make as much money so so here we are for part two of the Sheffield Walter Murch maybe it'll be better maybe it won't get as many hits as the previous one so welcome can we fire up the screen here thank you okay I'm I'm aware standing in front of you of the fact that I'm as old as I am just about to turn 74 and thank you and it's also worth mentioning that cinema the way we understand it arguably began sometime in the middle teens of the last century perhaps with this film which set the tone for people going in masses to a something that lasted about 90 minutes long having this transformational experience and leaving the theatre different the way they came in and we are here today almost well more than a hundred years later and in the middle of that roughly 1965 is when Agee and I got married in New York and so just to say that I've been working in cinema for half of the life of cinema is not entirely untrue because we got married and we hopped on a motorcycle you can't see it in this picture and we motorcycle de cross the United States and I went to my first day of film school in September of 1965 so that's a long time but it's also a very short time the first filmmaker who came to talk to us at cinema was this gentleman a filmmaker named King Vidor who was born in 1894 which is also arguably the invention of the caneta scope Edison's machine that you put a nickel in and you watched a little movie and he started making films in 1913 at the age of 18 and he came to our film school when he was as old as I am now and talked to us about his life in film and now I'm here talking to you and that's it you know within the space of two human lifetimes we have the the parentheses that contains the history of motion pictures so it's it's new in human experience all of the other arts that we are involved with painting and music and dance and theater go back to way beyond writing it they are pre historical and cinema is within almost a single human lifetime certainly within two human lifetimes just skipping over this is me a few years after getting going to film school this is editing Apocalypse Now I'm surrounded by sprockets their the the physicality of film in those days was an undeniable fact with which you had to wrestle and this is the guillotine the chopping block on which all editing in the United States anyway was performed its name was the rebus splicer named after Carlos Rivas it was an engineer at MGM in the 1940s and 50s who designed this terrifying object and just before we go any further want to say that motion pictures are not the same as montage and montage which are cousins in Europe call editing in France Italy Spain Poland the word for editing is montage which technically means to build to put something together and in English were hobbled with this phrase to edit which means that there is something that already exists and now we cut it down and of course that's an inherent part of working on a film is cutting it down and modifying it but you have to build it in the first place in order to cut it down and so I prefer the word montage I wish we use that in English but those two things were not born at the same time motion pictures let's say were born in 1894 and they spent this blissful adolescence childhood in a kind of YouTube life of cat videos and kisses and trains arriving at stations before somebody arguably somebody here in England in Bristol I think put the I put these things together and developed continuous action editing which in what began the cinema that's sort of the key invention that allowed what we know is cinema to take off so it's important to remind ourselves that these two things were not born at the same time that montage the the idea of taking disparate pieces filmed at different times and then blending them together into something that gives the illusion of a continuous dramatic reality is something that had to occur to us it was not there in at the beginning August Lumiere famously in 1896 said cinema is an invention without a future precisely because it hadn't occurred to him yet that you could edit it and turn it transform it into something beyond what it seemed at the time take a look at this next clip this is I think a four minute scene from a movie made in 1940 speaking of evolving language because cinema is not only it's a language it's an art and a language but I would say it's a language of languages I don't know what a meta language it it's a language that has different languages within it and I participated in some of the language of cinema for the last 50 years but it's it's evolving it's changing and so it's not for me to stand up here and say this should be the way it is that's it because it it is it's an evolving organic substance that has many different realities talking about what cinema is is like talking about what cooking is or what food is or what cuisine is there all kinds of different things there there are arguably some essential fundamental things about nourishment and cooking that we all want to obey it has to taste good it has to look good and smell good and be nourishing beyond that whatever you want to do and so what I'd like to talk about today is is what what are those core things underneath the the art of cinema that arguably shouldn't be tampered with like in cooking you know nourishing taste good smell good look good so here's I I hope you can hear this in in the back of the theater this is a movie by preston sturges this is the opening of the movie so a wonderful scene four minutes long not a single edit in it and you're not really aware of that fact or of the fact that it the camera is moving in interesting ways the actors are moving relative to the camera but it's all done without much flash in a totally effective way the choreography of their moves and their dialogue and everything is about as perfect as you can get it's a movie that was made 70 by 76 years ago and here this audience here is laughing they're actually talking about things that are sort of germane today in terms of unemployment and the world tearing itself apart and the function of motion pictures what's the value of a motion picture today so it's the the ability that we have now as seen in films like Birdman and/or recent Victoria is to make an entire film without any edits in it is that a valuable thing Kent should we do it obviously we can do it and those films are both good films Hitchcock made a film in the late 1940s rope that as you experienced it had no edits in it Birdman actually also does have edits in it but they're very carefully concealed by digital reweaving across the the actual cuts so I also like to just examine the value of that the cut itself the transition the instant transition from one image to another and it's a paradoxical thing because ostensibly we don't experience that in our normal life we in a sense we wake up in the morning and we take off the the lens cap of sleep and the camera starts turning and it's one continue dolly shot for the next 16 hours and then we we put the lens cap back on and sleep for eight hours at least that's the way it seems the the truth of it neurologically is much more complicated than that but it seems to be a continuous shot so how is it that we can do what we do with motion pictures and cut from the the match in Lawrence of Arabia in Cairo to the Sun arising in the desert we can and not only can we we enjoy it it has a value in itself as wonderful as this scene is to say all movies should be made in one continuous shot every movie from now on should be made like Birdman or Victoria is going to deprive us of one of the essential and unique tools that we have that cinema has afforded human beings as a way of communicating which eita which with each other so it works I think that it works because we're very familiar with this grammar from our dreamland that when we do put the lens cap on the things that unspool in the back of our head are cinematic it would be fantastically interesting if we could go back a thousand years and figure out how what did people do how did they dream back then there are some indications from the Bible and other writings gilgamesh of what dreams were like a thousand two thousand three thousand years ago and as far as we can tell they are sort of cinematic that there are these leaps of imagination and impossible things happen and then suddenly you're somewhere else and something else is happening and so in a sense cinema has taken that the grammar of the dreamscape and externalize dit in a way that we can now manipulate it which I think goes some distance not all the way but some distance to explain how it is that it's possible that we do this and give some indication of the fact that it has this amazing power over us those you know those of you who are parents know that when a child is upset at a movie you can say don't worry darling it's only a movie but it's the same thing when the child wakes up from a dream a nightmare don't worry it's only a it's only a dream it was only it's not real but nonetheless that that gets at the power that it has over the person who is experiencing the movie or the dream and we rarely say don't worry it was only a piece of music or don't worry it was only a painting but as as impressive as those things are they don't have the the kind of obligatory power a very early reviewer of a motion picture back before birth of a nation was looking at a film saying it grabs the emotion like the vise of fate that there somehow is a something that catches your mind and puts it in this grip that it's very hard to break away from so there I'd like to propose two things well two three three things a new idea and two old ideas but you can essentially break down editing into two streams and I'm going to suggest three streams historically there is a classic Hollywood cut which is to cut on matching action and this was precisely because in the early days of motion pictures the people who made motion pictures were nervous about the Edit they didn't know that people could assimilate it that it had to be explained and in Spain and other countries there were in the early days of film there was somebody over to the side of the motion picture silent who was in Spain on splittorff who somebody who explained this is what she's looking at now don't this is her close-up it's not a decapitated head so the the grammar of film was being explained as people were watching the film and so the they cut on matching action where somebody walks and then weave across a room and we find the place to cut to the next angle and sort of duplicate where they were and that somehow gives you this idea and it works of continuous action this is from Sullivan's Travels the film we just looked at they just you know found the matching place coming through the door and it reads as continuous action even though it's not continuous action because they shot that at very different times so the the goal of this is the illusion anyway of physical continuity and in the early days of film this is a very very important important to kind of help people understand how to look at this stuff and it's still important it's it's still important but not as important as it was to begin with the other stream at that time courtesy of Eisenstein and Kuleshov and others is the Soviet method of editing which was the cut was valued for its dialectical opposition I don't have a clip of it but everyone here probably knows the you know the famous Kuleshov experiment of the cut from the man's face to the empty bowl of soup and then back to the face and you now know that he's hungry and or the cut from the same face to the broken doll and then back to the face and now you know he's sad because his daughter is sick person or something like that and the goal of that is two plus four equals ten which is to say the sum of putting these two images together is greater than either one of them alone and without question this is what we do this is extremely valuable and it's part of our toolkit it's it's done more with slightly more sophistication now than it was back then at the beginning but that's part of the evolving language of cinema what I'd like to throw into the mix is another way of thinking about the Edit which is what I call nodal node meaning like I'm not like it like I'm not in a tree that's the place where as the tree is growing where it decides to branch to put a branch out and then the branch decides to put a twig out and then the twig decides to put a leaf out each one of those is marked by a not literally a knot in the wood because that's the place where the genetics of the tree says this would be a good place to branch to change direction and the goal of that hard to put into words I would call it organic musicality the in the sense that putting cinema together we are obeying some of the rules of music except we're doing it with images and in rhythmic sense and obviously sound as well so a little more precision on this if time is moving up I hope you can see it on the back time is moving up the screen there's a certain action that's happening and well I'll run a clip in a second somebody walking away from camera and we have to decide where we're gonna cut it if if we were doing it in the classic Hollywood Way we would have to keep that shot going as until we found a point to link it up kind of like knitting with the next image where somebody was duplicating some aspect of that same action and if there was you know we would just have to keep it going as long as possible knodel is saying you can find a place to cut it that's that little horizontal line before that happens and interrupts the image and graft a new branch on to this part of the tree so this is the not the nodal point the knot point and if if that doesn't convince you for some reason then try someplace earlier or maybe later and again the image here of a branching tree that a film in a sense is is is an organically evolving entity that finds places to organically branch and graft from one concept which is the trunk to another concept which is the branch to another the twig to another the leaf ins and so on so we could do that and maybe another place so you keep on searching for these places the point is that although technically we can cut at any frame you know for running at 24 frames a second every one of those frames is a potential cut point in an organic sense we can't cut at every one of those places that there are places in the shot that I have to do with the internal rhythm of the shot which afford us the point the place to make that transition to whatever the next shot is obviously that depends on what you've chosen from the next shot and how those two concepts work together in the classic Soviet way hopefully that putting those two shots together makes a an idea happen that is greater than the sum of either of those two shots so let me run a clip here this is from the conversation actually the first film that I first feature film that I edited and I'm selecting this just because this is where these ideas began to occur to me so this is gene Hackman and he's in his apartment he's playing the saxophone he's a lonely guy and now he's going to go to work and we watch him as he goes to walks to work so in the shot as Harry is walking away from camera into his laboratory that shot actually went on and he walked into the the caged area where the other fellow is and I could have kept that shot going until he went in and took off his coat but at a certain point that shot is not delivering anything anymore it has delivered what it has to deliver so it's senseless in a dramatic way in or in a musical way to keep going with that shot on the other hand you can't cut too soon because then you haven't really seen enough of this room so the question is where do you cut and let's just look at that cut once the owns again here so it works as a cut and you aren't bored by it because the the tension between what is this shot what am I looking at what am i learning is hopefully just enough so that at the point where you're about to get bored the cut happens and in this particular case that you are probably looking at him as a little figure in the shot and the incoming shot has a point of interest at exactly that same part which is Harry making a gesture with his coat which sort of wipes wipes your attention into the new shot and I mean there's nothing now revolutionary about this this this would in 1940 would probably be very daring as a cut now we're of course we're very used to it in 1972 it was sort of yeah it was thanks to the new wave and everything we were now used to this not completely as I remember as I did that cut I thought can I do this can I get away with this and I did it and yes you couldn't get away with that so one of the great things about working in a film is finding what you can get away with how how spare can you make this moment what impact will you have if you do this or something different and so it's like a huge scientific experiment in terms of human recognition and thought processes and the dance of emotions and how you are both creating and encouraging certain emotions and the result of the experiment is the finished film and then we see how did it work for a large large audience me I Frances has a way of shooting I just add parenthetically since we're here at the documentary festival that he has a way of shooting at times in a very documentary style in the conversation the conversation itself was an event that happened in a real space Union Square in San Francisco with real people who didn't know they were being filmed all of the cameras were hidden cameras and the actors were moving in and out of a crowd of people who were mostly oblivious to the fact that a motion picture was being filmed and he shoots a shot that scene with multiple cameras six I think and every one was slightly different and so to edit that sequence was I had to adopt approach that is very familiar to all of you here which is this is an event and how do we wrangle the various aspects of the coverage for this event into something that is effective and appears to be continuous to the degree that we need continuity and Francis he did the same thing in the in The Godfather the wedding scene in Godfather 1 was a wedding and he just covered it as if he was a documentary filmmaker covering a wedding everyone had identities that they aren't real people in this sense they're actors but the there was no sense where okay here's the camera and now we're going to deliver this this thing inevitably there were key moments that were covered that way but I would say 60% of the wedding in Godfather is a documentary covered it's covered like a documentary and in Apocalypse Now the the helicopter attack on the village the famous Valkyrie scene same thing at an event we was a massive attack by helicopters on a village in Vietnam was designed in the same sense that the wedding and Godfather was designed and then you kind of wound the machine up put six cameras in key positions and said go it lasted about ten minutes and then everything was wound back to the beginning and then the same events happened but the cameras were now in different positions and go and that just kept happening over the course of a week and so there were I don't know forty hours of material at least generated to cover that that material two hundred and eighty thousand thirty five-millimeter feet for that for that scene so I've started working even before I started working in features I worked in some documentaries then I got involved in theatricals and now I'm editing a documentary for tog II and as taki mentioned I edited particle fever which ran here at Sheffield four years ago and but in another sense I've never left documentaries that working on those early Coppola films was foundational in how I approached the material and in a certain sense even though the material I'm working with is theatrical and fictional I treat it emotionally anyway as if it it's a found object that the the material I'm getting oh look there's some material came in I wonder what story we can tell with this material so I I don't treat it in an intentional way here is this moment for exactly this I kind of let my mind loose a little bit when I'm looking at dailies and then planning on how to construct a scene and a certain double-digit percentage of my brain even if it's a theatrical feature is thinking in documentary terms these two fellows are emblematic in a sense of the different approach Copernicus on the one hand and Darwin on the other in in the sense that a feature fella theatrical film with a script is kind of like Copernicus who discovered or revealed the fact that the earth goes around the Sun not vice-versa he didn't generate any new information he relied on sightings that had been done sometimes 2,000 years earlier but he was approaching it in a different way so he was proposing an idea and then seeing if reality would back him up and in that sense a theatrical motion picture which has a script is kind of like that the Copernicus has a theory and now he's using the facts to try to emblem eyes and prove this theory is correct and so we have a script we're gonna shoot this and that the shooting is the experiment and the editing obviously will this work this this is the hypothesis which is the script will can we actually do this not only in terms of the budget and the schedule everything but will our intentions on making this film translate into the theatre with an audience such as we just saw magnificently with Sullivan's Travels at the beginning so on the other hand you have Charles Darwin who traveled around the world for two years on the Beagle collecting data and basically he was shooting his documentary film in a sense collecting data and then he went back to his estate and sifted through that data over the next whatever it was 20 30 40 years coming up with the theory of evolution how did it work what was the process by which this this happened and in that sense that's more like a documentary shoot that we have a lot of data we don't yet know what the story is going to be the hook and who the protagonists are we have maybe we have hunches none of this is exactly 180 degrees opposition between one on the other but but this story evolves out of the material rather than having an idea and forcing the material to conform to the idea that we already have which in rough terms is is what happens in a theatrical and again none of this is as cut and dried black and white as I'm making it out to be as you all as you all know that my my experience is for what it's worth is that at a certain point the process of making a documentary and a theatrical feature are almost identical here we have it we're trying to communicate it in the most in the shortest most effective most intelligible and emotionally rewarding way possible what can we do well let's take that scene and put it earlier because that's important to know oh no but if we do that then hmm that's going to be in trouble oh I have an idea why don't we split it in half and yes that's good and so on getting to that point is very different that you know in a theatrical motion picture we have not a lot of scenic variety but we have a huge variety in terms of the the moments themselves a line of dialogue and I'm not saying anything that's not obvious here a line of dialogue in a feature theatrical is said 4550 times from you know seven takes from this angle seven takes from this angle it takes from this angle to from this angle so the the the the dilemma facing the editor in a feature is what's the best reading of that line or what's the best version of that particular moment given the moments previous and given where we want to be later and we try to thread our way through this vast multiplicity of various shadings of emotions and and facts whereas in a documentary for the most part an event only happens once that line is said by that character only once and the moment the time that he opens the door and it's only from that angle it's only once and we have to make the best of that of what we have on the other hand we probably have many many more events then our gonna wind up in the finished film so the process in the documentary is deciding what we're going to eliminate in terms of actual events rather than mmm I think that line reading is a little soft can we find one where the performance is more edge to it well in documentary usually we don't have that luxury on the other hand we have the luxury of many different events going on which brings me to the present film that I'm working on which I'd like to show brief clip from this is crew 53 as I said tog II I mean Ronny has been working on this since the idea occurred to him in 2009 in our QA we can maybe talk a little bit more about it it in him it involves this man Mohammad Mossadegh who was the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1951 and Time magazine made him Man of the Year because he nationalized the Iranian oil he he was elected on that premise and [Music] British Petroleum or the company that became British Petroleum had the contract for all of the oil coming out of Iran and of course this act of nationalization made the feathers fly he wasn't going to steal the oil he was gonna pay for this but he wanted Iranian control of the oil and the various powers that be did not like that the events came to a head and he got another Time magazine cover in the middle of the troubles that unraveled in 1952 as the result of this his main opposition is a character out of central casting Allen Dulles who was head of the CIA in 1952 and he had various personal animosity toward Mossadegh that had nothing to do with oil or anything but he used those and his his geopolitical ambitions for the Middle East and stability strength instability in in the Middle East to stage a coup against Mosaddegh and against the democratic government of Iran to install this fellow the sha sha la vie of Iran so the the story is a triangle a many-sided triangle but essentially these three characters play the the dominant role and in the tragedy that unraveled itself in the early years of the 1950's and the repercussions of that are hitting the headlines on the newspapers today the the attack on Parliament that happened just a couple of days ago in Iran is arguably a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of what happened in 1953 the the this coup was the first time that the CIA went off campus and destabilized and eliminated a foreign government and it it was so successful a from their point of view it costs a little it was so done so with such subterfuge and achieved the stunning ends that they wanted that this became a model for all of the subsequent CIA operations starting the following year in Guatemala with the government of our bins and going on through Vietnam and Chile and Cuba and on and on a long laundry list so for all kinds of reasons this the the things that led to this event and then the repercussions of this event and the event itself are all fascinating things so why don't we run a short seven minute clip that this is not the film it's not an excerpt from the film it's a kind of starter menu of elements of the film put into a self-consistent format so I should have mentioned prior to that that you know the music there is just usual temp music not indicative of what will finally be there and the key ingredient there is this animation technique which we're using to bridge areas where we have testimony but we don't have archival material the coup itself the attack on Mosaddegh house happened at night and by surprise in secret and there was there is no film of it although we as you can tell we have testimony from this gentleman mu severe on and many other people's about what actually happened and the the film is is being made at a time when the participants in this are still alive many of them they won't be alive in five or ten years and so the film is is going to get them while they still have a story story to tell so I think taggi come on up and let's talk about whatever we have in our remaining minutes how many mean hello how many minutes do we have okay I'm not going to say much because I think it's very important you have a chance to ask questions I will only ask one question and then open it to the room please I have a little jar of Walter Murch fortune cookies and anyone who asked his question will go away one of these are the souvenir and and trust me you'll love these so could you put up the slide one please I could ask questions for a week but I will just ask something about the nature of making a movie for the big screen this is Walter's cutting room in London and when he first set it up with a large monitor there were these two guys on either side could you explain Walter what what's that about and I had the luxury on Francis Coppola film tetro which we shot in Argentina and edited in Argentina we built our own projection room using a digital projector and the cutting room was in the projection room in a corner of the projection room so I was able to be at my editing desk and then just turn 90 degrees and see a 20-foot 30-foot screen and that was a kind of Holy Grail that I had been hoping for all along because what I discovered early on is that the the the the tendency that we have that I had certainly in the early years was to look at the image and in those days pre digital the image was the size of an index card this this would be very big half that size and so it was a small image on the movie Ola and you looked at it but what what works on a small screen does not work so well on a big screen because in the big screen you are looking into the image you're not in a you're not your eyes aren't bouncing off the surface of the screen you're looking deep into it and the rhythms of a shot are different when when that's happening and so as a curative I cut these two little people out you might see them a man on one side and a woman you can cut as if they're six feet tall or whatever and that gives a proportion to the plasma screen which is I don't know it's a it's a 50 inch screen I think but that's as if you're watching you're in a theater watching the finished result of the film and how do you feel and that anyway they're just there to tap me on the shoulder to remind me that the editing room is not the end result of where we're going with this with this well the optical illusion does work because whenever I stand next to these people I really think that TV screen is a giant cinema screen it's a very effective optical trick questions gentlemen here and then and then gentleman over there always recommended shooting and over the shoulder shot the lead actor talking on the telephone which you could then use in editing I wonder if you could tell me and what the biggest insights you think editors can give to directors Wow good good question I tell you a slightly salacious story that Phil Kaufman told me I directed the film returned to Oz and Phil Kaufman who was a good friend is a good friend said as he as he kind of patted me on the back sending me on my way he said just remember screw your editor and I thought what are you talking about and he said I know I know but but the thing is the dynamics of shooting on a set are very different than the dynamics of the editing room don't overly worried and he kind of knew me he said you will be more you will be too concerned about how it's all going to cut together and you have to kind of let that go into the the organic Millay of shooting on the other hand you can't go too far with that obviously you you do have to think how is it going to cut together but but not too much you know that that there is a truth to this that there was also another lesson I learned on Return to Oz we we fell behind in the schedule and it resulted in my being fired from the film after five weeks of shooting thankfully George Lucas who was a friend heard about that and flew to London met with the Disney executives he wood fired me and wrapped them on the knuckles with a ruler and I got rehired again it's probably the only time that that's ever happened some director has been fired and then rehired five days later but George said what's the problem and I said falling behind and he said shoot the master I said I can't shoot the master because it's a chicken over which I have no control a nine-year-old girl over which I have limited control a puppet or being run by five people hiding behind an a tick-tock man and clay creatures and there is no master so and he said I know I know I had the same problem with r2d2 and LeBlanc and he said shoot it anyway because if you shoot the master that gives the crew a visceral sense of what you're trying to achieve with this scene even though it's full of mistakes and but that's what's missing because I'm an editor and because the film was a special-effects film it was very carefully storyboarded and we were relying on that but the the trouble was that the as much as you could point to a storyboard it didn't the crew of visceral feel for what we were doing and how long it was going to take and who was needed on the set once you've shot the master then the painting department can say okay I get this I don't need to be here I can go do the next set and I can leave my deputy here if anyway as a result of that everything sped up and as it turned out we could use amazingly more of the master shots than then I that I had feared but it it's it's a very good question and I'll have to think even more about the answer to that yeah how do you choose your projects and more specifically why did you want to be part of coup 53 the people who am i working with the subject matter do I want to spend a year plus on this subject matter and some sense of the budget and the schedule to see if it's achievable what what we can achieve and those are like oh that's a rope with three braids in it the ideal is to get all three of them and sometimes you get two and a bit of the third and then it's a judgment call and you know I met tog II five years ago and we got along instantly and you know so I I knew tog II and I was I had I knew about the story already and was fascinated in it and you know the the third strand is something that we've been struggling with the the money budget as you all know from documentaries is is a difficult thing we've had filmmaking interruptus on this we we worked last year and then we had to stop in September and we're only just starting up again now so that's those are the three things and the times I've gotten into trouble or when one of those is really missing and I tried to minimize that it has happened it's you just you you are making a leap into the unknown and it's you just have to trust your judgment yeah every time we run out of money I go checking the can in the states there's an a single British penny in this film it's all American money and it's all individuals it's it's an object lesson in fundraising that I've spent seven years on I've learned more in this film than any other film in my life it's also the most important film I'll ever make in fact it's so important even having made films for 26 years and 30 40 documentaries for television what have you this is the film of my life and this if this film works does what it's supposed to do out in the world and they tell me mr. Ram irani you're not allowed to make any more films I'll be good with that this is the one that matters are gonna bake bread or learn how to make furniture Jody hello that language is everything evolving even further maybe like crossing the line for instance yes as I said at the beginning the the film is very young and we're still coming to grips with with what it is and yes it it will evolve and I don't I don't know where it's going to evolve the the whole you know there's a special thing here about visual virtual reality where that's going we don't know it it's I think virtual reality now is where the Kinetoscope was to cinema in 1895 and even physically that's very similar a Kinetoscope was a machine and you put your nickel in and you put your head into the machine just the same way we do virtual reality and you had a 20-second experience of a motion picture and then to see it again you put another nickel in nobody in 1895 knew that we were going to be there except for a few people who had these wild visionary ideas about the future based on no particular evidence the Dixon the William Dixon who was a British English man who worked for Edison and and he's the guy responsible for 35 millimetres wide four sprockets four frame one one age per frame and all of that he he was a visionary and he said the future is unlimited someday we will have cameras on Mars reporting back to us about the goings on on other planets and what evidence was there for that in 1894 but it turned out he was right so I guaranteed we will we will go somewhere that the only caveat there is this idea that I said at the beginning about cuisine and cooking the food it's unlimited but it has to be nourishing it has to taste good it has to smell good and other than that it and look good and other than that you can cook whatever you want and I think there are these core things films have to be nourishing at the spiritual level and they have to look good and they have to sound good and you know other than that anything is anything is possible especially now that there are so many different venues for for this material from the iPhone two screens in department stores to home video to theaters okay I'm getting the classic and I just wants to say thank you so much to Walter Murch it's been an honor to have you here you

Channel: Sheffield DocFest

Views: 18,031

Keywords: walter murch, taghi amirani, craft summit, documentary campus, sheffield doc/fest

Id: 1Y2Ysz1kCZg

Length: 58min 47sec (3527 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017