Masterclass with Walter Murch - Meet the Oscar®-Winning film and sound editor

thank you thank you it's great to be here this is my first time in gothenburg but it's been a very warm welcome and i love to talk to editors and sound designers about what we do which is endlessly fascinating um it's very new however in human experience the the first films or are maybe 120 years old and that's just around the maximum human lifetime when i was at film school a gentleman came to talk to us who was in his early 70s younger than i am now the director king vidor and he had made a documentary at the age of 18 in 1913 and was talking to us who were in our early twenties and um now i'm talking to you most of you are older than your early twenties but younger than me uh but nonetheless that you know in two human lifetimes this is where we have arrived at in in film do we understand what we're doing maybe maybe we understand it at the level that the architects and builders of gothic cathedrals knew what they were doing there were no instruction manuals for how you build a cathedral and yet build it they did and most of them stayed up a few fell down but they're still with us a thousand years later even though the knowledge for how to do that was trent was transmitted orally by and largely by experience there was a troop of architects and builders who moved around europe from place to place building these magnificent structures i'm not comparing film to cathedrals but in a certain sense i am in this in this in that largely the the understanding of what we do comes through oral transmission like we're we're doing now there are books of course but it's largely through people talking to each other and relaying experience of this happened then maybe we can use that here now maybe and maybe the film will work um our our rate of success with films is much less good than uh than cathedrals five percent of films are successful whatever that means financially uh critically that's another thing but it's a miracle really that any films get made when you underst when you know what goes into making a film it's it's if you don't know what goes into making a film you think how complicated could it be the film lasts two hours maybe it should take a week to make a film uh on the other hand once you know how complicated films are it's amazing that they don't take 10 or 15 or 20 years to make but the average is around two or three years from conception to in in the theater so how to explain all of this uh i'd like to fantasize sometimes that 500 years in the future the people if we're still around if civilization is still here which is an open question they'll look at what we did today and they'll have a special filter and they they project the images but through this filter and they see some kind of amazing moire pattern they don't see the images that we see they see a moire pattern of all of the people who came together and all of the decisions that were made and they finalized endlessly fascinating because some some place between now and 500 years from now they discover a new force in the universe that makes all of our troubles disappear and they say how did they manage to do that back then when they didn't have force x or whatever it is this sixth force in the universe anyway that's just a fantasy but we all filmmakers know what i'm talking about in the sense of this sort of communal understanding of what it is that we're doing and somehow if we're lucky this information gets transmitted from person to person within each film and then from film to film so with that as prologue i'd like to talk about the the value of film editing in itself uh not just as a tech not just as a necessary technique but for what it contributes to the film itself particularly in light of films like 1917 which just came out this year which is has no cuts in it there are cuts a couple of dozen i'm told but they're invisible or victoria the german film that was made a couple of years ago that really has no cuts in it but just as prologue let's look at a clip from a film made in the early 1940s this is sullivan's travels you may be familiar with it but it's just good to look at it [Music] you see you see the symbolism of it capital labor destroy each other it teaches a lesson more or less and it has social significance who wants to see that kind of stuff it gives me the creeps tell them how long it played in the music hall it was held over a fifth week who goes to the music hall communist communists this picture's an answer to communists it shows we're awake and not dunking our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches i want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions stark realism the problems that confront the average man but with a little six a little but i don't want to stress it i want this picture to be a document i want to hold a mirror up to life i want this to be a picture of dignity a true canvas of the suffering of humanity but with a little section with a little sex in it how about a nice musical how can you talk about musicals at a time like this with a world committing suicide with corpses piling up in the street with grim death gargling at you from every corner with people slaughtered like sheep maybe they'd like to forget that then why do they hold this one over for a fifth week at the music hall for the ushers it died in pittsburgh like a dog while they know in pittsburgh what they like if they know what they're like they wouldn't live in pittsburgh that's no argument if you pan of the public you'd still be in the horsey you think we're not let's hop along you'll look at them we'd still be making keystone chases bathing beauties custard pie fortune fortune of course i'm just a minor employee here mr lebron is starting that one again i wanted to make you something outstanding something you could be proud of something that would realize the potentialities of film is the sociological and artistic medium that it is with a little sex in it something like something like capra i know what's the matter with capra look you want to make her brother out there yes i'll wait a minute then go ahead and make it what you're getting i can't afford to argue with you that's a fine way to start a man out on a million dollar production you want it you got it i can take it the chin i've taken it before not from me you have it not from you sully that's true not with pictures like so long sauron hey in the halo answered your plants from 1939 but they weren't about tramps lockouts sweatshops people eating garbage and alleys and living in piano boxes and ash cans and foil they're about nice clean young people filling up with livestream music and legs now take that scene and hey hey but you all realize conditions have changed there isn't any work there isn't any food these are troubleless times what do you know about trouble what do i know about trouble yes what do you know about trouble what do you mean what do i know about trouble that's what i'm saying you want to make a picture about garbage cans what do you know about garbage cans why'd you eat your last meal out of one what's that got to do with it he's asking you you want to make an epic about misery you want to show hungry people sleeping in doorways newspapers around them you want to grind ten thousand feet of hard luck and all i'm asking you is what do you know about heart yes what do you mean what do i know about hard luck don't you think i've what yeah i'm not i saw a newspaper until i was 20 then i worked in a shoe store and put myself through law school at night where were you at 20. well i was in college when i was 13 i supported three sisters and two brothers and a widowed mother where were you at 13. i was in boarding school i'm sorry well you don't have to be ashamed of it sully that's reading your picks have been so light so cheap and so inspiring they don't stick with messages that's why i paid you 500 week when you were 24 750 when you were 25 000 when you were 26 when i was 26 i was getting 18. 2 000 when you were 27 i was getting 25 then i just opened my shooting game 3000 after thanks for yesterday 4 000 after asking i suppose you're trying to tell me i don't know what trouble is yes in a nice way solid you're absolutely right i haven't any idea what it is people always like what they don't know anything about certainly had a lot of nerve wanting to make a picture about human suffering you're a gentleman to admit it silly but then you are anyway how about making ants in your plants in 1941 you can have bob hope mary martin maybe been crosstalk the avid dancers maybe jack benny watches our big name band what oh no i want to make our brother i'll tell you what i'm going to do first i'm going down to the wardrobe and get some old clothes some old shoes and i'm going to start out with 10 cents in my pocket huh i don't know where i'm going but i'm not coming back till i know what trouble is what don't worry you can take me off salary who's talking about taking your salary so long and thanks for that wait a minute wait a minute don't be so impulsive how soon you'll be back i don't know maybe a week maybe a month maybe a year don't worry about me and thanks dracula you gave me a great idea i gave you now look what you've done yeah what i've done with your lies about something newspaper i sold as many newspapers that you supported a family of 13. i opened a shooting gallery didn't i with money you borrowed from your uncle we better insure him for a million he's worth more the phone head ask for what a genius get me a copy that old brother where art out i guess i'll have to read it now make that two copy why should i suffer alone a wonderful scene beautifully written and acted and the camera work is exactly what is necessary but there's not a single edit in that shot there's no coverage for that two and a half minute scene which is a funny and touching and if you're in the film business you know exactly what they're talking about um so you know what is the value of the edit if you can do that why do we need to edit so that's the that's the mystery in the question that we're we'll talk about um this i discovered this a number of years ago this is a article by maxim gorky the the russian and it's his experience of looking at films for the first time he was a young reporter in nizhny novgorod 100 miles or so east of moscow and the lumiere brothers came to town and set up their show in the local brothel they put up a screen and they brought in the projector and they showed the classic lumiere brothers films of the train arriving at the station and the people leaving the factory and he he calls it the kingdom of shadows um if you only knew how strange it is to be there it's a world without sound and without color interestingly he's seeing motion pictures for the first time and he's impatient it makes him think where's the where's the color where's the sound well eventually we brought color in and sound in it took a couple of decades at least uh to do that but it's just interesting that the miracle of motion pictures uh he he completely accepts it and it makes him want more he says it's terrifying actually to see the movement of shadows he's looking at the workers leaving the factory and then he says suddenly something clicks everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen it speeds right at you look out it might plunge into the darkness of the theater and make the audience a ripped sack of lacerated flash he's very dramatic in what he does but what he's describing is the first cut and in those days of analog physical film we physically cut the film as you all know and we glued it together there wasn't any tape even in those days we we glued it together and when it when the cut went through the projector it made a click and so there's just you know in 1896 this is maxim forkey talking about the sudden transition from one shot to another um would it work to make a film with cuts in it we didn't know because we didn't experiment with that for another 10 years or so from the invention of film let's say in 1889 to 1900 this gentleman film was largely like youtube videos in the early days cat videos single shots that made you laugh and then they were over and you went on to the next one and it it took about a decade or so uh for this young medium to enter adolescence and discover the almost sexual thrill of cutting things together and like sex the idea that you can combine the dna of two different points of view is intensely fertilizing of the medium we didn't understand that at first it was simply a mechanical way and people were kind of embarrassed about it the very earliest cuts weren't cuts at all but little four-frame dissolves because they thought could can can we do this and it might have been that they would have an experiment of cutting from one shot to another hoping that there would be a visual continuity and instead the whole audience threw up because wait a minute i was looking at something and it went away instantly and was replaced by something else i mean imagine if that happened to you in real life you're walking down the street and suddenly the street disappears and now you're on top of a mountain and then five seconds later you're at the bottom of the ocean well we do that all the time in cinema turns out of course we do that all the time in dreams so i think what saved us uh for or saved cinema was the fact that there was already a part of the human brain that was conditioned to think in these kind of leaps which is the time we spend six or eight hours a night in a dream state and our experiment with cutting for continuity at first and then cutting for collision the kind of marxist hegelian [Music] collision of images is very dreamlike and we eventually got the hang of it and here we are 100 or so years later this gentleman we think is the first person to make a film that has continuity in it so 1901 he loved exclamation points stop thief fire and it's clear that the great train robbery porter must have seen these films because the two first films that porter made were life of an american fireman and the great train robbery and they had what we understand now is continuity editing this is a great quote uh that i like uh mostly from victor fleming who directed gone with the wind and uh wizard of oz they both came out in 1939 two very big films good editing with the emphasis on good makes the film look well directed which is okay uh i understand that that's pretty so obvious but then he says great editing and i would add whatever that is makes the film look like it wasn't directed at all and on the when you first read that you think well it's a strange thing for a director to say knowing how much work goes into it but what he's getting at is that when the collision of images has a certain magic to it and that's a magic that we all aspire to and rarely get there but it's a north star that sort of guides us you you get the audience to a place where they're simply experiencing an event a series of events and sympathizing or not with the characters on screen and they're not aware of the frankenstein-like subterfuge that has gone into taking these chopped up pieces of life and sewing them together and then energizing them with electricity and sending them on screen with sound and he's talking about a kind of invisibility of the editing and that's good up to a point i think there you know we can be too invisible and there are times in every film when we want the sound and the editing to sort of come out of the the wings of the theater and do a dance for the audience and make them aware briefly of what's happening and then pull back of course we're doing things all the time but the audience is not consciously aware of it but in certain films at certain times this sudden prominence of the subterfuge of what we're doing is i think it has a value this is another nice quote vladimir nabalkov a writer but i would say a filmmaker and certainly a film editor must combine the precision of a poet with the passion of a scientist and he's getting at the contradictory there which because the common wisdom is that poets are full of passion and scientists are full of precision but he was a lepidopterist he was a kind of scientist but also a great writer and he knows that in a sense the the scientist is full of passion but it's bridled passion it's bridled by the discipline of science and poets have passion uh but also for their work to work and we know this absolutely in editing there has to be an underlying precision to it you have to respect the decimal points of what it is that that we do and so we discovered uh montage i'd like to call it what what's the word in swedish for editing in swedish clip so it's cutting you know same in english editing or the cutting i prefer the romance languages polish also talks about montage which is building and we all know from what we do that yes of course there is a time for editing for cutting down but you have to build it first before you can cut it down and [Music] in in the romance languages montage is applied way outside of film a plumber comes into your house to montage the pipes meaning to connect up the pipes uh to make sure that the size of the pipe is appropriate for the job and that the joins are clean and nothing leaks and it goes where it's supposed to go and you can kind of think of editing as a sort of plumbing that each shot is a pipe that has a certain width and a certain speed of delivery and then you have to join it to the next pipe and make sure that there are no leaks make sure that that whatever whatever the value is that that join is correct and goes off at the right angle and delivers the fluid which is emotion to you the audience at the right time and the right place so cinema was not invented with motion pictures motion pictures are the technical invention of showing that films at 24 or 25 frames a second will create the illusion of continuous motion but cinema depends on montage of course this is a direct challenge now by films that have apparently no cuts in them what is what is the value of of that there's this word that is overused now which is immersive the idea that somehow a film that doesn't have any cuts in it is more immersive personally and we can talk about this in dialogue i don't feel that i i think it's kind of the opposite that cutting in the fleming sense of the word when the cutting is good or great um it's it's more immersive in the sense that it's more like dreams which are this private theater that we all go into every evening and experience for six or eight hours a night but it's it's here with us i i don't think [Music] people will make lots of cutlass films it's just uh it's very time consuming and um i i think it it other than the the technical interest and oh how did they do that it has a limited shelf life in my feeling but that's something we can discuss so plumbing you can think of what we do both in sound and editing as a braided chord of three strands one of them is plumbing which is simply how do we get here from there and in when i started out in film 50 plus years ago the plumbing was very straightforward we were shooting film everyone had been doing it the same way and there was just this is how we do it um you have you shoot the film you send it to the lab the work group comes back you code it you sync it up with the sound you cut it you get it to where you want it you send it to the negative cutter who conforms the negative you time the negative you mix the sound and then you marry the two things together and you're done and now at the beginning of every film and i'm sure you know this all personally there's a week at least of discussions of okay on this film what's the workflow going to be because the technology is changing so fast um the cameras are developing faster and faster you know i i think we're at the limit 8k you know maybe 12k uh it's it's like that that begins to create its own problems um certainly in terms of the delivery of the image we're at the limit of of the human eyeball to discern detail when we're talking about 4k uh i think uh also something for discussion anyway plumbing and writing we all know that as editors uh that much of what we do is the final draft of the screenplay that's been said over and over again does the screenplay and then there's the interpretation of that screenplay in the directing and then there is the interpretation of that interpretation in the editing and then a kind of secondary interpretation with the soundtrack which is sort of like a greek chorus that is commenting in the best sense on what's happening visually sometimes at odds with it other times reinforcing it that's a whole other thing that we can talk about when do we want to reinforce and when do we want to be interestingly at odds with what we're looking at because that's the quickest way to engage an audience is to give them subtly and effectively a paradox that they can solve if we simply give them what it is that we're talking about in a sense an orchestra where all the instruments are playing the same note that's effective for about five seconds and then it becomes very boring because we're you know what else so just like in a symphony you want the various orchestral groupings to be commenting on each other and reinforcing each other and diverging from each other in very interesting ways so the various disciplines within film the camera the sound the editing the costume the production design can all be commenting in their different ways on the core which is the characters and the story and interpreting them in different ways and then there is in editing what you would call the performance and this is the equivalent uh in music since we're talking about music in terms of the bowing of the violin and we esteem certain violinists why because of that technique there's something about the way they dig in to the note and the way they finesse the vibrato and the way they lift all of all of these subtle things that you feel intuitively and that you learn to channel when you go to music school there are editorial equivalents of that in terms of where where we cut and how we cut and what we go to after we make a cut these are all very interesting personal things that characterize the work of each editor does an editor have a personal style that's also up for up for question certainly the editor the the unique thing about an editor is that among all the heads of departments of camera production design costume and whatever the editor frequently is on the film for the longest throughout the production of the film and also is has to and is obliged to uh shift in the hierarchy of the film organization at the appropriate moment in a diplomatic way if at a certain point the film editor is like the pianist interpreting the emperor concerto they're playing every note and they're doing it again with this performance how the notes are struck how you linger how you trill our characteristic of each pianist in an interpretive way and we value certain pianists and we uh we don't uh value so much certain other pianists because of this mysterious touch um but uh an editor is is that but also will be required and really obligated at certain points to stop playing and say you know i think we should change these movements put them in a different order it's like they're having a dialogue with the composer uh and say you know i'm going to instead of trilling here i'm going to hit all the notes at the same time uh well okay so that editor is now just not an interpreter but an orchestrator and then especially if the film is not working something in the concept it's up there on the screen but something's not right the editor can jump up another level and say enter into the role of a composer somebody who is writing the story along with the director and this is obviously the delicatest part of our craft how do you navigate those shifts the other members the other heads of departments can and should do this but but they don't do it quite as much as editors are called upon to do it there's a whole other thing to talk about in terms of sound mixing and we can get into that later but there's another sensitivity in terms of the re-recording mixers have to be sensitive to the fact that this is the last time the director can solve any of the problems in the film the film is locked almost always and here we are in the mix but the director in the back of the director's mind is this niggling problem and i never really got that moment with the actor is there anything we can do in the mix now with the music and the sound effects to solve that problem and [Music] mixers re-recording mixers have to be sensitive to the sensitivity of the director about that and rise to the occasion to help to solve that problem to be aware that there is a problem and not simply to think of this obviously as simply a technical or even just as an artistic thing but uh creative in the highest sense of what we're doing and of course we're all bound by schedules and time but these things do enter into it i just wanted to say a few things my the book in the blink of an eye is notorious for the something that's called the rule of six and i just wanted to go over that to dispel some misconceptions about it sometimes that have emerged the the primary goal is to to create and to maintain and to direct the emotion of the audience in the biggest sense of that emotion of course we can always go for easy emotion but we may not want to do that at any particular moment we have to think of the total emotional curve of the whole film and not to go for the jugular every time and that's this is very hard to define and if you could define it you would have the aladdin's lamp of how to make a successful film every time we we simply don't know how to do this this is one of those uh acupuncture things that i talked about at the beginning we're just we're we have intuitions about some of this but we don't have a engineering handbook for this kind of stuff next most important is story making it intelligible if you're you know you don't want to confuse the audience you want to uh keep them interested uh you don't want to be too obvious uh but you also have to make sense uh and in an interesting way i i like to think of the ideal film on this level being a kind of sustained deja vu experience that your their people are watching the film they can't what's going to happen next but when it does happen just like a deja vu experience you think oh yes of course that happened and so in a sense the audience begins to feel that they are creating the film that they are looking at and then this mysterious sense of rhythm which is like dance do you have rhythm can you dance uh i think these three things are if you say or do you want to be a film editor do you have a sense of rhythm do you have a sense of how to tell a story and do you can you empathize with characters and with the audience to allow this emotion to be channeled these are the core things and the the not well the sad fact is that not everybody has these talents and we can teach this we can say it's important but just like in dancing if you want to be a ballet dancer you have to have that something that allows your your mind and your brain to work with the nerves of your body and the muscles of your body to create an interesting dance and not everybody could do that it's just that's how it goes then this secondary thing which is what you might call eye trace which is where is the audience looking at any one moment on the screen and you have to or should have a good intuition about where 90 of the audience is looking at the moment of the cut to either in the incoming shot to put something there that is interesting you can think of that ball of attention as kind of a an animated thing that moves around the screen and it's the editor's obligation to carry that ball of attention from across every cut in an interesting way or not in a fight scene you don't want to do that you want to have these jagged um and sometimes in a love scene you you want to have these jagged things where the audience doesn't quite know where to look um so that's just it's it's an element to take into consideration then there is the the trends the problems of translating three dimensions into the two dimensions of the screen and this is most visible in the 180 degree rule talking about dialogue uh dialogue scene um there are times when most of the time we want to obey this but many times we don't and you have to choose where not to do this and know what you're doing and the film has to support that different films will allow you to do that other films will say no you can't do that and you have to learn the language of the film in order to know that and then uh the just the 3d continuity of space where is the characters in the three-dimensional room uh not literal room but the the space of the the scene and this is the last and least important of these things so there is a hierarchy here and uh in no sense is a cut supposed to do all of these things uh it's just these are what are in a simplified form these are the things that are in play and that you should be thinking about consciously or sometimes subconsciously when you're doing it if if you're presented with a cut that doesn't work then my suggestion is work your way up this list by removing each of these things if the cut doesn't work because you're trying to maintain 3d continuity get rid of it you know just going so the person will jump from opening the car door to cut opening the door to the apartment and we don't watch the person move we understand what happened we we were using the geography of the screen to move the character we're not using we're not relying on the actual space through which that character has to move and in the early days of cinema we were tentative about this and so those early films did spend time moving people around and now we don't largely don't do that anymore so and then 180 degree rule if if you really can't do it get rid of it i trace get rid of it and now we get into more sensitive territory uh if you have to break rhythm to get emotion and story across do that and and in the extreme sense if you to get to maintain the emotion if you have to confuse the audience slightly do that don't stay there very long it's like those uh training flights for astronauts where they they fly them in these big planes and they do an arc of like that and suddenly the people in the plane are free-floating because the plane is actually falling through space um and it lasts about 30 or 40 seconds and it it trains astronauts of how to live in a space without any gravity so a story is a kind of gravity that is pulling at you and you have to acknowledge it and take advantage of it and use it to transport you from one place to another like we do with gravity but if you have to get rid of it for a while go ahead and then you're in the land of this sort of pure state but you can't stay there very long in a in a two-hour film a short film maybe maybe that's the whole point is just this but a long film is something that has to have the gravity of story uh behind it the again this is another way of thinking this kind of acupuncture of cinema the the classic hollywood cut uh which is a cut on matching action and this was an attempt to in the early days to create a grammar of how could we make how could we create a continuous reality when it's broken up by cuts and one of the solutions was to use an action as the impetus to make a cut the person gestures like this we cut in the middle of the gesture and in the next shot that gesture completes itself the gesture might be what i just did or it might be somebody getting up from a chair or somebody picking up a gun to shoot or something but its origin was a fear that the audience would be upset if we made too violent a cut and it it just simply got accepted as this is what we do i had an interesting experience uh on the film i was working on a few years ago uh brad bird's tomorrowland and brad bird is an animator who made the jump to live action and he did his first live-action film was the mission impossible film that he did and then he decided to make this film tomorrowland uh which there were lots of problems with the film uh we can talk about that later but it was interesting because i tend not to cut on matching action that's part of my bowling technique i will do it but i don't do it as a default mode and we can talk about the reasons for that later but brad because he's an animator and he thinks on a shot by shot basis that's in his dna is that the animated shot moves to a certain point and then there's an action and because each shot is very expensive to draw and render that's where the cut point is and so designing the next shot in the storyboard because everything is storyboarded of course that action is what picks it up and so we didn't fight about this but this was an irritant i think in his uh opinion of me uh in that he kept saying well no no make let let the move happen and he's the first director i ever worked with who would talk to me in frames um none of the other uh directors least of all somebody like francis or anthony mangella would never never talk in frames to me and never even anything specific they would just talk about a feeling and then allow me to interpret that feeling by what i would do um but brad would you know because he's an animator he would talk about just extend that two frames uh i i um i'm aware of when i'm uh and in a situation where i am not mixing uh a film but i'm sitting in the back and somebody else is mixing the film i will never talk about decibels uh by that token and i always say you make that louder by two teaspoons and i'm leave it up to the mixers to decide what is a teaspoon basically what i'm saying is what i heard that line of dialogue was not loud enough make it louder by two teaspoons you decide you know i'm leaving it up to the mixers what that means so then the classic soviet cut is a dialectic opposition just the opposite of the hollywood cut this was you know the classic koola shop experiment of the empty bowl of soup and the face conclusion hunger that the the truth is that we we get a a value added from the juxtaposition of two shots and the more frontal the juxtaposition is the better because that allows the thing and i am in general sympathetic with this as a way of editing but i think it has to be modulated you can obviously go too far with this and it becomes a dialectic sledgehammer that is forcing the point so what i'd like to propose is a third way and this is just something i call nodal editing and a diagram of this would be let's say time is moving in this direction and a shot has a certain vector to it certain things are happening in the shot where do you interrupt that vector and cut to the next shot you could do it there whatever there is and in that case you the next shot would also have an unfolding and that word is kind of a key to the way i think about this is that each shot is a kind of flower that at the cut point blossoms from the cut point um there could be a different place to cut there or there so how do we decide what it is that we're doing so let me just run a clip here [Music] [Music] [Music] me so he's walking across this derelict section of san francisco which is where he has his office and obviously the eye trace is looking at him he's the only real moving thing in the shot so we're not and he's the star the movie's gene hackman so we're looking at him [Music] so he's off now on the right hand side of the screen at the cut point uh the cut point is uh where the this bar of black is obscuring harry's face so the point the cut point is basically a cut to darkness we don't know what we're looking at because we have been looking over here on the right hand side and then there's a cut and now the the moving elevator reveals harry's face which allows our eyes to move over to the other side of the screen i'll go backwards here for a second if i can uh so there's technically a jump cut the shot continued all the way uh francis allowed gene to go all the way into the cage in the back and then they had dialogue in this long wide shot would we stand for that i thought no we have to compress this film we can't there's at a certain point the shot is not interesting anymore it's your decision and here's where we get into kind of boeing techniques your decision where does that interest flag or just before the moment of flagging so you want the audience to think oh where are we this is a big room and the character is moving away from us he's going somewhere and cut and your decision about exactly where that cut point is is part of this boeing technique it ideally has to be just before the audience would get tired of looking at it and uh audience is a complex entity it uh is going to be uh there are people who will think that's too long there are other people who say i'm confused so you're you're trying to gauge the the 90 factor uh in this so let me go back here for a sec i mean these are all basically very simple things but this these were where i discovered these things so i'm playing them for you so the point of focus the eye trace he was where we see him now in other words as a figure he's moving deep into the shot and then at the cut point the eye trace is looking right at him and he's in one of these unfolding gestures he's is taking off the coat he hasn't taken off the coat already he's not about to take off the coat the shot unfolds with this gesture of taking off the coat tomorrow night did you know that yeah i told myself listen among those preeminent in the field expected to attend are hal lipset and harry call from san francisco uh kenneth sperry will speak on surveillance in the law wait a minute let's say this also attending will be william t moran of detroit michigan since when william beam around detroit michigan become preeminent in the field oh he's very big there you want some coffee i was in this will relate to that in a second i was in lyon france during the shooting of unbearable lightness of being phil kaufman's film on milan kundera's book with lena olin who you all know and juliet binoche and daniel day lewis this was one of juliet this was juliet's first english language film and it turned out i was there longer than i thought i would be because of various things i was helping shoot some second unit and i ran out of things to read and i came across this book in lyon i read french so i picked it up i'm interested in cosmology this is what the book was about and it he in the course of talking about uh the origin of the universe he quoted a story from this author kurtzio malaparte about some uh during the siege of leningrad some horses some soviet military horses who were running from a forest fire they ran into lake uh ladoga next to saint petersburg and uh or leningrad as then was and they were flash frozen suddenly the lake uh turned to what's known as frazzle ice uh kind of slushy ice they were caught in a kind of mud of ice and they couldn't get out they froze and the next morning malaparte who was with the finnish army uh looked out and said what's that over there oh look the lake is frozen overnight what's that over there and he went and saw hundreds of frozen horses who had been immobilized it was like a classic greek sculpture garden of broken limbs and heads and various agony and they went out and lit up cigarettes and wandered around this sculpture garden so i thought what an amazing story and i heard about malaparte because i studied italian literature but i hadn't studied this story and so i got interested in him he built this house you may have seen it it's a the house in contempt goddard's film he built this with a local builder with their own hands in the late 1930s and i i began translating malaparte's uh poetry um i had given an interview after english patient and in the course of the interview which was with a poetry magazine i made an analogy between editing and translation in the sense that when you translate from one language to another you're translating from a language that has a set of efficiencies built into the language and those efficiencies are different in the next language some languages have a word for this idea other languages don't so you can't you have to translate it with a phrase rather than a word and so you're as a translator you're constantly navigating these efficiencies uh and interpreting them in different ways and if you do this there then you have to do that here and if you do that then you have to do this and oh now i'm in trouble because and for editing you should be familiar with this because we are translating from the language of text which is the script into the language of moving images and sound in time and each of those things have different efficiencies language is very efficient at certain things very inefficient at other things in film we find sometimes the exact opposite a picture is worth a thousand words but maybe a word is worth a thousand pictures so we're i was saying oh well an editor is like a translator and when i got home that evening i thought do i know what i'm talking about maybe not and so i thought well malapartie i'll translate some malaparties so i started doing it and i found that the state of mind aside from the fact that i'm doing very different things with my hands the meant the mental stuff that's going on was exactly like what happens to me in editing and this this actually became a uh a kind of interesting way to come down at the end of a film because as all of you know at the end of the film the ending is sometimes very brutal you've been so deeply involved in this world and then suddenly it's over and now you're at where am i what's what's happening and by doing some translating for a couple of weeks it it's an easy way to get you back into the world very inexpensive also so here's uh here's the original pros that malaparte wrote what i was surprised at is when i did the translation i started writing it in what's called free verse it turns into a kind of poetry and there are various reasons for that and i'm not a poetic person i don't read a lot of poetry so i was curious and i just let it happen so when i translated it it became this and in english so this is my native country the land where i was born a foreigner his dad was a german and but he was born in italy the home where i came to know the loneliness of the outsider he was laughed at at school because his last name was german this is back in 1895 1900 the solitude of hope the struggles of becoming a man anyway what i suddenly realized is that the word that you use to end each line with is significant and it's not grammatical that where you break doesn't have anything to do with where the commas are or the periods but it has to do with the internal rhythm of the line itself and where that rhythm is building to and then the concept that it ends with propels you onto the next line so each ending word has a significance to it in a sense you're exposing those words to the ozone uh of the blank page which is a way of underlining each of those words without underlining them so if you just read the end words of each line country foreigner loneliness solitude struggles man died descended country dead rivers trees forests head you wouldn't know exactly what the poem was about but you really got a good sense of what you were in for if you read the whole poem if we restored this to prose in english you'll see kind of what i'm talking about because now all those significant words are still there but they're buried within the fabric of the paragraph and it was here where the light bulb went off and i realized oh this is just like editing in the sense that we each shot is like a line of poetry that has its own internal rhythms and development and we choose usually and here's where i divest myself of the hollywood cut the cut on action we choose the frame to end on which is should be as iconic as possible and indicative of the overall message of the film so if you just looked at the last frame of every cut it should say something about what the film is about and then we shift to the next shot but from neurological studies that people have done that moment of transition is shocking despite what we said earlier what i said earlier about oh it works continuity editing works there is a shock that it doesn't make us throw up but the neurologically the brain says what the hell just happened oh and this all happens in microseconds oh it's different i must remember still what that last image was before i decide where we're going and so there's like a little flash bulb that goes off at the end of every shot and which those ending images are imprinted in the audience's mind which again goes exactly against the idea of of cutting on action the cutting on action is trying to defeat that flash bulb moment and say don't pay any attention to this moment of transition and i so i think it it achieves exactly the opposite of what it's trying to achieve but again this is early in the development of cinema we've only been doing it for a hundred years all of the other arts are lost in antiquity dance theater story painting whatever you know thirty thousand fifty thousand years ago but this is brand new and we're still trying to figure it out so each line is a certain length and you could look at that and then you could make a transition to a scene in a film and this is the length of the shots in the the tape assembly scene in the conversation so i'll just play that here this now matter of fact it's out of the country he asked me to get the takes from you and give you the money mistakes are dangerous someone may get hurt so here's now that i'm thinking about this is a good example of the hierarchical thing in the original script and as shot harry call the scene with harry call and these tapes was done as a one continuous scene uh he threaded the tapes up he we showed how he what he did the technology of it and then we discovered that there was a an obscure line of dialogue and he uncovered that line of dialogue which was he'd kill us if he had the chance and then he finished the tapes and went and visited a girlfriend and then the next day went to hand in the tapes which is this scene and it was one of those things that on paper looked fine but in the film was not something wasn't working there and uh the film as a whole was having problems with the few audiences that we showed it to uh who couldn't what is this film about and that was partly francis's decision in making the film was to hybridize a murder mystery with a character study to combine as he said herman hesse and alfred hitchcock and even the name of harry kall in in hermann hesset was harry holler this is harry original harry caller that became harry kahl c-a-l-l that eventually became harry kahl c-a-u-l which then became emblazoned as the transparent raincoat because when a fetus is born sometimes with a call around it which is a semi-transparent membrane so harry is as you saw there were always wearing this semi-transparent membrane anyway francis was shooting godfather two at this time while i was editing and we were having this problem and francis said at a certain point he said you know i can't deal with two films at the same time let's put conversation on hold and i'll deal with it after godfather ii let's just you know and this was a big big decision uh and i went for a run uh to decide what what's happening here and what should i do and this was a crisis of the hierarchy should i be the interpreter and say okay good whatever you decide or should i say no uh and in the middle of the run i stopped and i looked at the landscape and i said you know i'm not gonna go along with this decision so i phoned up francis in lake tahoe where he was shooting i said i have a couple of ideas let's not shell the film let me do these ideas and see what happens so one of the ideas was taking the tape assembly and splitting it in half um and just at the beginning just showing technically what he does um and that's it we just get a glimpse of it and then he goes visit his girlfriend and then goes to hand in the tape and there's something wrong the director isn't there and the harrison ford character says those tapes are dangerous you know what i mean well we don't know what he means harry doesn't know what he means because he didn't fully decode the tape he didn't do a good enough job is the implication so now this tape which represents fifteen thousand dollars uh in 1972 which is two hundred thousand dollars today was now oh dangerous money and so he takes the tape back uh and grows back to the back to his lab to find out what is the danger here and in the course of doing that he sees in this office the two young people who were in the conversation the girl [Music] [Music] so he's in the elevator he's trapped with this girl he's been told these tapes are dangerous what's going on this this sequence ended uh as shot the elevator reached the ground floor and they went their separate ways but i decided again with this idea of the flash bulb and don't let the elevator end end the shot with him trapped and then cut from that image of a band trapped to the image of the tape reel itself so these two iconic images you again this is this kind of dialectical crash these two images together but what about me yes i started this conversation anyhow you didn't remember oh look that's terrible it's not hurting anyone no matter are we oh god every time i see one of those old guys i always say the same thing what do you think i always think that he was once hey harry what do you say we take a break come on we'll go to alex transfer i'll buy you a bill how about that no i won't finish this so that line of dialogue i thought you turned those tapes in is an added line of dialogue to to help cement this idea that he didn't already in the original screenplay he had already turned them in uh or or he was about to turn them in in this after the scene but now it acknowledges the fact that these scenes are split so that line was an added voice-over line and that respond uh gene hackman be quiet will you all right all right or also uh added lines in fact john cazale is not saying all right all right he's just something we just forced those lines into his into his mouth tired of drinking anyhow so the i'm interrupting the rhythm here to talk about it but uh the the now we are listening like harry call these tapes are dangerous what do you mean dangerous it's just these inconsequential lines of dialogue so we like harry are trying to listen for what where is the danger where is the danger what a stupid conversation stan please i'm trying to work also added lines of dialogue to mostly everything [Music] but not today stanley please i'm trying to get this done well i'm getting fed up well what about your asking me questions all day long jesus don't say that but for christ's sake stan don't say that again please don't use that word in vain it bothers me what's the matter your work's getting sloppy later in the week sunday maybe sunday definitely we had a much better track if you pay more attention to the recording less attention what they were talking about i can't see why a couple of questions about what the hell's going on can get you so out of joint because i can't sit here and explain the personal problems of my clients jagtar hotel three o'clock room 773. i heard if you filled me in a little bit once in a while did you ever think of that it has nothing to do with me and even less to do with you it's curiosity did you ever hear that it's just goddamn human nature listen if there's one surefire rule that i have learned in this business is that i don't know anything about human nature i don't know anything about curiosity that's not part of what i do what i this is my business and when i'm i'll see you later telephone i love you i'm spending too much time [Music] together [Music] my telephone so he'll kill us if he got the chance woof he'd kill us if he got the chance so the that character at that point is uh knows that the tapes are dangerous he knows that the people he was handing the tapes into know that they're dangerous he understands he thinks why they're dangerous and he he's a catholic so he goes to confession and doesn't confess exactly what is going on but almost goes all the way there so it this and a couple of other changes that i made in that week i then showed them to francis and he said okay good let's we we will finish this film this year and he gave the go-ahead to uh to go to the final mix and do the final negative cutting and everything and luckily that allowed the film to come out in the same year as godfather 2. a conversation came out in the spring of 74 and godfather 2 came out in december of 74. and both films got nominated for best picture imagine if if i had not gone up in hierarchy and said francis i'm not going to do what you said i'm going to try these other things then the conversation would have come out a couple of years later and watergate and all of that stuff which were very much in the zeitgeist would have the film would have seemed like an afterthought rather than something actually talking about things that were happening uh live at the moment and uh so and you know francis uh got these two amazing best film nominations in the same year and that gave him the uh the power to do whatever he wanted and ironically he's he said you know i'm tired of these films making me uh pull my guts out and hack away at them in full view of the public i want to just do an easy film with three bankable stars and lots of action i'll do apocalypse now and so he did so i see that i've wildly overstayed my welcome here i've got lots more to say but i will cut it short the comparison with ku53 the documentary is also that the events that are happening right now in iran and the relationship between iran and the west we didn't imagine when we were making the film that there would be this congruence of these things but that's in fact what's happening so there's lots more to to talk about so thank you very much

Channel: KULTURAKADEMIN K-PLAY

Views: 10,077

Keywords: Walter Murch, K-PLAY, Kulturakademin, film editing, editing, sound design, Masterclass, THE RAIN PEOPLE, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, THE GODFATHER, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE CONVERSATION, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, In the Blink of An Eye, film maker, TOUCH OF EVIL, film schools, Sweden

Id: KuUUP2eP1_k

Length: 79min 28sec (4768 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020