THE KING OF THE CUT
Film editors get no hype on Oscar night, but they’re too busy lurking in darkened rooms to care. Tymon Smith found a master of the art in Venice
THE tall, bearded and bespectacled man sitting opposite me in a room in the Danieli Hotel in Venice is a legend of the film world. Walter Murch, the 70-year-old master editor, says his field is dominated by workaholic hermits. “People who work very long hours — 14 hours a day — usually in rooms with no windows, seeing the same things over and over again.”
But Murch gets out and about; he is one of the most visible practitioners of an art that was born with cinema itself. “All the other parts of film, the costumes, the makeup, even the photography, have roots previous to film, whereas the ability to take moving images and juxtapose them in a mosaic that is greater than the sum of its parts is unique to the medium of film.”
Murch began his career in the company of American Zoetrope, the collective formed by Francis Ford Coppola in the ’70s. Responsible for sound recording on The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, Murch virtually invented the term “sound designer”. He bagged two Oscars for his sound work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient.
With his series of lectures on editing, published as The Blink of an Eye, and The Conversations, a dialogue with author Michael Ondaatje during the editing of The English Patient, Murch has inspired editors with his careful dissection of the art of putting things together.
Murch isn’t interested in hitting people over the head with the ’importance’ of a film’s message
He was in Venice as the film mentor for the Rolex Mentors and Protégés programme. Italian documentary director and editor Sarah Fgaier watched him cut his first feature-length doccie,
Particle Fever, about the search for the Higgs Boson. While the film is about a particularly significant moment in science history, Murch isn’t interested in hitting people over the head with the “importance” of a film’s message.
As an editor, Murch is the first audience for the work of directors whose singular visions can sometimes make them forget that their projects have to be seen by audiences. “We have to service the vision of the director, but we also have to accommodate this invisible force, the dark matter, which is the audience and the gravitational force and the effects of people who know nothing about this. And ultimately the best pass is something that takes both into consideration,” he says.
Editing is one of those anomalous arts that isn’t noticed by everyday audiences if it’s done well. When it draws too much attention to itself, through trickery and flash, then it is.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is one of this year’s nominees for the editing Oscar. Murch was impressed by its 17-minute, no-cut opening. “I was sitting there thinking: ‘How did they do this?’”
That’s high praise from the man who helped create one of the most visually memorable opening sequences in film history: the beginning of Apocalypse Now, in which sound and picture merge into an almost perfect amalgamation of the horrors of Vietnam and the psyche of Martin Sheen’s Willard — linked by a cut that links throbbing helicopter rotors to the whirr of a ceiling fan in a Saigon hotel room.
Famous for editing while standing up, Murch says he is happy to continue seeking projects that challenge him, and remind him that “the wonderful thing about film is that it’s a big bowl that can, under the right circumstances, accept input from a huge variety of sources”. • Smith was in Venice as a guest of Rolex.