The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film [Hardcover]

Michael Ondaatje (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 17, 2002

The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through.

It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history.

The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux.

Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient.

“Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried.”


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ask most moviegoers, "Who is Walter Murch?" and they're likely to stare uncomprehendingly. Ondaatje (The English Patient) seeks to eradicate that ignorance by providing an expert analysis of Murch's consummate film editing skills, and pointing out along the way the monumental contributions editors make to motion pictures. Murch, a three time Oscar winner and integral collaborator on such cinematic milestones as The Godfather, Julia, The English Patient and American Graffiti, attended the University of Southern California with George Lucas and bonded early on with UCLA film student Francis Ford Coppola. A relative neophyte, he worked on Coppola's The Rain People and a low-budget sci-fi picture, THX 1138, which has since become a cult classic. Murch adhered to a rule of not watching other movies while concentrating on a project of his own, calling himself a "queen bee who gets impregnated once and can lay millions of eggs afterwards." Through his eyes, and Ondaatje's remarkably insightful questions and comments, readers see how intricate the process is, and understand Murch when he says, "The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. The director simply doesn't." He also offers insightful thoughts on Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and Fred Zinnemann. Although Murch claims the actors on his films rarely know who he is, this excellent, eye-opening book done in a question-and-answer format will make readers glad Ondaatje has shown them the significant role he plays behind the scenes. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Editing is an often invisible part of the filmmaking process; the audience tends not to be aware how the editor's eye has crafted a film. Ondaatje reveals some of its mystery through several conversations with Murch, the editor of The Conversation, The English Patient, and Apocalypse Now and Redux. In the late 1960s, Murch, along with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas (who describes Murch as "strange like me"), helped form Zoetrope, the independent company where films like THX 1138 and The Godfather were born. Murch finds his own profession difficult to accurately describe, comparing quirks in actor dialogue to signs in the wilderness that only a hunter might detect. Ondaatje and Murch walk the reader through key scenes from several films, providing a glimpse into the editing process; the origins of his masterful re-edit of Orson Wells' Touch of Evil are particularly fascinating (especially for film buffs). These conversations allow readers a peek behind the curtain to reveal a man as mysterious as his art. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375413863
• ISBN-13: 978-0375413865
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 1.1 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #263,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 80 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Editing is Paramount September 22, 2002

By Harvey S. Karten

Format:Hardcover

...

Someone once said, "Film editing is a wonderful arcane art, like
mosaics. I love to watch it being done, but editors hate to be
watched." Just as editors like to work away from the gaze of
would-be supervisors, we in the audience are often not aware of
the important the work of these people behind the scenes. How
many times have you seen a review comment on the editing, and
if it praise or belittles the way the film is cut, how often is the
responsible editor named? In his new book "The Conversations,"
author Michael Ondaatje has transcribed a series of talks with
Walter Murch, considered by many to be without peer in the
profession. The 59-year-old Renaissance man, as involved in
trying to prove the Titus-Bode theory on the spatial intervals
between planets and a translator of Italian poetry, has been
instrumental in creating the sounds and the cuts of films such as
"American Graffiti," "The Conversation," "The Godfather I,II, III,"
"Julia," "Apocalypse Now," and "The English Patient."

In introducing this seminal work on Walter Murch, Ondaatje
informs us that Murch, like other editors, is concerned with a
film's pace, of course, but even more with the moral tone of a work
which has to do with speed, background noise, even how the
antagonist may turn away from a conversation. Recall how many
films have the editor cut away from a character before he finishes
speaking. This could be because the editor encourages the
audience to think only about the face value of what the character
has said. If on the other hand the editor allows the audience to
see from the expression in the actor's eyes that he is probably not
telling the truth, he will linger on the character after he finishes
speaking.

Words and sounds are not all. Murch at times pulls all the
sound out of the scene so that there is complete silence. This
often means that something terrible is about to happen. And
when sounds take place outside the room (as in the street sounds
when Michael Corleone commits his first murder in "The
Godfather"), we get the feeling that we are inside a cave-like room.

Murch tosses in his personal theories about the nature of
viewing a movie, among the most inciteful being this paradox:
"One of the things about watching a video is that it never feels
private. I'm always conscious of others in the room, so I become
self-conscious during an erotic scene. But it never feels that way
in a cinema, even at a comedy with people laughing around me."
On a note more technical than philosophical he states, "....a
sustained action scene averages out to 14 new camera positions
a minute."

When I used to take a class of tech high school students on a
field trip to a Broadway show, I found that they were more
interesting in discussing the big sound-mixing machine in the
back of the orchestra than in chatting about the way Hamlet's
vacillations were dealt with on the stage. "The Conversations"
won't tell you how to work the editing machines, but Ondaatje
does give you solid insight into the world of the editing profession
in a reader-friendly, flowing style.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Art and Science of Film Editing From a True Master November 26, 2004

By Ed Uyeshima HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The film editor is the great unsung hero of the filmmaking process. After all, during the annual Oscar ceremony, the award for Best Film Editing seems to be hidden away between bad production numbers and some indecipherable technical award. As directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Anthony Minghella constantly receive praise for their creative visions, it is obviously the film editor's onerous task to make sense of that vision and capture the key moments and sounds that define it. Film editor and sound designer par excellence, Walter Murch, is the subject of this endlessly fascinating book, which chronicles a series of five extensive conversations he had with Michael Ondaatje, author of "The English Patient". They met on the set of that film, one of many fine films Murch has edited, and Ondaatje was so struck by his personality and methods that he decided to write this book. In fact, Ondaatje was bowled over by how Murch could draw lines connecting the most disparate things in the cosmos: philosophy, technology, science, music, literature, art, languages, sound theory. Murch can locate the impulse of a film in the symphonies of Beethoven or in the way he views painting and architecture. He knows of what he speaks as his track record is very impressive - "Apocalypse Now", all three parts of "The Godfather", "American Graffiti", "Julia", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "The Talented Mr. Ripley", and the list goes on.

This intriguing book also explores the dynamic relationship between film editing and writing, which means Ondaatje is in a unique position to provide insight into his own methods. It becomes clear that Murch's descriptions of his editing offer Ondaatje new ways of understanding his own work as a novelist, and much of the pleasure derived from the book comes from Ondaatje's self-discovery process. Murch convincingly presents himself as both a physicist and a mathematician of cinema and suggests that we are in a prehistoric period, and that over time, we will eventually develop a system of notation for film much like musical notes. He sees it as his own destiny to uncover the underlying mathematics of cinema. Of course, Ondaatje provides perspectives of the filmmakers with whom Murch has worked extensively, providing accounts of Murch's importance in Hollywood by such figures as Coppola and George Lucas. Some films understandably get more attention than others. There is a lot of discourse on "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse Now", including the Redux version, as well as the "Godfather" trilogy, including his re-edit to make it one giant epic. Lots of revelations come out in these discussions. For example, one can now finally understand that Robert Duvall's absence (due to pay demands) is to blame for the lackluster "Godfather Part III" since the initial vision was to focus on the death of Tom Hagen, much as it was on the killings of Sonny in Part I and Fredo in Part II. He also has some interesting insight in the recutting and remixing of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil". But he goes well beyond his own films, as he cites and discusses films of great influence to him like "King Kong" and Eisentein's "Alexander Nevsky".

An obvious intellectual with a nimble mind for data collection and synthesis, Murch has managed to combine technological and engineering know-how with artistic inventiveness. Not surprisingly, he is also a bit of an eccentric, a Renaissance man slightly out of step with his time. This book will greatly appeal to film buffs as it offers a real insight into how some of our most iconic films of the last quarter century were made. This is a pure delight chock full of interesting photos, probably the best such interactive collaboration since Francois Truffaut interviewed Alfred Hitchcock.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, articulate, surprisingly good June 23, 2003

By documentia

Format:Hardcover

Like the reviewer below, I was skeptical of the Q&A format - an approach that often tends to elicit fairly superficial dialog in the realm of film (with some notable exceptions, including the classic Hitchcock/Truffaut book). This is fine for a magazine article, but potentially painful for 300+ pages. That said, this book really surprised me - and within only a few pages I was totally hooked. Ondaatje manages to spur on a delightful conversation filled with some very profound insights on editing, filmmaking, and the creative process itself (with many interesting detours along the way). I think this book can be enjoyed by both amateur film enthusiast and cynical cinephile alike. To be honest, I found the book to be a better articulation of Murch's ideas than his own "In the Blink of an Eye" -- though I would still recommend that as a secondary text to Conversations. I would also suggest that anyone reading this try to see Murch's major works first: The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, the Godfather I & II, and the English Patient - as they are all referred to in fairly significant detail throughout the book, and it will make for a more enjoyable read if you're familiar with them.