Walter Murch: An Interview with the Editor of “Cold Mountain”
Author Michael Ondaatje writes that every scene for you has a larger pattern at work in it that governs your cut. Is there a pattern guiding your work on “Cold Mountain”?
I remember Al Pacino saying that what guided his performance of Michael in “The Godfather” was the idea of an imaginary spotlight always trying to find him, and that he was always trying to evade it. So I believe no matter what the discipline — acting, editing, or whatever — these “meta-strategies” will give your work an extra depth and resonance, if you are lucky enough to find them. And if the material itself is rich enough to support them in the first place.
The audience doesn’t have to be consciously aware of them — in fact it is better if they aren’t. This seems paradoxical: why expend the effort for something that is not going to be directly perceived? It’s probably something like the effect of harmonic overtones in music. If a violin plays the note “A,” we are consciously aware of the note itself, but there is a whole array of harmonics that comes along with the note, and these overtones are what gives each violin its particular tone. They allow us to distinguish an oboe from a violin, and in fact even to distinguish a Stradivarius from a fiddle.
The “Godfather” script gave Pacino the lines of dialog, but it was his “meta-strategy” — those harmonic overtones — that told him exactly how to say them, and with what body-language.
One strategy I worked with on “Cold Mountain” was the idea that Inman was actually killed in the battle, and that it was his ghost — a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead — who goes through all these adventures trying to get back home.
It’s contradictory, of course, because the Inman we see is a solid physical being who interacts with everyone he meets. But the overtones of that idea are always hovering around the edges of each scene, informing in subtle ways where the cut points are, what reaction shots we used, and so on.
Director Anthony Minghella says that film, like music, builds on restated themes. In “Cold Mountain,” the theme is renewal. How will viewers see or hear this theme in the movie?
There’s no question but that film — any film — is a kind of visual music: the alternation and development of individual shots being the equivalent of the alternations and development of phrases in music. Certainly film is more visually musical than theater, which mostly depends on the spoken word. I think this is one of the reasons why film and music work so well — and so sometimes mysteriously — with each other.
“Film — any film — is a kind of visual music: the alternation and development of individual shots being the equivalent of the alternations and development of phrases in music.”
Anthony began as a musician when he was in his teens and 20s, and I naturally tend to think musically because of my involvement in sound. So “Cold Mountain” might tend to be more “musical” than some other films, in that sense, because Anthony wrote and directed it, and I edited the picture and did the final mix.
Specifically? There’s the visual repetition of reflected images: the film begins and ends with an image seen through water, and there are crucial moments in the story where this reflected imagery comes into play. Then there are the larger thematic alternations and repetitions of humor, anguish, cruelty and love throughout the film. Beyond that, it’s up to the audience to enjoy the discovery.
