Walter Murch: An Interview with the Editor of “Cold Mountain”
You’ve commented on how cutting films for absolute poetic compression can bend narrative structure. Were you surprised by the final structure you created for “Cold Mountain”?
I think so. It was clear just from reading the script that there were going to be very interesting challenges in the editing, because for the most part the film has a parallel structure. You’re following the Inman character traveling across a vast landscape trying to get home while Ada is struggling back home with a desperate situation, so we’re alternating back and forth.
Any time you have a parallel structure, the script gives you an indication of how it might go back and forth, but you only really discover that when you actually have the film in your hands. Because the image has a very different weight than the words that describe that image — sometimes it’s heavier, sometimes lighter — you have to take that weight into consideration.
So you might wind up staying longer with one person’s story than the script indicated because of the lightness of the image, and on the other hand, you might stay not as long, because of the heaviness of the other story. That certainly was our experience on “English Patient,” which in some ways had a similar forwards and backwards type structure.
“We shot and printed 600,000 feet of film, which is about 113 hours of material. The film is 2 hours 30 minutes long, so that’s a 30 or 40 to 1 ratio.”
The other thing is we shot and printed 600,000 feet of film, which is about 113 hours of material. The film is 2 hours 30 minutes long, so that’s a 30 or 40 to 1 ratio. The first time we put it all together it was over 5 hours long. So you find more inventive ways to compress the story to find out what can be eliminated that not only doesn’t affect the story, but actually, by its elimination, improves things by putting into juxtaposition things that formerly were not. It was a very complex orchestration, shrinking it by half.
The Workflow
How did you decide to cut “Cold Mountain” with Final Cut Pro?
Starting in March of 2002, Sean Cullen, my assistant, and I went over to DigitalFilm Tree, where Ramy Katrib runs a post and design consulting company that specializes in Final Cut Pro. When we told him that we were interested in using Final Cut on “Cold Mountain,” he was very enthusiastic. But we had questions because it hadn’t yet been used on a project of this scale. We brainstormed together over three days developing the “Cold Mountain” workflow.
Your decision to use Final Cut Pro shocked the industry. Were you nervous about the decision?
Well in a kind of a healthy way, I was. Over the last 30 years or so, it seems to be a pattern with me that I will plunge into a new technology, both for the benefits that it can bring me directly, but also because I’m very interested in systems, and how they work within a creative environment. I was one of the first people in the U.S. to use flatbed editing machines in the late 1960s, after having used the upright Moviola. At the time that was seen as a radical departure.
Were there bottom-line differences in working with Final Cut Pro than with other systems you’ve worked with?
At the basic everyday level of working, say when I’m assembling a scene, the differences were trivial. I felt very comfortable with Final Cut within a day or two of working with it.
But one of the significant things about Final Cut is that it’s not a software/hardware hybrid system, it’s a software-only system. That means it almost completely eliminates the natural tendency of editing systems to develop bottlenecks. That started to be an issue with the emergence of flatbeds, which were significantly more expensive than Moviolas. They offered real advantages, but the disadvantage was that you couldn’t simply say, “Let’s get another one.”
But on “Cold Mountain,” we are able to have four Final Cut Pro stations, fully-equipped, for less than we would have had to spend for one Avid station. And to have four stations working on a feature film is a significant improvement over what you usually have, which is two. It’s good to have four burners on a stove when you’re cooking dinner. You can put all of them to use. You can cook a big dinner on two burners, but you have to juggle the pots and pans a lot more.
In addition, we were able to create what you would call satellite stations on four laptops equipped with Final Cut, offload the media for a number of sequences, and continue to work. So if we ever got into a situation where suddenly there was a huge amount of footage, we were able expand out to eight working stations.
