Walter Murch: An Interview with the Editor of “Cold Mountain”
Did you use the editing technology to collaborate with Minghella?
Certainly we didn’t look at everything together, but for a number of scenes during the shooting, if there was an issue with something, I would go up to location and take a laptop and show him the cut. And we would explore certain other things with the footage that was in the dailies in the laptop.
We also burned DVDs with DVD Studio Pro. Each day, we would burn and distribute a DVD of the dailies not only to Anthony, on location about three hours away, but to producer Sidney Pollack, 8,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Everyone had a library of everything that had been shot, organized by the date that it was shot, as a point of reference.
You’ve cut a major project on Final Cut Pro. What’s your assessment?
Certainly it’s a great product, and it just got significantly greater with Final Cut 4. We were about as far out on a limb as you could be, 6 months in a country that 14 years ago was solidly part of the Soviet Bloc and is still one of the most hard-pressed of all the Eastern European countries. And there we were in the middle of it all with 4 Power Mac G4 Final Cut stations happily cutting away, with no serious downtime at all on any of the stations. We were really very confident in what we were doing and in the hardware and software supporting it.
“The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.”
The Future
Minghella says he starts directing a movie as he writes and writes with the camera on location. Is an even more radical bridging of roles being enabled by digital technology, where anybody with a robust system can be writer, camera man, director and editor?
Well, sure. Just look at somebody like Robert Rodriguez, who does exactly that. But that’s something that’s always been part of the industry. Look at Charlie Chaplin, that’s exactly what he did. It really comes down to where is your interest and focus. Certainly digital technologies facilitate that role expansion, but the lack of digital technologies never stopped anyone who was really interested in pursuing it.
Back in the late 60s, when Francis Coppola, George Lucas and I graduated from film school, we looked at the industry and saw that everything was compartmentalized. We didn’t like it. In film school you are forced by the nature of the school and how they teach to involve yourself in all the aspects of making a film. So we set up American Zoetrope to be a professional version of filmmaking the way we had made films at film school. Things hadn’t been digitized yet, but they were certainly becoming miniaturized, and we were energized by the impact of the integrated circuit and the transistor.
Film school was a change incubator for you, but “film” is viewed by proponents of digital acquisition as an endangered species.
It will drop away, I think. You can already see that happening. It didn’t in the case of “Cold Mountain.” We shot on film for many reasons, one being the fact that at one point we would have something like 13 cameras shooting simultaneously. It wouldn’t have been feasible in Romania to have 13 24p digital cameras shooting simultaneously.
But we did make a digital intermediate on this film. The entire film was scanned digitally at high resolution and a negative has been laser scanned out. So although we have a piece of film that is our negative, it’s actually been through a digital process, and all of the timing and color balance was done digitally.
Are new editors missing anything by learning on non-linear editing systems instead of older systems, or is that older editors waxing nostalgic?
I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which — in the right proportion — is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.
The other “missing” advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.
You push the technology, but you still use index cards to create a scene-board for a project. Will those ever be subsumed for you into a software visualization tool?
I actually tried a version of that on my previous film, “K-19.” But I went back to doing it by hand, with index cards, post-it notes and Sharpies because there seems to be something essential about the hand-craftedness of some things. Certainly it is true for me in this case. I love striking the right balance between hi-tech and lo-tech.
