Latest / Half the Picture / #6 - WALTER MURCH

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#6 - WALTER MURCH · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  Hello, welcome back to Half the Picture Podcast. My name is Billy Barnell and I am so
• 0:05
  excited and thrilled to be joined today by Mr. Walter Merchard in today, Walter. Welcome.
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  Very good. Excellent. So I guess there's so much to talk about when it comes to your work.
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  I mean, the body of films that you've worked on over the last 50, 60 years has so many of them
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  have become kind of locked into the annals of great American films, great films in general.
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  I mean, just, you know, listing off my head, I mean, films that you've worked on,
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  you were the supervising sandediser on the Godfather films, you were the picture in sandediser
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  on the conversation, picture in sandediser on the apocalypse now, picture editor on Julia,
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  I mean, imbarable likeness of being the English patient, jarhead,
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  pounded Mr Ripley, I mean, so many great films, you wrote what is arguably the book on editing
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  in the blink of an eye. Yeah, and have just finished writing a new book called suddenly something
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  clicked. There you go. So you're a prolific chap. And as for me being a someone who's
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  who studied editing at university, I mean, your books and your films were such a, you know,
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  were a huge source of inspiration for your personally as well. And as were the films you worked on,
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  I'd like to go back to the very start of your career if I can back to when you were working in sound
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  because sound is the little that you came from before editing picture. And as I say, you worked
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  as the supervising sand editor on the Godfather. And I was wondering if I could ask you about a
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  really specific detail in that film. I'm not sure if you'd be able to recall it for me, but
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  you've taught, I've heard you talk before about the the final scene of that film where
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  Michael and Kay, Diane Keaton's character, there's a divide between them. And one of
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  Michael's aides, Matthew Osoades closes the door on Kay. And it's the shot that closes the
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  ends the film. And I've heard you talk for about how that the sound of finding the perfect door
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  closing, you know, was a quite a tough thing to find. Like your pet, it sounded like you spent
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  quite a long time recording different sounds of different doors shutting and like, you know,
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  and just sort of finding and finding the perfect sound for that. And I was wondering if you could
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  maybe talk me through what that process was like. How long did it take you to find the perfect door
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  shutting sound? Yeah, you have to kind of go back in time, 50 plus years. And at that time,
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  most of the stock sound effects for film were inherited from the old days where sound was recorded
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  on optical sound. And they had transferred all of those sounds to magnetic sound,
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  but they still had that kind of 1940s, 1930s sound to them. So when I was going through the library
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  at the Paramount, I kept shaking my head thinking, these are terrible, you know, because I had
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  as a teenager fallen in love with the tape recorder, which was magnetic. So the fact that movie
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  sound, this amazing medium of movie sound was still wedded just on practical sense to a lot of
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  the old sound effects. And also at that time, for most films, the approach was just put some sound
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  on it and get it out there. You know, there were some films that paid attention to sound, but most
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  of them were just trying to do the most efficient, cheapest, but adequate way of putting the sound
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  in. So there were some door closes, naturally, and they were all in my view terrible. So I just,
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  I went around, this is in San Francisco, listening to doors, thinking, is that the door? No.
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  It's also important for me, I mean, this is a personal thing, that that was the last sound
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  effect in the film. And for all we know, we didn't know that Godfather too would ever be made.
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  We didn't know that this would be a huge success, but it was just whatever that sound is, it needs
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  to be good, meaning solid and firm, but with a hint of absolutism that Michael had just lied
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  to Kay. So this was him shutting her out of a whole part of his life. So it had to,
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  you know, in some ineffable way talk about that. And ironically, the sound, that particular door
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  was a door in Frances Coppola's house in San Francisco, which was an old Victorian house built
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  by the sugar magnet, the Sprickles family, in the late 19th century. And so everything was solid
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  wood. And it just, it happens that the director of the Godfather owned the house in which I found
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  the best sound. I mean, I'm going into obsessive detail here, but you asked for it. Yeah, you know,
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  please, please, this is what we're here for. I mean, did you just have literally a black and
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  an anger tape recorder and you would just sat there and you just shut the door and like,
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  record held it up and recorded it. That just as simple as that. That's it.
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  And yeah, as you say, it is the sound that closes the film. And I get it at the time,
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  it was, that could have just the last sound in the Godfather, you know, Sarger, if you like.
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  So it's, and speaking of, of the films we worked on with Frances, we mentioned, I mentioned
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  the conversation earlier, which was your first film as Pitcher and so as well as the sound
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  designer and then engineer. I mean, that film, I know that film obviously, it was, it's the 50th
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  founder history of that film this year and a lot has been said about it recently. I know you've
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  been interviewed about it a lot at the BFI and places like that and how, and when I was
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  be visiting it for this interview, I was struck by how the film is such a sort of strange,
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  numerous quality to it in terms of how it seems to embody so much about filmmaking, but also as
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  I've been, you know, as I've read about your own editing process, it seems to embody a lot about
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  your own approach to editing because the setup of that film that something is sort of perfect and
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  technical and fixed as a sound recording of a couple walking around you in Square in San Francisco,
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  the edges of it can be kind of blurred and muddied and its definition can shift depending on the
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  parry call, the man who's listening to it. So the point where he fundamentally misunderstands
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  the meaning of it as we find out by the end, you know, we'll kill it, kill us if we got the chance,
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  he'd kill us if we got the chance. And I know you've talked about editing as being kind of like almost
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  the dance between you and the movie, or the avid, whatever sets up you're working on. There's a
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  kind of dance going on between something that's very technical as an editing machine and then you
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  as an editor, you know, the human operating it and there's a blurring there and out of that sort of
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  congress, if you like, the movie and the art and the movie comes through. I mean,
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  when you were working on the movie, was that something that resonated of you about the story?
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  And I guess, does that resonate of you now about the film for years on?
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  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had worked as a sound editor, sound designer, what we would call it
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  today on Francis Coppola's The Rain People, 1969 and then George Lucas and I wrote THX 1138
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  together and I did the sound on that and then I did the sound on the godfather. So I'd worked on
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  these three feature films and Francis, after the success of godfather, paramount through Francis
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  a bone to get him to do godfather too, which was okay, you can do this little film if you want,
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  but you have to squeeze it in between the end of the schedule on godfather one and the beginning
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  of pre-production on godfather two. So that was the technical scheduling challenge of that film was
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  that. So anyway, in putting the film together, Francis looked at me one day and said, well,
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  you're a sound man, yes, but so you understand these guys. So why don't you edit the picture of
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  conversation because you are that central character and you understand him so you'll know what to do
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  and you know I had edited commercials and documentaries picture edited before but not a feature
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  but that's what I wanted to do. I said yes, absolutely. So that was all of the stuff that you were
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  just talking about is baked into the very idea of the film repeating the conversation over and over
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  again and having slightly different meanings attached to it, even though it's exactly the same
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  thing each time. It's kind of the opposite of russia mon where you see different interpretations
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  of the event here. You hear the same event except for the last time you hear it, but because of
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  the context of things that have happened in the film, you hear different things in them.
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  So yeah, it was a definite, it was a mutual decision based on me as a sound person,
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  both in Francis' eyes giving me the trust to do something like, I mean, he just directed
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  the biggest film of the year, Godfather, and he was giving this kid who had never edited a feature
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  film before the chance to edit his next film conversation. So, you know, there was a lot of
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  responsibility and we thought a lot about that situation. Well, I mean, you pulled it off. I mean,
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  50 years on, the movie still has such a great impact and I mean, something I like to ask
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  specifically to that film because of course Gene Happen is a starlit film and it's arguably,
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  it's one of his finest performances. And I've heard you talk before about how being an editor,
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  obviously you're working with all that footage and just to share them out of footage
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  to cut with. And when you come to the carving out performance, you really do become as an editor
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  and I can attest to this, you become intimately familiar with every single like contour of
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  an actor's performance. Also, there may be even them, they are all the director. You see every
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  single side of it, every facet. And especially with that film because Harry Call is in every,
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  I think, is in every single scene of the movie. You know, we see everything from his perspective
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  so much. And I've heard you talk about how meeting actors in the flesh after you've edited one of
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  their films can be a really strange kind of almost discombobulating experience because they're
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  standing there in front of you and you've obviously, you know, you've studied every facet of their
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  performance and suddenly they're right there and you know, it's so strange. I mean, did you have
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  that experience? Did you ever meet Gene Happen and actually worked in the film and did you have that
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  experience specifically with him? Yeah, I mean, it happens on every film. It's particularly intense
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  on conversation because again, it was the first feature film that I was editing. So I was,
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  I was alert to all of these things. And the screenplay and the film are told, as you pointed out,
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  from the point of view of Hackman. He's not in every shot, but every shot is either him or
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  something that he's looking at. And so there's no escape from him, his point of view.
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  And this is a technique that filmmakers use when the lead character is not naturally a,
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  what you would call a starring role of a sympathetic character. Harry Calle is an in-bred
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  paranoid, obsessive, silent, constricted personality. Very difficult for Gene Hackman to act to
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  that part because he's not like that at all. But so is the talented Mr. Ripley is the same. It's
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  all from Ripley's point of view. And he's not a sympathetic character. I put that word in quotes.
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  Chinatown is the same. When an audience watches those films, part of them says, why am I looking at
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  this guy? But there is no escape valve. And in a sense, they become, it's kind of like the Stockholm
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  syndrome. They become hostages to that point of view. And most of the time, if they stick with the
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  film, they start to adopt, despite themselves, the point of view of this slightly deviant character.
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  And as an editor, that happens in spades because, yeah, you're right. You as an editor, you see
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  everything over and over and over again. And you know it much more deeply in a sense
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  than the director does or any of the other people who work on the film. And so, yes, when you
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  meet the actors after that experience, and I can't remember. I met Hackman before shooting,
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  but I don't know that I ever saw him. Maybe, and maybe we did some ADR. I think, yeah, I did meet him
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  afterwards. But yeah, you're looking, you know things that the actor doesn't even know because
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  a good double percentage of what an actor does bubbles up from their own subconscious. They're not
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  aware that they're doing what they're doing for some time, but you are, that's all grist for your
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  editorial mill. Yeah, I just, I can't imagine just like, as you say, you know, he didn't virtually
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  every scene and his, and the film is alive with his, with him, you know, it would easily,
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  everything from his perspective and, and we see the world from his perspective. And it's just,
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  and it's such an evocative character study of a film. So yeah, cutting that performance and
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  cutting that film. Yeah. And especially being your first film as picture editor. Yeah, I can't
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  imagine that experience. It was, it was complicated slightly by the fact that Francis abandoned
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  shooting with 10 shooting days to go on a 45, 50 day schedule. So in essence, 20% of the script
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  was never filmed. And so when he took off to do pre-production on Godfather 2, I said, Francis,
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  what are we going to do? He said, I don't know, I don't know, do something. See what you come up with.
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  And if we have to, we will ask Paramount for a few extra shooting days to sew up some of the wounds
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  that I might have inflicted on this, on my own script. And so Richard Chu, who was the associate
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  editor on the film and myself, banged away at the film. Francis was mostly not there.
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  He was doing pre-production and then shooting on Godfather. So he would come back to every couple
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  of weeks, maybe every three weeks. We'd have a screening and we'd have a discussion for a couple
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  days and then he'd take off again and we'd have a list of things to do. But he would also say,
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  yeah, try to do all these things, but then surprise me too. I want to be surprised. So
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  we took that literally and came up with a structure that allowed us to close that gap.
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  And in the end, we did need one shot that had to be shot to tie it all together. But it was a
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  simple rear-angle view of Harry call discovering that the tapes had been stolen. Because in the script,
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  that was not what happened. The Meredith, the girl had stolen the plans for Harry's secret microphones.
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  Nothing to do. That whole part of the story had nothing to do with the main part of the story.
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  So by making her an accomplice and by implication, Bernie Moran, also an accomplice because she
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  worked for Bernie, then that tied everything together. And then by inverting that, the emphasis on
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  the line at the end, he'd kill us if he had the chance. The idea was to pin that idea to the
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  bulletin board that, oh, they're the murderers, not the Robert Duval character, Mr. C.
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  I mean, speaking of Robert Duval, I feel like this conversation won't be complete without
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  at least mentioning Apocalypse Now, which of course was such a huge film. Just in the landscape of
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  war films and in Francis' career, and you won your first Oscar for sound, working on that film.
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  And when I was revisiting that film for this interview, which I hadn't seen it for a while, I was
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  quite amazed by how the structure of that film, which is this beautiful episodic structure,
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  which I think is maybe one of the best in film. You have that device of the river,
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  Martin Sheen's journey up the river in the boat towards Kurtz's compound. And you have all these
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  incredible set pieces leaked by the device of the river. And I'm watching it. I was, there's a
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  viewer, your bio-rhythm, and your investment in the film is taking care of so well, it's so oiled,
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  those sort of the river and the machine machinery underneath the surface of the film is so
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  efficient in terms of bringing you into the story. You know, the first 50 minutes, the first
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  set, you have the incredible visceral action of, you know, Kennel Killgore scenes, Robert
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  Neville scenes on the beach, and the general scenes that start bringing you in. And as I say,
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  as a viewer, your bio-rhythm is taking care of so well, it's almost like, and you make it look
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  easy, I guess, because that is so much that is in the editing, and you almost make it look easy,
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  but working on that film, because I know that film famously was a bit chaotic to say the least,
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  the production of it, and you had a huge amount of work to work with. How difficult for it,
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  was it as an editor to maintain that sort of sense of buyer of them and sort of leading the audience
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  in by the hand into that story? Difficult. But, I mean, you put your finger on the key element there,
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  which is the river, that that, the river, the journey up river, which comes from Joseph
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  Conrad's novel of the trip up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness, the novel on which the film
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  Bucklems was based, that river provides the spine of it. The other key to it is that
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  Willard is the audience, so if you take care of Willard, you take care of the audience in a sense,
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  and Willard doesn't do anything really until he gets to the the Kurtz compound, and even there,
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  his role is, is only comes to a point where he actually kills Kurtz. Before that, he's imprisoned
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  and talked to and everything. Anyway, Willard is a lens through which the audience sees this
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  landscape, this war. parenthetically, that's one of the reasons that Harvey Keitel was fired from
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  the film, is that both in terms of his acting approach, he was very aggressive and wanted to act,
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  according to what I've seen of that performance and what Francis told me, and also his face is
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  a clenched fist sometimes, and when you think in advance, I mean when Francis told me,
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  I've hired Harvey Keitel, I thought, great, Willard is a killer, but I forgot the fact that
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  in fact Willard doesn't do anything all throughout the film, he just, he sits there in the boat,
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  he looks, he reads a dusky, the one thing he does do at the midpoint of the film is kill the
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  Vietnamese woman who's been terribly injured in the Sam Pant massacre, and that whole scene was
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  something that I wrote during the typhoon hiatus, the typhoon had destroyed some sets during
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  shooting, Francis came back to San Francisco for I think six weeks, he showed me what he had shot,
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  and he said, is there anything missing? And I thought, yes, there is, the boat is too much at the
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  service of the film, because this boat under normal circumstances is a patrol boat that is a police
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  watchdog for terrorists, and so they would be stopping traffic on the river to conduct searches,
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  so I said, let's do one of those, and he said, okay, write it, so I sat down and wrote the scene,
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  and in that, you know, Willard gives the coup de gras for this, everyone else had been killed,
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  and the poor Vietnamese woman was near death, but chief wanted to take her to an arvain, ARVN hospital,
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  and Willard said, not not doing that, the point is that Willard is a witness, and that allows
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  the audience access, in a sense, in a way that if he were an active character throughout the film,
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  that would be very different. Yeah, I mean, that's funny, they mentioned that Sam Panmask has seen,
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  because it's not that, even when I, but I was actually really quite young, and even when I was,
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  you know, young and watching the movie, that scene always had such an impact, I think, like you say,
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  because Willard, up to that point, is a very passive, you know, he has the eyes and ears of the audience,
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  and then it, not until the very end of the film, does he actually take action, I guess, yeah,
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  a spear gets put in his hand, and he assassinated Kurtz, but that, that's the only other point,
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  as you say, where he just, wait, does something, the same thing, but, you know, with the Vietnamese woman.
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  And staying on Apocalypse Now, I mean, there's something that I've, a very famous adage that you've,
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  that you've coined for your book in The Blink of an Eye, is the fact that, and you know,
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  you go right into the title of that book instantly, that the Blink, an actor's blinks almost seem
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  to subconsciously mark a, a cut point in a shot, like you notice this when you were working on
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  the conversation, and you editing Gene Happens performance, and like you saw he would blink,
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  he would blink just after the point where you felt emotionally, this is the right place to cut.
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  And, and when I was watching Apocalypse Now again, and sort of, I had this in my mind,
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  well, one of the amazing things on it is about Robert DeVolves' performance, especially in those,
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  in the, the right, the right of the Valkyrie, it's the famous attack on the village,
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  and then the Napalm bombing sequence. It's the fact that you have all these pirate
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  techniques going off on the, yeah, on the set, all that set, you know, the land that you're
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  there, the Francis was shooting on, all these explosions and all these gunshots and all this
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  incredible action is happening. And DeVolves just seems to be, he doesn't seem, I didn't, I almost
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  didn't see him blink once, you know, I was watching it, I was keeping an eye on him, I was like, yeah,
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  there's an incredible shot, which I think is his last shot in the film, where he,
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  a mortar shell goes off behind him and Martin Sheen and all the other characters, and everyone
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  reacts to it, everyone flinches or, but DeVolves just doesn't even, yeah, he doesn't even blink.
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  And then he just, you know, this wall's going to end and then walks out of shot and walks out of
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  the film. And it's, and it, to me, it felt like he was almost serving character, is the stone cold,
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  oh yeah, army, Colonel, that he just wasn't, he was not being phased by at all. And I guess
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  when you were editing the film and editing that his scenes, did you feel that yourself in terms of
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  you, you observing that in his performance and did, and, and as we, as we've said, the blinking
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  have almost designated a cut point. Did that make it more complicated for you to cut his scenes? And,
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  and I guess, no, no, I mean, that, that aspect to his performance was also baked into the screenplay
• 24:50
  that Francis and John Melius wrote. And it, it was echoed in Michael Hare's narration.
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  I think when it, it dissolves to the nighttime's barbecue scene, the narration says, you know,
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  he wasn't even going to get so much as a scratch here. He had his golden light around him.
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  And that that made his boys trust him because if he wasn't afraid, they had no reason to be afraid.
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  To, in point of fact, I, I never consciously thought about Dubal and any blink points with him.
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  I think it had to do with the nature of the kind of material that he was in, which is, you know,
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  most of the time he's in a medium or a samurai long shot. There are very few big close-ups of him
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  except when he's piloting the helicopter. Anyway, there's, there's lots of action. So,
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  it's a different thing than when you're in some scene like in the conversation where everything's
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  quiet and you're listening to dialogue and there's a close-up and somebody blinks, you have time
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  to appreciate that. Here, it's a, it's a, it's a different, different kind of a thing.
• 26:04
  Okay. Yeah, it was just, like, it, it was just so impressive that this guy who was, yeah,
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  surrounded by the absolute chaos, so that production was still just absolutely unfazed by it.
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  So, jumping ahead, I guess, because I don't think any discussion of your career would be
• 26:18
  complete without at least mentioning Return to Oz, which is your first and an only film that you
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  worked on as the, you know, director of the director, it was your director for real debut. And,
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  and that film is such a fascinating film to me. I mean, it did not just only as a legacy
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  sequel to The Wizard of Oz, which is, of course, you know, this iconic American classic, but
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  having worked on all these sums that we've mentioned, conversation, oculaps now, Julia, the godfather,
• 26:43
  and of all these great directors like Francis and George, were you then excited to jump into
• 26:47
  directing yourself? And did you feel like you'd learned a lot of lessons from those films that
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  you were going to buy to making your first film? Yes. I would say it's, it's a little bit like
• 27:00
  watching dancers dance, and you're in the audience thinking, I'm going to dance someday, but
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  the experience of watching other people dance and the experience of you actually dancing yourself
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  is a very different thing because your, your body is engaged here, and by body, I mean,
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  your total being when you're directing. So, definitely having, you know, worked with Fred
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  Xeniman, Fred Francis Coppola, George Lucas, I learned things by watching them and their decisions,
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  but I wasn't around during shooting on any of those films. I was in post-production,
• 27:44
  and so that's a different environment than when you're actually on the set. So, I, plus I,
• 27:54
  you know, I was 40, 41 when we were shooting Return to Oz. It's a little late to be directing
• 28:03
  your very first film. You, you have a lot of, there's a lot of build-up of information that you've
• 28:11
  learned by that time, and in a sense, there's a reason that we have, that, that soldiers are recruited
• 28:19
  when they're 18, 20 years old because they're invulnerable, they think, you know, when you're 40,
• 28:29
  that's midway through your life and you're a little more aware of mortality in, in all senses of
• 28:35
  that word. So, you know, it just happened that that was what happened to me. What I'm saying is I,
• 28:43
  I both learned from all of the experience that I'd had up to that point, but none of that experience,
• 28:51
  none of that learned experience filtered through to the visceral experience of actually directing
• 29:00
  a multi-million dollar film on an iconic subject matter, such as the Wizard of Oz.
• 29:07
  I mean, I was wanted to start to ask you about the tone of the film, because the tone of the film
• 29:11
  is so interesting, and it's so different from the original. It has, well, as the original is,
• 29:15
  obviously, almost this, it's become a kind of iconic portrait of fantastical, like, innocence and
• 29:20
  whimsy, I guess. And then the thing about Return to Oz is that it's, it's so tricky, and it's so,
• 29:26
  there's a real sense of, of danger to it, but also a sense of excitement. It almost has more
• 29:30
  in common for me, or something like, almost like Night of the Hunter, or like a sort of disobedient
• 29:35
  fairy tale, like American Gothic fairy tale like that when I was watching it, which I was really
• 29:39
  peeked by, and, you know, there's that scene where where Dorothy and Osmo sort of escaped from the,
• 29:45
  you know, this sort of institution where she's been taken to at the start of the film, and they
• 29:49
  run into the river, which really reminds me of that scene in Night of the Hunter we're rock with,
• 29:52
  and probably mentioned. And I guess when you were making that, the film, it's a film that doesn't
• 29:59
  really seem to talk down to its audience, perceived audience of kids. It's a film that sort of
• 30:02
  presents this world on screen to the audience, okay, this world is dangerous, but it's also,
• 30:08
  it can be exciting and thrilling, and all the other positive things we associate, I guess, with
• 30:12
  with Os. And did you feel at the time like you were sort of reacting against, or fighting against
• 30:17
  the fashion of the day, like set by films, like Vice-Bealburg, like, I mean, ET, or like the Gune,
• 30:22
  say, or Star Wars, which are very, I guess, much more, I guess, more overtly friendly,
• 30:27
  tonally, I guess. Did you feel like you were sort of fighting against that fashion a bit?
• 30:32
  Yeah, I had grown up on the books. I had not seen Wizard of Oz the film until I was probably 12 or
• 30:42
  13, but by that time I'd read eight of the Os books. So my imaginative life was formed very
• 30:51
  much so by the books that the author wrote, not by the Wizard of Oz. And when I saw the Wizard of
• 30:59
  Oz, even as a 12-year-old, I thought, this isn't Oz, this is silly. So I was simultaneously trying
• 31:08
  to be true to the aesthetics of the stories, which are weird and frightening, as a grim
• 31:17
  spareytale would be rather than a vaudeville performance and an excuse in a sense to sing some
• 31:27
  songs and do some dancing, a pretext, which was, Wizard of Oz was turned by Elf rank bound
• 31:35
  himself into a musical in the early days of the 20th century. And it was a huge success. It
• 31:43
  triggered the musical babes in Toiland, which was an attempt to piggyback on the success
• 31:49
  of The Wizard of Oz. So there were two streams. There was the vaudeville stream and there was
• 31:57
  the books, and I was trying to move the story back to the books. And also, I knew that I could never,
• 32:05
  never, never make a film that would slot in as a sequel to the 1939 film. It had been whatever
• 32:19
  30-plus years since that film, more, 40-plus years. And the whole tradition of 1930s MGM
• 32:33
  musicals was brought to a peak at that film, ending color. And then the atom bomb went off in World War
• 32:44
  2, and there were concentration camps and Holocaust and horrible things happened. And we were
• 32:57
  separated from that 39th sensibility by all kinds of psychic trauma. And I wanted to make it
• 33:08
  simply stated to premises, what would have really happened to a girl whose house was destroyed
• 33:17
  in a tornado in 1899, knocked on conscious, and came back with a story to tell, what would have
• 33:28
  happened? Well, her parents or your aunt and uncle, they would be concerned. Maybe she is
• 33:36
  something's wrong there. What would they do? And then the story would take off from that
• 33:43
  premise. So I wanted to, in a sense, the concept of the Oz World is the Sun. And in 1939, there was
• 33:53
  a planet set in orbit around that Sun, which was Judy Garland. And what I wanted to do was to launch
• 34:01
  another planet around that Sun, a different planet, a kind of Mars version of the planet,
• 34:10
  which we saw in 1939. And this is this quality that you described, which I think has made the film
• 34:17
  age so well. I mean, not only because the filmmaking, so much of the filmmaking is practical,
• 34:21
  like you've got all those amazing, amazing puppets and models like TikTok and all these
• 34:27
  characters, like, you know, the chicken and they're like, you know, replacing Toto with the talking
• 34:31
  chicken, which I loved and all these different elements. But also that sense of realism, I think
• 34:37
  that which is very much, I think has become more and more accepted and popular in films and
• 34:42
  popular cinema in the last 20 years. It's aged very well, I think, in that area that it has
• 34:46
  grounds and approaches. That was the, I was approached by Disney. They just formed me up one day and
• 34:52
  said, come and talk to us about making a film. Maybe because I was associated with Lucas and
• 34:58
  he'd had this huge success and I had worked on the black stallion, which also was a big success.
• 35:03
  And those two films were kind of Disney films in the best sense of that word. And at Walt
• 35:12
  himself had died in 1966 and this was the early 80s and 14 years had passed and the studio was,
• 35:24
  it kind of was always saying, what would Walt do, you know, scratching their head?
• 35:32
  So they've reached out to a number of filmmakers. Matthew Robbins was one. I was another
• 35:38
  to see if they could inject some new sensibility. And going down to that meeting, I thought,
• 35:46
  what possibly would I like to do that they would like to do? And my son at that time was
• 35:54
  four years, three, four years old. We were watching Sesame Street, which was, had a lot of
• 36:00
  puppets by Frank Oz and Jim Henson, you know, afternoon kids programs. And I, aside from the fact
• 36:11
  that Frank Oz had the name Oz, I thought there's something Ozzy and about the sensibility of these
• 36:18
  puppets. So that's, I went down and said, I want to make a sequel to the Wizard of Oz and use
• 36:26
  Muppetry to tell a story. And they thought, this is a great idea, not only because it might be good,
• 36:34
  but because we own the rights to all of those books, which I have no idea going into the meeting
• 36:41
  that that was the case. Well, there's a scene in that film, which, which sort of fascinates me when
• 36:49
  I think about it, because it's the scene where Dorothy, Piper Laurie's character,
• 36:52
  Dorothy's guardian takes her to essentially a psychiatrist, like a turn of the centuries like
• 36:57
  a psychiatrist, and he shows her the, the machine, which he will then, you know, I guess,
• 37:02
  for a little bit, if you haven't seen her since it was, but like, you know, they were used to
• 37:05
  attempt to cure what they perceive as Dorothy's, I guess, you know, maybe madness, madness is too
• 37:10
  strong a word, but you know, and having read about you and your, your sort of work and your
• 37:15
  interests and how I know, because I know you're very fascinated by sort of that period, that turn of
• 37:19
  the century period and the technology that was created around that time, like Thomas Edison and
• 37:24
  the light bulb and motion pictures, obviously, I mean, you of course synced the sound and image
• 37:30
  with that the first ever recorded footage of that, you know, Thomas Edison and Dixon's clip of
• 37:35
  the man playing the violin in some recording horn. And so it seems to me that you're very interested
• 37:39
  in that period and that time and the technology and what it meant the society. I mean, and that is
• 37:45
  kind of like your bait into the film and into that scene specifically. I mean, was that something
• 37:49
  that you were conscious of when you're making the film or was that something that was in it peak
• 37:52
  your interest more, making the film in terms of that era and that those ideas? No, absolutely,
• 37:58
  that that by the way, that's a real machine that was designed in 1903 to do exactly what you
• 38:08
  see it do in the film. It was an electro therapy machine. It's not an electroshock machine,
• 38:15
  it's an electro therapy machine because they had begun to understand that humans are full of
• 38:21
  electricity, which is a new idea that the nervous system is a electrical system. In fact, the whole
• 38:29
  wizard of Oz was triggered by L. Frank Bounds personal experience in Chicago at the Chicago
• 38:39
  World's Fair of 1893, which was the first electrified fair. And Thomas Edison was there with his
• 38:48
  movies, his canadascope, and Nikola Tesla was there. Tesla with Westinghouse arranged all of the
• 38:56
  electricity at the fair. So for the first time buildings were outlined with light bulbs,
• 39:05
  you know, something we see all the time now, but that was, you imagine seeing that for the first
• 39:09
  time. And Tesla and Edison were called wizards. The wizard of Menlo Park was Edison and Tesla
• 39:19
  was the wizard of I don't know where. And, you know, I, so I researched all of that and I decided
• 39:29
  unlike the 1939 film, which was arguably set in a kind of ambiguous time zone. Maybe it's the late
• 39:38
  1930s on a farm, you just don't know. But I decided definitely under lines of dialogue that cement
• 39:46
  this is the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900. And which is exactly when the Wizard of Oz book
• 39:54
  was being written. So I was definitely tied into all of that. And I discovered that machine by
• 40:01
  accident at an antique store that normally sold, I don't know, remainders from estate sales.
• 40:11
  But one of the estate sales was the grandfather of somebody who had just died. And he had invented
• 40:20
  this machine, which was made in Chicago, which is where bound was from. So it all tied together.
• 40:27
  And did you get a good price for it? 125 dollars, which was not nothing back in those days.
• 40:35
  And it's in the movie. That's the one that's immortalized.
• 40:40
  Fantastic. I mean, staying with that idea of turn of the century, I guess, sort of technology,
• 40:45
  I guess the birth of cinema and the birth of motion pictures, which is what we're touching on
• 40:49
  with with Edison back in the days of silent cinema of Chaplin and Keaton. Editing was for
• 40:54
  very much as classically as a woman's profession. It was for very much his sewing. You know,
• 40:59
  women, it would be something that would be done, you know, obviously in a by one woman in a room.
• 41:05
  And you know, it would be done almost by very much by insects. The technology was so primitive.
• 41:09
  And it would be done with scissors as I understand. And then as sound came in more, I guess,
• 41:15
  more male editors who were working with sound and picture came in and it became a more,
• 41:20
  I guess, a modernist workforce in a sense. As many men have got more than women. And I guess
• 41:26
  this is more of a general question about editing that I wanted to ask. But it's something that I've
• 41:30
  been, I've thought about myself sometimes time is, do you think having had the experience you've had
• 41:34
  in the industry and obviously worked with so many great teams of editors and assistants on films
• 41:37
  like Apocalypse Nail? Do you think there is a kind of fundamental difference in the way that
• 41:41
  male editors and female editors approach editing? Because there's that, there's that
• 41:45
  cliche, I guess, that like met about gray matter and white matter in men's brains and women's
• 41:51
  brains about how, I mean, this is, I'm being very general here, but like how men are apparently
• 41:55
  better at reading maps and women are apparently better at multitasking. And I don't know how much
• 42:00
  stock to put into that as an idea, but I think, do you think there is like any fundamental difference?
• 42:05
  I mean, there are obviously a great number of great female editors like D.D. Allen and film
• 42:09
  issue makers. There are male editors like yourself and, you know, Paul Hirsch and guys like that.
• 42:13
  I mean, do you think there is a difference? No.
• 42:15
  Two things, I would say. Somebody asked Thelma once as a woman, how do you work on these
• 42:27
  frightening films? And she said, they're not frightening until I cut them.
• 42:34
  So she's able to make these films frightening by her editing, how she edits them. So she's,
• 42:44
  you know, anyway, that's a possible answer to one question. I would also say that film editing,
• 42:51
  as we understand it, it was always mostly men, but there were more women in the days before
• 43:01
  sound came in, but definitely negative cutting was almost all women.
• 43:08
  And I mean, we don't do negative cutting anymore, but the two preeminent negative cutters
• 43:17
  who are still working or have just recently died are women, because that is really feminine.
• 43:27
  Let's say, and women don't smoke quite so much as men, and in the old days, film could explode
• 43:34
  if you dropped a match on it. So there were all kinds of reasons for that distinction.
• 43:40
  But to go with your idea, to go back to the Neanderthal era, who goes out hunting men.
• 43:58
  They go out with spears to try to get a mastodon. They might come back with a rabbit,
• 44:05
  but they go out to see what they can get in the woods. The women stay back at base camp and
• 44:13
  collecting berries and vegetables or whatever, they're the gathering part of hunter gathering.
• 44:23
  And they're also the cooks, so the men come back and they dump the meat, whatever it is,
• 44:30
  and they say, ring me when dinner's ready. And the women have to figure out what to do with this
• 44:39
  meat. Well, I was expecting a good mastodon leg. Well, I got this rabbit, see what you can do with it.
• 44:46
  So in a sense, filmmaking is the hunters who go out to get the meat and they bring back the
• 44:55
  the carcass of whatever they could get out there in the world. And editing is a feminine profession.
• 45:03
  We're receiving what the hunters get and we try to make the best meal out of this material. So
• 45:11
  when you're out there in the forest hunting, you are engaged in a masculine
• 45:20
  organization. You might even be a woman, but you're using the masculine part of your map territory
• 45:26
  brain to use your analogy. When you're editing or cooking, you're using your feminine part to
• 45:35
  make a delicious nourishing meal out of whatever was brought back. Having said that,
• 45:43
  it's a hierarchical system like the military. And in terms of post-production, the editor,
• 45:52
  the film editor is now in a masculine position relative to the sound editors and the visual
• 45:59
  effects editors. And what the editor says goes and they have to make the best they can with what
• 46:07
  the editor has come up with. So, you know, it's a series of Russian dolls with a little
• 46:15
  genetic determinism built in. I should say for the record that, yeah, I mean, I guess
• 46:22
  I was being very general with the idea, but yeah, it was just interesting to me because obviously,
• 46:27
  of course, there are as many great female editors as male editors, you know, to like say people
• 46:30
  like Phelma and D.D. Allen and Marshall Lucas. And yeah, I guess it just, yeah, but it's interesting to
• 46:37
  hear about that. And hadn't considered that the idea of the mastodon in the end that in the end
• 46:41
  it taught those kind of, yeah, that's interesting. It's taking, sticking with the editing process then,
• 46:46
  because I know that something that you've said before in the blink of an eye, your book,
• 46:51
  is that with the advent of digital editing, the amount of people that are needed in the editing room
• 46:57
  in terms of a team of assistants and the editors themselves has shrunk, you know, it's no long,
• 47:01
  you don't need a team of assistants to just be filing through the 35 millimeter film you can now
• 47:06
  do all that on average or premier. And with that sort of restructuring of the editorial team,
• 47:13
  there are a few people in the room, I guess, as the main editor to bounce ideas off of,
• 47:18
  then, to talk to, I guess, because you can almost, you know, because it is possible to edit
• 47:22
  just completely on your own today. And I mean, and you said that back in 2001 or 2002, and now that we're
• 47:27
  in 2024, do you think that is the, I guess, the implications of that idea have only just become more
• 47:34
  stark, but now as technology has moved on and editing has become more and more digital.
• 47:38
  Yes, although, you know, my editing career of 60 years is cut in half analog,
• 47:51
  the first 30 years and digital the second 30 years, but even it's down to temperament. When I was
• 47:59
  editing analog, I did edit on my own. I would edit away and I would fill up bins with trims and
• 48:07
  stuff. I had an assistant, but the assistant wasn't in the room with me. And I had to do with
• 48:13
  the architecture of Zootrop studios back in the day, the rooms were so small that we couldn't
• 48:20
  easily fit two people. And I was working on a conversation I edited on a chem universal, which is
• 48:26
  an eight plate horizontal machine, which is huge, certainly compared to the small room. On Julia,
• 48:35
  I edited on a movie, but I also edited it again. My assistant was in the next room,
• 48:43
  and I would generate trims and stuff, and then at the end of the day, I would push the trims in
• 48:51
  to the assistant's room, and there was not only an assistant, but there was a second assistant,
• 48:56
  and there was an apprentice, so there were four people in the editing room. Particle fever,
• 49:02
  the documentary that I edited in 2013 had 400 hours of material. I edited it in the same
• 49:13
  room as the director, and the director was my assistant. I was using Final Cut 7 before the big
• 49:23
  shift. The technology enables all kinds of different ways of doing things,
• 49:29
  but it also comes down to the personality of the director and the producer and the editor and
• 49:38
  the team. But in general, yes, much fewer people. On Apocalypse Now, there were probably
• 49:46
  including sound editors that were probably 45 people working on 1,250,000 feet of 35 millimeter film.
• 49:58
  I can't even imagine. No wonder it took a year. The post-production was a year, I think,
• 50:03
  on picture, and then it was another year on sound, wasn't it? That's right.
• 50:06
  Well, in my case, I edited for a year picture, and then I switched over to sound,
• 50:12
  Richie Marks continued to edit picture while I was editing the sound. So there was picture
• 50:19
  editing was going on at the same time as sound editing was. It puts the two weeks I had to work on
• 50:25
  my final short, fourth, wide degree portfolio into perspective. I mean, I'm sticking with
• 50:31
  the director, because you talked about how you had the director in the editing room when you were
• 50:34
  working on Final Cut. There's a story, I think I've heard you tell about Red Zinneman,
• 50:39
  on I believe it was the film Julia, currently if I'm wrong, I think it was Julia,
• 50:42
  where you were in the final stages of post-production on the film before it came out, and there was
• 50:49
  a scene that you were, because you described very eloquently a process of like, we're finding out
• 50:53
  what's wrong in the structure of a film, and how what you think is wrong in the hand is actually
• 50:57
  in the elbow, you know, you should operate on the hand, you should operate on the elbow to
• 51:00
  sell out the problem. And you talk about there was a particular scene that you and Fred were kind
• 51:04
  of owing an owing about whether to lose, and then you decided that it needed to be cut, and as
• 51:09
  you were cutting it, Fred said to you, this was the scene that maybe you first want to make the movie,
• 51:15
  and you, and it made you get any pause, and then you said you decided, no, you know, this keep up
• 51:20
  there, and this undue the splices and take the scene out. But at the moment, it didn't feel like you
• 51:25
  felt like you were cutting either cutting the umbilical cord of the film, or it was
• 51:30
  essentially something more, something more damaging. And so it was either going to
• 51:34
  birth the film, or it would damage it. I mean, and I know you've said subsequently that it was
• 51:38
  the right decision to make, you felt for the film. But have you had experience before,
• 51:43
  since where you've had a, you've been faced with a similar, I guess, pivotal moment in terms of
• 51:47
  losing a scene, and maybe in retrospect, you felt, oh, you know, have you been sort of not as sure
• 51:52
  about, oh, maybe that should, that's weird, like that scene, and should it still be there?
• 51:56
  Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, it happens all the time. It was particularly vivid here,
• 52:03
  because we had previewed the film in a couple of theaters, and it was clear from the previews
• 52:10
  that the audience had had a hard time getting traction at the beginning of the film.
• 52:15
  Well, where do we stand to watch this film, because it was a memory within a memory,
• 52:24
  within a memory within a memory? There were four levels that you went through in the first
• 52:30
  reel of the film. And so thinking about it, I thought, well, if we cut out one of those levels,
• 52:41
  it would help. What is there a level we could cut out? And yes, there was one scene
• 52:49
  that whose repercussions never reoccurred in the body of the film. You never went back to that part
• 52:56
  of the story. So it could be snipped out without creating problems later on. So I proposed that to
• 53:06
  Fred, and he kind of thought about it, and he ominously called it Walter's Cut. Let's do Walter's Cut
• 53:15
  and see what happens. So it was my responsibility. Now, and as you said, we cut it out.
• 53:24
  He came to the editing room, which he rarely did, and sat there as I was undoing the splices.
• 53:30
  And that's when he said this scene, which was, had echoes of the McCarthy era, which was
• 53:38
  cinnamon, was a formative era. Many of his friends were blacklisted, and he made a film,
• 53:43
  Hainoon, which is a metaphor about the McCarthy period in American politics.
• 53:51
  In this scene, that was openly talked about. And he said, you know, when I read the screenplay,
• 53:58
  when I came to this scene, which was page seven, or I thought, I can make this film.
• 54:04
  And so it was the scene that allowed Fred to connect with the material. And when he said that,
• 54:12
  I thought, oh, are we cutting out the heart? Or is this, as you pointed out? And as I mentioned
• 54:20
  in the book, is this the umbilical cord that at a certain point served an essential purpose,
• 54:25
  which was to connect Fred's intimate sensibility with the film? But once you're born, you don't walk
• 54:32
  around with an umbilical cord hanging out of your belly button. You snip it. So we did cut it
• 54:40
  out. And it's, it is gone. And you don't feel the repercussions of that. And it allowed the audience
• 54:47
  respite to, you know, they got their feet on the ground quicker as a result of cutting that scene.
• 54:53
  You know, that you felt a certain pressure, I guess, get back from Fred calling it Walter's cuts,
• 54:59
  putting the illness on you. I mean, that reminds me, I had a similar, maybe not totally similar
• 55:03
  in terms of the cut, the, it was the editing, but like, I remember working on a, a friend's film and
• 55:09
  and having assembled the footage from that day, I realized that there were, we were missing a couple
• 55:14
  of shots. So I went down to the set, I said, we need these couple of shots. And we had 20 minutes
• 55:18
  to get the shots before we were booted out of the location. And he was so, but Fred, my friend
• 55:24
  the director was so stressed, he was like, just, just, you do it. You know, you do it. I was like,
• 55:28
  okay, I've never done this before. So I, I, you went down, talked to the camera, set the camera up,
• 55:32
  got the shot, okay, do this, do this. And, and we got the shots in the 20 minutes. It was only,
• 55:38
  it was free. It was, you know, very quickly done. And then on the car, Jenny, back out, I don't,
• 55:42
  I don't feel in the background. I was like, these are my, yeah, these don't work. This is,
• 55:47
  entirely on me. And this is cost how many hundreds or thousands of pounds. And it was a very
• 55:51
  low-budget film. But then, I mean, I mentioned, they shots did ultimately, one of the shots made
• 55:55
  it into the film. So I was, I was pleased about that. I didn't get it in the neck. But I'd
• 55:59
  understand that, that sense of, that sense of terror, I guess, a sight sense of terror on me,
• 56:04
  precious, certainly, in that situation. So, of course, as you say, like, you know, the,
• 56:10
  I think you mentioned it before you've been, you're working on a book at the moment called,
• 56:14
  suddenly something clicked, which is, I believe you're, you're second, your third book,
• 56:17
  accounting the conversations. And also, I know you're, you're, you're currently touring
• 56:21
  with festivals with her, her name was movie other, which is your documentary about the,
• 56:25
  you know, the movie other, the classic editing machine. I mean, can I ask you a bit about those
• 56:29
  projects, like how they're going and like, what stage they're at at this point? What incubation?
• 56:33
  Yeah, I just today sent the last page of the book to the copy editor. So this
• 56:42
  Zoom conference is a celebration of the end of my work on the book, maybe. We'll see.
• 56:54
  It's, it's actually part one of a trilogy of books that will eventually come out and
• 57:01
  favor is publishing it. And this, this book covers thoughts about film editing and sound,
• 57:11
  sound design. The other, the other books covered production, casting, writing and other things.
• 57:20
  Excellent. So I know the title, I was reading that the title comes literally from when the first,
• 57:24
  was it, I can't remember the name of the man who coined that, you know, that when he was in his
• 57:28
  right type of watching a film in a brothel, I want to say, like the, the Lumiere brothers and they
• 57:32
  were touring and they project the film and he was watching it. And then, and he wasn't really quite
• 57:36
  in sync of it. And then suddenly something clicked, I guess, as the quote goes and then
• 57:40
  he understood what he was, what he was watching. That is, that's the story, here's that, right?
• 57:43
  Yeah, he was Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, who at that time was a 27 year old reporter in a
• 57:50
  semi-preventual city in Russia, Newsyny, which was later on named after him, because that's where
• 57:59
  he came from. And the Lumiere brothers came to town in 1896, I think. And the only place that would
• 58:10
  make them available was the local brothel. And so the whole town assembled in the salon of the
• 58:18
  brothel to watch most pictures move or photography move for the first time. The cinematograph
• 58:26
  fired up and there was a street scene in Lyon, pedestrians and carriages and stuff. And Gorky was
• 58:36
  immediately depressed because he fell into what we would now call the uncanny valley. Yeah, it's
• 58:42
  moving, but there's no color and there's no sound. It's a zombie version of life. But then
• 58:50
  click, a splice went through the projector and he wrote in his article, suddenly something clicked
• 58:57
  and suddenly, indeed, Lyon disappeared and you were at a train station in the south of France with
• 59:04
  a big locomotive arriving seemingly coming right at the camera. So it was the first time anyone
• 59:11
  let alone a great writer made a comment about the cut from one shot to another. And
• 59:21
  the phrase obviously has other connotations to it. When you get an idea, something just clicked,
• 59:28
  but in this case, it was a literal click of the first time a shot cut from one shot to another
• 59:36
  and somebody in the audience was smart enough to notice it. So in a sense, no, I wouldn't say it's
• 59:42
  to be able to film criticism as per say, but yeah, yeah, so he cut gone onto it and clearly, you know,
• 59:48
  and here we are today talking about editing and that you could trace it back to that, I guess in
• 59:52
  many ways. Yeah, I just came back from the Lumiere festival speaking of Lumiere in Lyon
• 59:59
  last week and we showed our film, her name was Movieola, which is a collaboration between myself
• 1:00:08
  and the head of post-production at the University of Hartfordshire Howard Berry. And we cried
• 1:00:14
  funded it for 30,000 pounds. We shot for 10 days with three cameras and the premise of the film
• 1:00:23
  Mike Lee, the British director, is shooting Mr. Turner his film from 10 years ago, but he's
• 1:00:30
  shooting it right now on film and he wants us to edit it on a Movieola. What a crazy guy, but
• 1:00:37
  we're going to do it. And this particular day, the rushes just arrived from the lab 80 minutes
• 1:00:44
  of material that Mike just shot yesterday. And what do you do? Here's eight rolls of 35
• 1:00:55
  millimeter sound and eight rolls of magnetic 35 millimeter film. Well, you have to synchronize it
• 1:01:04
  first because these come from two different systems. And so my assistant Dan Farrell, who I worked
• 1:01:10
  on, returned to Oz, begins to do that and he explains what it is that he does and why he's doing it
• 1:01:17
  and how he does it. And then he has to number the film, print numbers every foot on the film. How
• 1:01:26
  do you do that and you have to do that? Why do you have to do that? Et cetera. And we take it all
• 1:01:32
  the way through me editing that material into two seven minutes of film in two scenes. And then
• 1:01:42
  we've set it a steam back with Mike Lee himself and he criticizes what I have done. So we go
• 1:01:48
  through the whole arc of what you actually had to do and why you had to do it. Anyway, we
• 1:01:56
  showed that film at the Lumiere Festival, which is mainly focused on film history. So it was a good
• 1:02:03
  fit for this festival. And we showed it at the Lumiere Institute, which is where the Lumiere
• 1:02:12
  brothers invented their camera. Many of those buildings are still there. And so I was there at the
• 1:02:22
  Institute on the motto outside it says the birth of cinema. You allow them a little hyperbole
• 1:02:35
  because Edison had and Dixon had invented and there are other people who figure into it. But
• 1:02:43
  the Lumiere brothers accepted the 35 millimeter decision of Edison and Dixon and the four sprockets
• 1:02:52
  per frame and all of that. Their innovation was to take and project at 16 frames a second rather
• 1:03:01
  than 40 frames a second. And to project, Edison didn't like projection because he felt it wouldn't
• 1:03:07
  make as much money as individual peep show type things. But I was bold enough, it took the
• 1:03:15
  opportunity to say in the Vatican of French cinema, I'm happy to be at the birthplace of
• 1:03:25
  motion photography. But it took the invention of editing to montage in French to create cinema.
• 1:03:37
  If we had never thought that editing could happen and all films had to be shot in single takes,
• 1:03:46
  cinema as we know it would never have taken off. That editing both gave wings to both the creative
• 1:03:56
  aspect that people would sit for two hours and watch a feature film is down to editing. Now of
• 1:04:05
  course with digital we can make a seemingly unedited film but there are little secret edits in it.
• 1:04:12
  But by and large 99.9% of all films are edited. But it also gave wings to the ability to
• 1:04:21
  break the film down into single shots scenes. And then in the shooting schedule arrange those scenes
• 1:04:31
  in the most efficient order. Shoot all the exteriors in that distant location all at the same time
• 1:04:39
  and shoot all of the interiors in the bedroom all at the same time. And that actor is only available
• 1:04:45
  for a week. We have to use shoot all of his material in one week. None of that is possible without
• 1:04:53
  editing. So editing allowed cinema to exist both on the practical and on the
• 1:05:03
  the aesthetic levels. I mean so I mean fantastic. So when when abouts is a movie or the documentary
• 1:05:10
  coming out? Is it going to get a theatrical release or is it? It premiered at Doc Fest at
• 1:05:16
  Chefield. That was the world premiere. It had its North American premiere at Telluride. We had
• 1:05:21
  three screenings of it there. Leon we just came back from that. It's showing at the cinema tech
• 1:05:28
  in Paris in December. We not had any luck with getting distribution for it at this point.
• 1:05:36
  You know we'll see. I don't know what the answer is at this point.
• 1:05:41
  Okay well I'll keep I think this cross because I love to see it. I mean it will be available
• 1:05:45
  by hooker by crook. We just don't know what that availability will be.
• 1:05:50
  So as an editor who has obviously been working in post-production for you know five six decades
• 1:05:54
  at this point and is written so many books on the subject and has been acclaimed so much for
• 1:05:58
  your work. What is your advice I guess to add to starting out now? I mean I'm asking this
• 1:06:02
  for myself as much as anyone else because I just graduated from my degree and I'm
• 1:06:06
  faced with the prospects of having to dive trying to dive into the editing industry
• 1:06:10
  as best I can and I would love to work in offline editing in film. Do you have any specific advice?
• 1:06:16
  I guess for someone starting out for day that you who wants to get into editing. There's good news
• 1:06:21
  and bad news. The good news is that the tools that you have are
• 1:06:30
  completely accessible to you now for almost nothing. If you have an iPhone or an Android in your
• 1:06:39
  pocket you have a machine capable of making 4K maybe 6K for all I know now but but the equivalent
• 1:06:50
  of 70 millimeter film it's in your pocket. Go shoot something you don't have to pay for
• 1:06:58
  the negative you don't have to pay for printing the work print you don't have to you know and
• 1:07:07
  use DaVinci Resolve which is free very good to edit your film with or you know any of the systems
• 1:07:17
  uh it's unimaginably different from the world that I started in 60 years ago. A
• 1:07:25
  movieola that hunk of metal was essential but it was like buying a car it cost as much as a car
• 1:07:34
  on an automobile cost. Back then it was I think $2,800 today that you know $30,000 to get your hands
• 1:07:46
  on a machine to edit okay where do you get that and 10 minutes of 35 millimeter film to make
• 1:07:56
  work print from the negative of that for getting the cost of the negative and the camera and all
• 1:08:01
  of that cost a hundred dollars back then that's you know $1,200 today for 10 minutes of material
• 1:08:10
  so you you you have unlimited access plus you can make something and you can make something
• 1:08:18
  great and upload it to youtube or vimeo and do some promotion and get eyeballs looking at it
• 1:08:27
  and bobs your uncle the bad news is everybody can do that everybody in the world can do that so
• 1:08:37
  perforce back 60 years ago we didn't have competition anything like you have competition
• 1:08:47
  because of the cost of the material and how do you you make something then how do you get people
• 1:08:53
  to see it can't do it no but now you it's all available to you so the door is open and that's
• 1:09:03
  both a challenge and a difficulty you you're also right at the entry point within a year or so
• 1:09:14
  of whatever AI is going to be doing to your world we in the mid 60s were at a no point in the valley
• 1:09:27
  there had been technical advances cinemoscope magnetic sound but comparatively speaking
• 1:09:35
  making a film in 1939 was the same as making a film in 1969 we were using the same Mitchell cameras
• 1:09:43
  film was 35 millimeter film sound had to be recorded separately you know all of that stuff
• 1:09:50
  so we we entered film making at a stable era it was going to get unstable with digital but that was
• 1:10:00
  you know 25 30 years in the future so we were able to get our feet on the ground and
• 1:10:08
  you know make innovations we we made some innovations 5.1 sound was our innovation
• 1:10:16
  but it was relatively stable it's nothing like the situation today if if I were to start working on a
• 1:10:24
  film today there would be a week spent in pre-production figuring out the workflow
• 1:10:30
  given the newest development in x y or z but back in those days that was there was a way and you
• 1:10:40
  just adapted yourself to the method now you have to in the sense reinvent the method for every new
• 1:10:48
  film you're working and AI is going to complicate that in spades I'm already airing up stories about
• 1:10:56
  how people your editors can you know you say I just I mean even just for assembling footage doing
• 1:11:00
  the first assembly cut you can there are programs now to be developed where you can just be
• 1:11:04
  funneled the the footage into the program and it will assemble the cup view and it's like okay well
• 1:11:09
  that's one thing but I guess you know how far is it before making the next week to make to them
• 1:11:13
  just editing the whole final product for you yeah it's uh and taking the human hand out of it yeah I
• 1:11:18
  mean the when you assemble a film yourself you learn the film you you you learn the map
• 1:11:28
  as you put it that you know the territory um if you dump 100 hours of material and say to
• 1:11:39
  AI assemble this it'll assemble it but do you know the material no um you you can then fix what
• 1:11:48
  it did you know I'm inventing stuff here because it's early early days but you know I've experimented
• 1:11:55
  with AI in terms of text manipulation and that's the the danger is if you say to it do this for me
• 1:12:03
  it'll do it and then you fix it but inevitably it's got AI fingerprints on it that kind of give
• 1:12:11
  it a certain kind of smell that is not your smell uh if you know what I mean so you know where do
• 1:12:19
  you find the sweet spot in there it may be that you do the assembly and then you put it in and you
• 1:12:28
  say do this a different way you know surprise me as Francis said to us and it will do something and
• 1:12:37
  you'll say you know that actually there's something in there that's actually pretty good and then
• 1:12:43
  you take it but since you've assembled the film yourself you have a basis for making that as an
• 1:12:49
  intelligent decision it's not just a robotic stuff but inevitably that we will be deluged with
• 1:12:58
  robotic assembled material starting yesterday I guess it goes back to that idea that like you know
• 1:13:05
  when you're editing you want to have you want the machinery to give you what it you don't want
• 1:13:09
  to necessarily give you what you think you want you want it to give you what you need or what
• 1:13:15
  may or maybe just give you a chaos the sense of the chaos element in terms of like I'm looking
• 1:13:19
  through the footage I don't necessarily know what I'll find but I I'm open to finding something
• 1:13:23
  that I don't I'm not expecting and that actually might be perfect for it rather than just
• 1:13:27
  giving you exactly what you want every single time which is I guess it doesn't offer as much
• 1:13:31
  opportunity for creativity and for being surprised yeah Picasso in a completely different medium said
• 1:13:39
  first you find and then you look he takes it and inverts it and Godard said the equivalent
• 1:13:49
  thing which is editing is the transformation of chance into destiny so you know you you have to
• 1:13:55
  open yourself up a certain pretty high percentage to the things that chance will tell you
• 1:14:04
  because working on a every film is like learning a new language the the language of what is the
• 1:14:10
  language of this film how does it want to speak to us nobody really knows and you discover that
• 1:14:18
  as you work on it but if you've ever learned a foreign language you know that for most of the time
• 1:14:25
  when you're learning the language you can recognize more of the language than you can articulate
• 1:14:32
  and then you can speak and so you have to allow the film to talk to you and you have to construct
• 1:14:39
  things in a way that it either through chance or whatever that that things will happen and you can
• 1:14:50
  wreck oh that's that's good I never would have thought of doing that and so AI may have a role to
• 1:14:56
  play on that kind of stuff hmm that's so true I mean and again like when you're working at all
• 1:15:02
  that footage I mean the the thing that or whenever I'm feeling intimidated the thing that always
• 1:15:05
  gets me through it is just thinking one shot at a time just keep it one because at a time you know
• 1:15:10
  that's the you know to get through that to hack through the jungle you just got to take it one
• 1:15:14
  step at a time I guess that's always if I'm a face for you know a crippling deadline and just
• 1:15:19
  and a lot of stuff to cut so see yeah eggs well I think that's a fine note to end on Walter thanks
• 1:15:25
  so much for giving up your time today to share with me I'm so excited to for the your new book
• 1:15:30
  and for a name is movie order as well and and I should say for the record as well so the name of
• 1:15:34
  this podcast half the picture was when I was coming up with podcast names I was thinking you're
• 1:15:39
  trying to think of something that was you know filmic being because it is a film interview podcast
• 1:15:43
  and I was remembered I remember George George Lucas is the proverb I guess he coined about how
• 1:15:48
  when it comes to filmmaking sound is half the picture and I get I don't know obviously you
• 1:15:53
  you and George go way back to THX1138 and American competing how you were so intrinsic to the
• 1:15:57
  soundscape of his films so it's quite it's it's very sort of nice to be able to be chat to you
• 1:16:03
  on a podcast that I guess has been you know that has been named after indirectly from I guess
• 1:16:09
  those early days and you'll work on them so yeah so anyway so thank you so much for your time
• 1:16:13
  Walter this has been so much fun to listen to thank you thank you for the good questions
• 1:16:18
  my pleasure my absolute pleasure sir