Behind the Seen Read online

On December 9, Aggie flies back to London after a final weekend in Bucharest, with a last celebratory dinner for the whole editorial crew on Saturday.

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  December 12, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  English Patient x 2 today: this is the day that we cross the 564,000 foot threshold, which is double the workprint on EP.

  * * *

  More footage is shot in the final six days than in any other week of production—59,000 feet, almost 10 percent of the entire amount of workprint over the 113 shooting days.

  The last take on the last day of filming (setup number 954) is Georgia’s point-of-view of Teague shooting Pangle and Stobrod. And with that gunshot, production comes to an end.

  Activity at Cinelabs continues for another day, however. Saturday’s material has to be developed and printed, and then screened on Sunday before the actors and crew can be released. If the film has been scratched or damaged, the scene must be redone. The lab is kept open and busy over the weekend.

  December 15, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Finished looking at dailies from the last day’s filming. All ok. 4,900 records in the Log Book. 597,000 feet of dailies. 33,000 in the last three days. There are some MIA’s I have to catch up on, but that’s all... Congratulations to everybody... Packing UP!

  On Monday, Murch and Cullen, and Cullen’s wife Juliette and baby Ora, leave Romania for London to set up the editing rooms at Minghella’s Old Chapel Studios. Young Walter, Dei Reynolds, and the Romanian apprentices, Mihai and Ilinca, stay on to finish the final boxing up of equipment and film.

  December 16, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Flying out of Bucharest to London with most of the crew—Anthony sitting across the aisle, Ian in front of me, Sean and Juliette and Ora up the by the bulkhead. Farewell Romania. You were good to us and we thank you.

  Arrived safely at PH. Aggie was home, and we spent a lovely afternoon evening.

  When British film directors choose to live and work in London rather than migrate to Hollywood, they are saying something about who they are and the kinds of films they want to make—and that’s true for Anthony Minghella, who was born on the Isle of Wight. There is an active moviemaking community in the United Kingdom, and some wonderfully original and independent voices. Think of Mike Leigh, Mike Newell, Stephen Frears, and Neil Jordan. Normally they work on smallish budget films with backing from various U.K. government funds and tax-benefit programs; only rarely do American studios support their work. So when an Academy Award-winning director decides to stay home and not relocate to Los Angeles, that’s news—especially when his current movie is the high-profile Cold Mountain, financed and distributed by Miramax Films. Recognizing this, along with Minghella’s vision, leadership, and ambitious ideas for the industry, the British Film Council appoints him chairman of the prestigious British Film Institute at the end of 2002.

  Murch and the edit team moved to London from Bucharest in mid-December 2002 to complete the film.

  Minghella will complete Cold Mountain working from the London production office of Mirage Enterprises, a company he runs with his partner, Sydney Pollack. Mirage is located in a former Baptist chapel near Hampstead Heath in North London; it was previously a studio space for rock-and-roll photographer Gered Mankowitz. The Old Chapel studio, as it’s called, is a convenient ten-minute walk from Minghella’s house. Murch’s edit suite will be located on the second floor in four small, cozy rooms. Downstairs in his office, Minghella will have his own Final Cut Pro edit station. Like the other four stations upstairs, it will be linked to the Rorke RAID system over a FibreChannel.

  The Old Chapel Studio near Hampstead Heath in London.

  Minghella at his own Final Cut Pro workstation in the Old Chapel.

  December 18, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Meeting with Anthony to discuss preliminary scheduling. I said I wouldn’t be done at least before the 27th of January, God willing.

  Half of the Cold Mountain Romanian edit rooms were disassembled two weeks prior, crated up, and shipped to London so Walter could arrive and continue working unabated.

  December 20, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Trying to do notes on 30 and did some, but felt exhausted, hopeless. Rest of our equipment didn’t arrive today and now will sit in storage until Monday the 6th.

  The holidays are here, time for a break: two weeks off. Fortunately for Murch, he is well acquainted with London and enjoys living and working here. In the mid-1980s, not far from the Old Chapel, he oversaw work done by the Jim Henson Studios for Return to Oz. He edited Julia for director Fred Zinneman in London. His wife, Aggie, is English, and they have a cottage in Primrose Hill, a pleasant 20-minute walk from the Mirage offices.

  It’s been five months since Murch passed through London on his way to Romania to begin work on Cold Mountain. The film is now scheduled to open in one year’s time, on Christmas Day, 2003. In an ideal world, after this holiday hiatus Murch would be screening the first assembly for Minghella. Instead, he estimates he’s at least four weeks behind schedule. Standing down now for two weeks provides much needed rest, recuperation, and resettling for him and his assistants. But this interval is like intermittent slumber with troubled dreams of big things left undone. After the break, when Murch arrives at the Old Chapel to resume work, it’s the middle of winter and threatening to snow.

  January 6, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  I am grumpy and nervous, scared, tired, disoriented. Walk to the Chapel and have a meeting with Sean, Walter, Dei—what needs to get done this week.

  Is Final Cut Pro to blame for Murch being behind? Would the edit schedule have been any different using Avid? Recall that Murch did not start assembling footage until the end of July, two weeks later than he originally hoped. There were delays getting the conventional editing equipment through Romanian customs: benches, rewinds, bins. A lot of time and energy was spent early on with Final Cut Pro issues: getting audio conversions figured out, refining the workflow, and communicating with DigitalFilm Tree. All that effort, to some undetermined extent, cost precious time.

  On the other hand, FCP never seized up. Ingenious workarounds kept everything running. It may have simply been the deluge of film footage that weighed down the schedule, on top of not having second assistant Dei Reynolds on board until the end of July.

  It snowed all that week of January 6 in London—the heaviest in a decade. By Friday the snow is gone, Walter’s edit room is fully set up, and his spirits lift.

  January 9, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Harvey W visits the Chapel and we screen some material for him: Junior’s, Sara’s, Stobrod, and Ruby. He likes it, laughs at the right places.

  Once again the journal is replete with footage calculations, schedule projections for the remaining groups, a new three act division of the entire film, and a measurement of the walking distance from Murch’s cottage to the edit rooms at the Old Chapel: 1,280 paces. And a meditation: “May I ask your help to find out what the best path is to get the assembly together, in the best shape.”

  The pace picks up, from a brisk walk to a healthy jog.

  January 13, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  It feels good to be cutting again: like grandma playing her piano: “If I didn’t do this every day, I would have died long ago,” she said to me once, aged 97, as she was pounding it out in the front room of her house. There is something about it, the music of it, which is enhancing.

  Everything about the edit is now directed at the intermediate finish line of completing the first assembly. Only when Murch has all the scenes laid out according to the script can Minghella re-engage with the work and make his transition from director shooting to director editing. Once a first assembly is screened, the director can truly fathom what he has to work with and start getting the film down to a releasable length. Minghella and Murch will start searching for the movie that lies beneath the surface, like Michelangelo, finding the figure that exists within the marble, waiting to be revealed.

 
Minghella on the stairway at the Old Chapel.

  As Walter sees it, the break a director is forced to take between filming and editing is a good thing, a necessary transition. Film directors should come down off the emotional roller coaster of shooting a movie before they enter the quiet, deliberative environment of the editing room. From production’s white-hot, highly social milieu of a large crew and top-notch cast, Minghella now joins Murch where a quieter, cooler, and more dispassionate viewpoint prevails. A director must now be prepared to judge a shot for what it is on the screen, not for particular events or emotions involved in filming it. Associations recalled from that particular day on location, positive or negative, are memories to be left behind. Such withdrawal takes time. The further the director distances himself from the shooting, the more helpful he will be in the editing room. On Julia, the 1977 film with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave that Murch edited, 70 year-old director Fred Zinneman went off to the Alps to scale some mountains, to put himself in life-threatening situations where he had to forget about shooting. For Minghella, a director who relishes the editing process and feels completely at home inside the edit room, coming down off that mountain is a good thing. But the first assembly of Cold Mountain is not yet ready. It is a matter of professional pride for editors to be done with the assembly as quickly as possible after shooting—usually two weeks—and Murch feels guilty that this is not the case. He hopes Minghella will be sympathetic to the facts of the schedule.

  January 16, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Answer from Anthony who was calming—talked about being finished when I am finished. “I know you’ll be ready with the assembly as soon as you can be, and that’s the beginning and end of the matter. If there’s anything I can do to help then let me know. I meet with Miramax and the producers on Friday and will explain the delay and why there is one. Obviously, we need to get going on a cut, but the failings are mine, I think, rather than yours.”

  However patient he might be, Minghella is champing to get underway with the editing. He’s spent the past two weeks getting familiar with Final Cut Pro and he wants to put it to work reviewing scenes on his own, thinking about changes, making notes, and engaging with Murch in the process. So now, at the end of January 2003, not wanting to keep Minghella waiting any longer, Murch screens a nearly completed first assembly that runs just under four hours. Murch, Minghella, his wife Carolyn and son Max, and Cassius Matthias, one of the Mirage staff producers, gather in Walter’s edit room on a Saturday afternoon. Murch turns down the dimmer, the track lights go out, and he hits play. The Panasonic 50-inch plasma display lights up and the film begins. A few moments into the battle scene there’s a problem: “It kept freezing,” Murch writes later, “something about the complexity of layered and filtered sound when the film is that long... it was frustrating, but ultimately Ant was generous about the situation. We will reconvene on Monday afternoon.”

  Sean and Walter stay late to figure out the nature of the problem. They can see that the playhead on the Final Cut timeline acts fragile and sticky even when they reduce the amount of media they ask FCP to play from 2½ hours to half an hour. An important viewing for the director was cancelled, and the solution was not yet in sight.

  January 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  After the screening, walking home, I feel as if my head is coming unscrewed.

  The following day Murch shares his frustration with Ramy in an email with a subject line, Difficulties: “You can imagine the disappointment all around, particularly for me. The editor has only one chance to show the director his version of the film, and this is now gone.”

  Over the weekend, Murch and Cullen discover Final Cut’s problem: the software can’t handle the quantity of audio equalization filtering that Murch had added to the soundtracks. He was using multiple filters to improve the sound of some sections of dialogue. They were playing in real time, as opposed to being rendered, or permanently embedded in the saved file. If more of these audio effects are rendered ahead of time, it’s easier for FCP to play long sequences. A bug in FCP 3.0 overestimated the complexity of audio filtering, acting like a software traffic cop telling it, “Slow down, slippery road ahead,” when in fact the road was clear and dry. Murch learns that FCP can be ungainly when it moves, copies, and renders large amount of digitized footage. It all takes longer than it would in Avid. The frustration level rises. “How will the schedule work out with so much still to edit?” Murch writes a few days later in his journal. “God bless this situation and may it resolve itself happily and creatively.”

  The second attempt to screen the four-hour assembly using newly rendered audio material goes fine. Not yet being the entire assembly, it ends with Inman cresting the mountain and seeing the town of Cold Mountain below.

  January 27, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  The motto on Tower Cottage [an old house Murch passes every day on his way to work]: is “Strength and Patience”—Fortis et Patiens. Let that be your motto now. Successfully screened the film twice—once for me to see that it all went smoothly, once for Anthony and me. We finished about nine thirty. Well done! You got through it—at least this part.

  There is much to think about in that four-hour assembly, but firm opinions have still to be put on hold until the whole film can be seen in one piece from beginning to end.

  Cold Mountain sound supervisor, Eddy Joseph, has worked on sound for major motion pictures for over 25 years.

  Plans are made to staff up the sound editing crew. Walter and Anthony meet with Eddy Joseph, the supervising sound editor, a 50-something Englishman who’s worked in that capacity on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, many of director Alan Parker’s movies, and has 25 years experience with sound and movies. In addition to editing sound himself, Eddy will manage a six-man crew of sound editors and assistants who each specialize in various sub-fields: dialogue, ADR (automatic dialogue replacement), atmospheres (like birds chirping, wind blowing), “hard” effects (gunshots, horses, etc.), and Foley (footsteps and character movement). He’ll be responsible for bringing all the sound elements together in the sound mixing theater, first in temporary mixes for preview screenings, and at the end, for a final sound mix that Murch will manage, and co-mix.

  Anthony explains to Eddy how he and Murch will be making “enormous changes at the last minute,” which can be a nightmare for the sound department. Anthony likes to work on films until the very last possible moment, tweaking the cuts, replacing lines of dialogue, dropping or adding scenes, or trying a new music cue. It comes from his live theater experience and a writer’s never-ending need to revise. It’s difficult for Minghella to see the enterprise as really ever done, finished and impervious, like cured concrete. Murch shares this same drive to find perfection. Eddy says he is ready to be flexible and “pro-actively creative.” There is one potential hitch: Eddy says he doesn’t really like the ProTools sound editing system. He doesn’t have that much personal experience with it, but is “willing to give it a go.”

  February 13, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  I finished the campfire killing grounds scene—whew. But that puts me behind the eight ball for the remaining scenes with Inman and Ada. Guidance and wisdom and assistance, please...

  The day before Murch completes the full first assembly, he steps back for a moment and asks rhetorically, “Why are we screening the film two months after the end of principal photography? Because the load of film—600,000 feet—is just beyond what I can process and keep up with working six days a week. It means that the slightest wrinkle sets me over the edge and I lose time that I cannot retrieve.”

  Murch makes a list of what might have kept things on schedule, and what could be done differently next time.

  1. Shoot less film

  2. Anthony make selections and give me detailed notes

  3. Hire an additional editor to work with me

  4. Hire a different editor, one who works faster than I do

  5. Not have delays at the beginning that made it i
mpossible for me to start editing until two weeks after start of shooting

  6. Not move into a facility (the Chapel) that had never had a film edited in it (also applies to Kodak)

  7. Not move location until the first assembly is finished

  8. Have a “Man in Havana” here in London setting things up before we came back

  What may appear on the surface to be an aggressive, even cold-hearted attitude, is really a matter of feeling bad about being late, Murch admits later. “Editors often strike a macho posture,” he says, “proving to their directors how good they are by delivering a first assembly as soon as one week after production ends.”

  Murch will screen the entire first assembly on February 18. He refers to this volume reduction—compiling the first assembly from all the raw footage—as “the crush ratio,” a term in winemaking that measures the first pressing against the original volume of picked grapes. A second pressing will get the first assembly down to a release print. Murch already looks beyond the first crush to the second pressing: getting a five hour-plus assembly to a releasable length.

  February 15, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Crush ratio on CM is 22:1.On EP it was 11:1. Julia had a CR of 12, but only shot 180,000 feet. Then there is the second pressing, which is how much of the assembly do you throw away? On Ripley it was 55%. On Julia it was 30%. On EP it was 40%. On K-19 it was 43% ¶ 03/15/03 on Apocalypse the crush ratio was 11% and the second pressing was 55%

  February 16, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Finished this assembly 11pm Sunday night. Five hours four minutes seventeen seconds. Congratulations! Exactly two months since we returned to England, and seven months since the first day’s dailies.

  One of the limitations of Final Cut 3.0 is an arbitrary time cutoff: no sequence can be longer than four hours. So, as with old-fashioned road-show movies of the fifties, the Cold Mountain first assembly must be shown in two parts, with an intermission.