Behind the Seen Read online

  “Sure.”

  Several hours later, Murch walks out of the multiplex. He has finished a complete run-through of Cold Mountain, all alone in the theater, after carefully adjusting the audio levels and equalization of the theater speakers. A few hundred yards away, the Hudson River separates the two worlds of New Jersey and Manhattan. Murch observes his surroundings. He points across the river to the city’s West Side, which seems very close. “There,” he says, finding Riverside Church with its soaring bell tower. “That’s where Aggie and I got married in 1965 and that’s the block of 119th Street where I grew up.” It’s a whimsical statement, as if he were saying, “Look how far I’ve come in 60 years: I’ve crossed the Hudson.”

  The N-VIS-O splice, invented by Walter Murch, and made here on a guillotine splicer (left) with a special industrial-grade adhesive tape. The tape is very narrow (center), covering only the framelines between an edit, and is invisible when projected. The result is a seamless work-in-progress screening. A standard splice (right) uses clear acetate tape and covers part of each adjoining film frame. Murch first used the N-VIS-O system on Julia (1977).

  It takes Murch a few moments to walk from the new New Jersey of the Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas and the Promenade Mall to the old New Jersey on the other side of River Road. There, the River Gorge Cafe is tucked under the Palisades. With its old stone walls inside and out, it feels like a grotto, which is appropriate as it is two blocks from the Hudson. The flagstones shine with a patina of cigarette smoke, fried cooking, and river moisture that has been accumulating since the 1920s.

  The restaurant manager gets up from the table where she’s sitting, having a smoke break, and greets Murch.

  “Still open for lunch?” he asks in his commanding but amiable voice.

  “Of course,” she replies. “Back again?”

  Murch had been at this eatery only six weeks before, on August 20, for a prior test screening of Cold Mountain.

  Murch’s son, also named Walter, is the second assistant editor on Cold Mountain. He trims off a half-frame of workprint from reel nine to get the film back into proper framing before the last preview screening in Edgewater, New Jersey. He reassembles the cut with an N-VIS-O splice.

  “You’re the producer, right?”

  “No, the editor. The film editor.” The River Gorge is a quiet harbor amid the fast-running tides of a major motion picture preview, and this seems to be a good time to inquire about broader questions before director Minghella’s work-in-progress faces “a meat-eating audience,” as Murch describes what lies ahead that evening.

  Film editor Walter Murch at the River Gorge Cafe in Edgewater, New Jersey, before the final preview screening of Cold Mountain.

  How is he capable of stepping back, after spending 15 months working on this film, looking at 600,000 feet of footage, much of it hundreds, even thousands of times, and still retain any objectivity about what’s been done, and what must still be accomplished?

  “In a good sense, that’s exactly what a preview is for because it grabs you by the hair and yanks you out of your own mind-set,” Murch says. “For a new audience watching it cold, all things are possible. It’s always good to be reminded of this in various ways.”

  Robert Grahamjones, who assisted Murch on The English Patient and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, says that the hardest thing about editing a film is to sit down and look at it the second time, and then the third, and the fourth, and to keep doing that with fresh eyes every day, for as long as 18 months.

  Murch is silent for a moment. Then he responds to that idea. “In a way you can also use the opposite technique—to try not to be objective, because in my case it’s kind of hopeless. Instead I tend to plunge even deeper into subjectivity in the hope that if I push one opposite as far as I can, it sort of meets the other thing coming around the corner.”

  “When I’m working on a film, the image I have is of myself swimming in a fast-moving river. The film is always changing and I’m kind of in the middle of it. Objectivity would mean trying to swim to the shore, clambering up, and looking at the river go by. The dangerous thing about doing that is that’s when most people drown—when you’re trying to get out of the water. On the other hand, if you relax and let yourself be carried along, and even swim in the direction of the current—somehow, given the editor’s particular dilemma, that’s a better thing to do than to try to go back and forth from objectivity to subjectivity. Heightened subjectivity means learning to listen to very tiny voices that you hear in the corner of your head that say, ‘What if? What about this? What about that?’”

  “For example, ‘I wonder what it would be like if the sky were green.’ With film you have an opportunity to make that happen. You can make the sky green in a film—literally, because of what we can do with visual effects now. But I also mean figuratively in terms of structure: What would happen if we did something counterintuitive, flipped those two scenes around? So your unconscious, which is your deeply subjective self, is always whispering things to you. But in the middle of the clatter of all the urgent practicalities of making a film, and schedules, and getting on flights for London and New York, those voices can sometimes get drowned out. So, it’s learning to find ways to amplify them, or create zones in which things are a little quieter so they can be heard. Luckily for me, on this film I can walk to work, so that gives me a good half hour of ‘tiny voice’ time.”

  “I tend to plunge even deeper into subjectivity in the hope that if I push one opposite as far as I can, it sort of meets the other thing coming around the corner.”

  The manager takes Murch’s order—early dinner or late lunch, it’s not clear which, nor does it matter. For Murch it’s 10:00 p.m. London time, and this will be his only meal of the day since he won’t get back to his hotel in SoHo until after midnight. He picks up his thoughts about seeing and subjectivity using a different comparison—one drawn from lighting technique. “An interior might have four different sources of light in it: the light from the window, the light from the table lamp, the light from the flashlight that the character is holding, and some other remotely sourced lights. The danger is that, without hardly trying, you can create a luminous clutter out of all that. There’s a shadow over there, so you put another light on that shadow to make it disappear. Well, that new light casts a shadow in the other direction. Suddenly there are fifteen lights and you only want four.”

  “As a cameraman what you paradoxically do is have the gaffer turn off the main light, because it is confusing your ability to really see what you’ve got. Once you do that, then you selectively turn off some of the lights and see what’s left. And you discover that, ‘OK, those other three lights I really don’t need at all—kill ’em.’ But it can also happen that you turn off the main light and suddenly, ‘Hey, this looks great! I don’t need that main light after all, just these secondary lights. What was I thinking?’”

  “Editorially we do that by removing or transposing scenes. You can take out a scene that seems absolutely essential to the film—a scene that’s like the main light—and sometimes you realize, ‘Hey, we don’t need that scene at all,’ because it was telling us something too overtly, perhaps in words spoken by the main character, that in fact was present in all these other scenes in much more interesting and subtle ways. Even if you wind up putting the main scene back, looking at the film without it allowed you to see things that you couldn’t otherwise.”

  Young Walter suddenly appears outside through the window, walking past the restaurant. He had stayed behind in the theater solving a Final Cut Pro problem on his iBook. Tonight he will use his laptop to run a Final Cut Pro version of Cold Mountain in real time alongside the projected film. It’s a tool for re-syncing picture and sound should the film break during projection. Just as Murch stands up to get his attention, his son turns and sees him in the restaurant. He comes inside to the table looking happy.

  Eddie, the projection engineer, watches as the preview of Cold Mountain plays simultaneously
in Final Cut Pro on young Walter’s iBook “clamshell” and in 35mm film on the motion picture platter system.

  “It was the RGB”—the red-green-blue color setting—“versus the something-else setting; very straightforward.”

  “Fantastic,” Walter says, relieved. “Those are the problems we love.”

  “It’s very funny being up there hearing those guys talk,” Walter’s son says after ordering his meal. He is referring to Howie, Eddie, and Tim. “When you were testing sound, they were saying, ‘Yeah, you know, I’ll listen to him. That guy’s no bullshit. He doesn’t bullshit you around. He knows what he’s talking about.’”

  “Fantastic. Those are the problems we love.”

  Murch smiles while his son continues, imitating Howie. “Some guys, you get in there and they’re spouting off. They don’t know what the difference is: 80 db this, 90 db that; listening to the surround speakers. The real test, you go to a totally new theater and he’s in there and he’s saying ‘Up here,’ and ‘Down there.’ The levels—perfect.”

  Theater 4 is waiting silently on the other side of River Road, ready to go. Its 343 seats are empty, its doors closed, and two hours and 37 minutes of film lies on a stainless steel platter in one giant flat reel. Why is the final test preview screening of Cold Mountain so important? What is the purpose of these previews? What will Minghella, Murch, the producers, and the studio get out of it?

  There is an old adage in Hollywood, attributed to the screenwriter William Goldman, about the unpredictability of the film business: “No one knows anything.” Regardless, producers are like gamblers at the track with their Racing Forms, tout sheets, and lucky charms; if there’s any way to get an advantage, improve the odds, they’ll use it. Testing films in front of selected, representative audiences is one of those ways: studios and producers want to know if films they finance are on the right track while there’s still something they can do about it if they aren’t. Many a film has had its ending changed because a test audience didn’t like the hero dying. If you consider film an art, this is like letting a jury pass judgment on a painting by Picasso. If you believe motion pictures are commercial ventures, meant to attract the largest possible audience, then testing the “product” on potential consumers makes perfect sense.

  Not that films should be made in a vacuum. Only the most personal experimental film might be made and previewed by a single person. In fact, most filmmakers—whether they make documentaries or fiction films—no matter what the budget, screen their works-in-progress for friends, peers, and potential audience members. It’s the only way to get reactions and responses to the material before it’s set in stone. If a sequence is unintelligible or confusing, a filmmaker wants to know about it.

  But testing major studio films aspires to the level of a science, much in the way new merchandise and its advertising campaigns are put through all manner of market research, product testing, and consumer scrutiny. It’s not simply a matter of making a motion picture better. Backers and distributors want to know a film’s projected payoff, in part so they can decide how many millions of dollars to spend on advertising. Preview testing is not new. Even in the 1930s, studios insisted on getting audience reactions before a film was completed.

  “Anthony Minghella describes his physical sensation at previews as being ‘skinless’—all of his nerve endings are exposed.”

  For directors and editors who need to complete a film on schedule, with artistic integrity, and an eye toward success (who wants failure?), preview screenings are taken like cod-liver oil. No one involved in the day-to-day making looks forward to them, but they’re “good for you,” and hopefully good for the film.

  Murch has been at hundreds of work-in-progress screenings for pictures he’s still editing, presumably while he’s also still vulnerable to criticism. Does he get nervous?

  “Anthony describes his physical sensation at previews as being ‘skinless’—all of his nerve endings are exposed. The slightest touch is electric. The experience is intense for me, but I’ve never felt skinless at a preview where I was the editor. I think it’s just the difference between being a writer-director and an editor. I certainly did feel like that when we were previewing Return To Oz [a feature film Murch directed in 1985], so I know exactly what he’s talking about. But I think that intensity helps focus your attention. It puts you in a different emotional state, which makes you see different things in the material. When you go to work every day in the same room and you’re looking at the film all the time in the same environment, there’s a certain routine metabolism that is comforting, but it can lull you into a false security. All of that disappears here, when you’re looking at the film with strangers in a different environment. With consequences.”

  And since Murch handles not only story issues, but also technical problems, the added question “Will it run?” can be unsettling. During the previous preview, in Charleston, the hard drive seized up and the film was stopped for ten minutes while things were reset, put in sync, and started again. Film on a platter system can’t be rewound, so the audience not only had its viewing interrupted, it missed part of one scene.

  “The technology has the ability to kick back at you like what happened to us in Charleston. Whereas if something like that happens in the edit room, you just stop and restart it, and off you go. So there’s a performance level here that’s more intense—it’s an unstoppable juggernaut—but that’s good because it adds to the intensity. If the film is like an architectural model you’ve been working on, looking at it for months from the same perspective, now circumstances yank you up and plop you down so you’re looking at it 90 degrees to the side. Suddenly you’re seeing around the back and making connections you hadn’t before: ‘Oh, if the stairway goes down there, we don’t need this little portico here.’ Whereas before, you intellectually knew there was a stairway back there, but you didn’t see it. So previewing the film—with all these different people looking at it—helps to reveal the film as a dimensional thing, which in turn kicks off different ideas. It’s a psychic component that you pick up from the people sitting there taking it in for the first time.”

  Walter Murch and Fairuza Balk on the set of “Return to Oz” (1985). The film, which Murch directed, also starred Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, and Piper Laurie.

  There are also reactions of the director and the producers, who will each provide notes to Murch after every screening.

  “It’s hard to pick all of that apart at the time. You’re feeling the whole gestalt at once. After Charleston, Anthony felt that the audience had a more muted response. Whether they were really muted or whether it was his heightened skinlessness from showing the film to a Southern audience, I don’t know. In fact the numbers from the Charleston preview were among the highest we’ve had. But it became a benchmark for him and informed his attitude toward the next round of changes.”

  It’s nearly dark outside. The meal is over and dessert is ordered. Murch has a further thought about audiences. “Think of the comparison between a vacuum tube—an old-style radio tube—and a theatre. They’re both devices to amplify something. If you stick two electric wires up into a glass bulb, with no air in it, the current would normally jump from the end of one wire to the other. But then something revolutionary was discovered around the turn of the last century. When the current is leaping through the vacuum from one wire to the other, it is in a highly suggestible state. It is very easy to influence it when it is in the middle of its trapeze act. If you take a little grid of metal—a wire screen—and put it in the gap, and attach the screen to another, weaker electrical signal, the strong current will pick up the vibrations of the weak signal as it jumps through the screen. So at this point you have two things coming into the vacuum tube. One of them is very powerful but simple current coming from the wall. But then you also have a very intelligent, but very weak current—Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony coming from an antenna that shows up as electrical oscillations within the screen. The simple but powerful cur
rent leaps through the screen and on the way picks up the shape of Beethoven’s Ninth. The current that lands on the second wire is powerful and it’s Beethoven’s Ninth. That’s amplification, pure and simple. Ultimately the current is going to be powerful enough to push the coil of a speaker back and forth in the same pattern as the music, and you hear Beethoven’s Ninth in your living room.”

  A radio tube brings together power (electricity) and coherence (music).

  “That’s essentially the setup you’ve got when you’re in a theater. The power—the energy—isn’t coming from the film. It’s coming from the collective lives and emotional world of the audience. Say it’s a big theater—there are a thousand people there, and the average age of that audience is 25. You have 25,000 years, three times recorded history, sitting in the audience. That’s a tremendously powerful but unorganized force that is looking for coherence. That’s why they pay their eight bucks. They reach some point in their own life when they say, ‘I need coherence,’” Murch says, laughing. “They didn’t articulate it that way, of course. It came out as, ‘Let’s go to a show.’ But what really is getting them to leave home is a temporary dissatisfaction with where they are, craving something that will cohere them, at least temporarily, within the self and with a bunch of like-minded people.”

  “So there they are, waiting for the film to begin, but they’ve all got their own histories: tragedies, love affairs, heartbreaks, triumphs, you name it. It’s all collected there, waiting. That’s the equivalent of the current coming out of the wall. And then the screen lights up in the darkness. It’s not really that powerful a light. If you measure it with a light meter, it’s probably about as bright as this tablecloth. But it’s very coherent because 250 people for two years collectively worked on it, made that movie. So there are 500 ‘man-years’ of work in that particular play of images and sounds. It’s as if somebody started out on their own to make this film in 1503, and now, here in the year 2003, brought it to Edgewater and said, ‘I’m done.’ Well, that’s a piece of work. That’s the number of years of endeavor that something like this film represents.”