Behind the Seen Read online

  July 10, 2003, Murch Journal

  Film Editing—exciting that it is still in an early stage of its evolution. The underlying values of storytelling remain the same, but the techniques of image manipulation, storage, and documentation are transforming, along with the grammar of image sequence. But by how much? Juxtapose “Conversation” with “Cold Mountain” and what is different in the grammar? In some way, “Conversation” is more advanced. Jump cuts in the workshop and the Jack Tar Hotel sequences.

  There is an optimal structure to the image sequence in any particular film. Just as there is an optimal molecular structure for every particular combination of atoms. “Least energy,” I think they call it. If the atoms are arranged in a different pattern, even by a small amount, the properties of the resulting molecular substance are different. A diamond and a graphite pencil are both made of the same carbon atoms, but in a different arrangement. The diamond pattern is optimal, most densely packed, “least energy,” which is what gives it its density and clarity. And given a particular structure, there is an optimal cut point for every shot (atom) within that structure.

  It’s all well and good that the first public preview of Cold Mountain comes up in less than ten days, that this new version is not yet locked, and four days of temp mixing still lie ahead. Walter’s birthday trumps all that. He and Aggie spend a long weekend in Paris to celebrate. For Walter there are deep sleeps on the train ride from London and in a friend’s apartment where they are staying. Taking this kind of hiatus in the middle of the race to complete Cold Mountain can certainly be good for the mind and body, but suddenly slowing down from such a rapid pace can induce a certain kind of melancholia.

  Walter Murch celebrates his 60th birthday at Veeraswami’s, a London restaurant where, 40 years earlier, he took Aggie on their first date. On his left are director Anthony Minghella and his wife, Carolyn Choa.

  July 12, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  60th birthday: Both my father and his father, both Walter Murches, died when they were sixty. May I break the tradition, Inshallah. Dad died on December 11th 1967, just under four months after his 60th birthday. For me that will be somewhere around November 6th. I remember getting the phone call from my mother—in the evening. Aggie and I were living in the little house on Cheremoya in LA, and Aggie was working night shift at Hollywood Presbyterian. I went for a walk along the streets in the hills just above the house. I remember thinking: “Well, he was old.” I was 24... what did I know. Two years later, my mother died.

  Was I sad? Yes. Was I devastated? No. I had grown up with him but independent of him as far as my emotions were concerned. Still, I don’t know why I wasn’t more wrenched. I remember in New York that Xmas retreating into some mathematics.

  SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2003—LONDON

  Having spent the following week making final changes to version seven and completing the temp sound mix, Murch and Cullen prepare to fly to New York for a Monday night screening in New Jersey. Minghella had to leave a day earlier to do some ADR in New York. Less than two hours after finishing the mix, they walk to Mr. Young’s, Minghella’s favorite screening room in London. There, along with sound supervisor Eddy Joseph and music editor Allan Jenkins, they watch the film all the way through. Murch notes, “I feel a bit ‘out of body’ at the moment. Shaky.” The picture looks good and is perfectly in sync, except for two places where Murch had earlier “slipped sync” during the mix to make a last-minute sound adjustment and forgot to readjust. Nearly all the N-VIS-O splices are good, meaning the film does not stutter on the splices. Dei and Walter fix the few bad splices in the projection booth at Mr. Young’s. Another triumph: picture editing, sound mixing, ADR, sound editing, and 35mm picture conforming all intersect successfully—and Final Cut Pro is the hub of it all.

  July 19, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Eddy and Alan were at the screening and proud of the work they had done. First time any of us have seen the 35mm picture projected with all the sound effects, ADR, etc. I was (mostly) dry-eyed except when I would get “work vertigo” from contemplating how high up we are on the mountain of work that has been done. Most unstuck at the campfire scene between Ada and Inman. Bless this film and all who work on it. Another Rubicon crossed.

  “I marry you. I marry you. I marry you.”

  Chapter 10. Time and Endless Patience

  The Multiplex in Edgewater, New Jersey.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2003—EDGEWATER, NEW JERSEY

  It’s 9:30 p.m. and the audience in Theater 4 is watching the concluding reel of Cold Mountain—the final 20 minutes of the last preview. Inside the stadium-style auditorium, 300 moviegoers will soon be filling out survey cards with their likes and dislikes. About 20 others will be invited to stay afterward for a focus group.

  Walter Murch sits right in the middle of the upper section of the theater. A Russian émigré sits behind him. Earlier, before the lights went down, he leaned over and asked Murch, not possibly knowing who he was, “Is this a good movie? Is this going to be a good movie?” Before Walter could answer, the man continued: “Is it like Scary Movie? That was a good movie!” Walter just chuckles.

  New Jersey filmgoers are a vocal audience, and they watch the film’s big explosion scene with awe, the Russian vocalizing their general sentiments: “Oh, yeah—wow! Look at that!”

  They’re also amused. When Ruby first appears at Black Cove Farm and meets Ada, she picks up the rooster that’s been terrifying Ada and breaks its neck. Zellweger, playing Ruby, gets a big laugh. When she adds, “Let’s go put it in the pot,” there’s another round of laughter. “Kill the rooster!” the Russian guy exclaims.

  These are moments that must reassure director Anthony Minghella. Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, who is sitting behind Minghella, should also be encouraged.

  In the middle of the screening, Weinstein leaves the theater for a few moments during the scene of Inman recuperating at Maddie’s, the goat-herder and healer played by Eileen Atkins. On returning to his seat Weinstein passes behind Minghella, taps him on the shoulder, and says, “It’s good.” You’d have to know Weinstein well to discern whether this is a genuine conviction, meaning he will not have much criticism later, or if he’s posturing for the moment. Minghella and Murch will find out the next day, during a debriefing in Miramax’s offices.

  So far, Weinstein has been mostly supportive of Minghella. The previous preview on August 20, also here in Edgewater, received very good audience ratings. Miramax offered to extend Minghella’s delivery date to November 15, giving him one extra week.

  Inman about to leave Maddy (Eileen Atkins), who nursed him back to health.

  This version of Cold Mountain is 2:37 hours long; the end credits will add another six minutes or so. On top of all the major surgery that was done previously to reduce the running time, Murch has spent the last few weeks making little nips and tucks. One week earlier, on locking the picture for this final test screening, Murch took the film’s measurements, reminding himself how far below the theoretical 30 percent limit it now is—sometimes even he forgets where all the cuts come from.

  September 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Almost 50% cut out of film. Actually 48%. When did we pass 30% (at 3:33) and how were we able to cut out almost another hour below that? Cut out the Inman-Cold Mountain-Long Walk cycle. Sara’s final character beat cut out. Veaseytown and other Veasey development cut out. Swimmer. What else?

  Film is 2.36.55: now that we have locked all reels. It is 2.15 am. Congratulations!! Now finished conforming the tracks at 3.30 am.

  Feeling good despite the eight-hour turnaround. Home at 6am and back at work at 2 pm.

  Mom said I was a happy kid until I was two, and then I became suddenly serious and preoccupied. What changed?

  As Murch puts it, the story question that drove the five months of editing from the day he completed the first assembly (February 16) to the first edited version for public test screening (July 16) was this: “Will the audience engage with the cha
racters—these strange people meeting other strange people under strange circumstances?” In particular, since Inman is quite a reticent protagonist, Murch felt the need to better reveal what is going on inside Inman’s head. When his journey goes, “slightly off beam,” as Murch describes it, the audience needs to see through Inman’s eyes to know what he is thinking.

  “With Apocalypse Now we had the same problem only more so,” Murch explained late one night in his editing room. “In that film we’re with Willard (Martin Sheen) the entire time. The film is told from his point of view, yet he hardly speaks, nor does he do very much until he finally kills Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Narration was the only way in. Contrary to Apocalypse Now, with Inman there are ways to find out what is going on inside. He talks—though not very much—and does things. Since Ada already speaks in voiceover through her letters, it didn’t feel right for another character to also speak with a narrative voice.”

  After getting the balance of Inman’s interior and exterior selves provisionally balanced to Walter and Anthony’s satisfaction, largely through pulling Inman’s actions into tighter contact with each other, Murch and Minghella spent much of their edit time from July until now focusing on Ada, both as a character and in relation to Inman. “Just as Inman goes from being a golden-haired youth to a scarred, bearded veteran, Ada matures from being a porcelain doll to having her hands dipped in blood. And it is she who survives, not Inman. In that sense the film belongs to her,” Murch explains. “She is Cold Mountain’s Ishmael, who survives ‘to tell thee.’”

  Audience Response

  Wise filmmakers never underestimate how movie-savvy their audience can be. Having seen and heard so many movies, filmgoers bring to the theater a sophisticated movie sense they may not even be aware of. Good editors maintain a healthy respect for the moviegoer’s innate smarts about film logic and grammar. Filmmakers want to strike the right balance between exposition and discovery—pulling the moviegoers more deeply into the story, while also rewarding them for their acumen. The movies they construct need to contain exact portions of hints and foreshadowing. Too much and an audience feels talked down to; too little and they get lost. The ideal is to achieve what Murch describes as “surprising self-evidence. They don’t know what is going to happen next, but when it happens it feels inevitable. Like a continuous déja vu experience.”

  * * *

  Minghella’s Theory of Cinematic Relativity

  If Walter and I are watching the film, it goes at one speed. If you, Walter, and I watch the film, it will go at another speed. If you, Sidney, Walter, and I look at the film, it goes another speed. If there are ten people, if there are a hundred people, the collective weight on the brake of our car is extraordinary. If everybody walks away and I watch it by myself, I find it goes very quickly. The point is the film changes in front of you.

  At a preview there’s nobody looking to love you. They’re just looking at the film and it has none of the meaning that it has when friends or family or interested parties view it. It’s just what it is.

  * * *

  In this screening of Cold Mountain, even though the film is fairly complex in its intercutting, flashbacks, and time-place discontinuities, one can feel the audience engaged, leaning into the film like a long distance runner, anticipating, but not falling off balance.

  During a sequence of Inman’s journey back to Cold Mountain, soon after he leaves the hospital, a close-up shot fills the screen with crabs crawling in the mud. “He’s going to eat them,” the Russian sitting near Murch says out loud, even before Inman is established in the scene. Audiences participate like this, using clues dropped for them, whether or not a film director plans for it. Intelligent filmmakers craft this kind of relationship with an audience, and constantly evaluate their film-in-progress from the point of view of the spectator. Murch and Minghella respect this “dialogue” with their imagined audience and as a result, moviegoers benefit from a richer film experience. Murch and Minghella benefit, too. While they work, the specter of a future audience hovers in the edit room with them, challenging their decisions and raising questions, like a Socratic third party.

  One major area the phantom moviegoer questioned was Cold Mountain ‘s violence. During editing Murch and Minghella shifted the tenor of the film’s bloodiest scenes—what Murch dubs a process of “desanguination.” At this point in the screening the audience is watching “the Sara sequence.” It may be the best example in Cold Mountain of not only how a scene can work better without being too full of “tang,” but also how story and character get transformed as they travel from book to screenplay to film.

  From the beginning when Murch first read the screenplay, he took note of potential problems with this powerful scene between Inman and the young Sara (Natalie Portman). It is Inman’s last stop before making it back to Cold Mountain and to Ada. Sara is widowed and alone with her sick baby. In giving Inman shelter, she looks to him for companionship and for protection from three marauding Union solders. It is Inman’s final temptation: a world and a woman are offered that are completely familiar to him, that need him, and to which a part of him responds more immediately than to the mysterious Ada. In the screenplay, Minghella intensified the scene with more violence (Sara is about to be raped) and tragedy (Sara kills one of the Union soldiers herself, her baby dies, Sara commits suicide) than were in the original novel. By now, however, it may be too late in the film to bring in a new major character like Sara and then ask an audience to spend emotional capital on her without deducting it from somewhere else. As producer Bill Horberg commented during editing, the viewer may begin feeling “donor fatigue.”

  Sara with her sick baby, Ethan.

  Sara and Inman in bed.

  All through post production the Sara scene seemed to galvanize people; some were moved, others felt overwhelmed. In either case, it seemed to be too much weight for the movie to carry right at that point. When Murch provided the scene to Apple in March to use as part of a presentation, word came back that they found it too depressing. In May, when Sydney Pollack came to the Old Chapel to see the cut at that point, he told Walter he thought the way it was assembled implied Sara and Inman had sex. This would jeopardize the whole purpose for the scene, which was to set up the final reunion between Inman and Ada. In June, after the first screening in New York for Miramax executives, co-chairman Bob Weinstein, Harvey’s brother, felt there was more heat between Sara and Inman than between Inman and Ada. In early September when Harvey Weinstein visited the Chapel for a day, he suggested taking out the shot of Sara breastfeeding her baby as Inman introduces himself to her.

  The Sara sequence didn’t achieve its ultimate form until just before this final preview. The overhaul began with a relatively minor change, when Murch tried cutting Sara’s explanation of her predicament, a few lines of dialogue spoken to Inman while she breastfeeds baby Ethan:

  Click here to view code image

  SARA

  Used to have a cow; few goats. Raiders took them.

  Made me kill our own dog on the porch. That poor

  creature watched over me. Nothing left now save a

  hog and a couple of chickens to live off till spring.

  I'll have to kill that hog and make sense of the flesh

  and divisions—which is something I never did.

  The cut seemed to work. Not only did the lines disappear without a trace, but in retrospect they seemed slightly out of character: why would she have revealed her vulnerability and lone resource so early to a complete stranger? Murch showed it to Minghella, who liked it and said he felt the cut put more emphasis on their tender exchange of names at the end of the scene. Maybe this was the hidden problem, the “referred pain,” that had triggered Weinstein’s suggestion to cut out the entire scene.

  Pollack and Horberg arrived on September 11, a week after Weinstein’s visit, to spend three days in the editing room going through the film inch by inch. This would be their last opportunity for such detailed work before the final p
review and, given the inflexibility of the schedule, their last such opportunity, period.

  When the Sara scene was run, both Pollack and Horberg liked the lift of the expository dialogue. But a few minutes later—after the Union soldiers have been killed—Inman’s helpful butchering of the hog now appeared gratuitous and inexplicable, almost aggressive, because Sara’s explaining her need to have it butchered (and her inability to do it herself) had already been removed. The choice was clear to everyone in the room: restore her explanation or go deeper and remove the hog butchering and everything associated with it—leading inescapably to cutting out the death of the baby and Sara’s suicide. Anthony suggested cutting it all out and seeing what happens.

  One simple extraction had triggered a major “lift,” as editors call a wholesale removal of a scene or large portion of a scene. Will this radical cut work?

  This scene of Sara and Inman butchering her hog was eliminated—the “Sara lift.”

  September 13, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Lifting Sara’s suicide became inevitable when we saw that the scene on the bed worked well without the exposition, and then Inman slaughtering the hog afterwards was redundant. Unintended consequences. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it turned out. So we cut the Sara death scene—slaughtering of the hog, the baby’s death, her suicide. Brave of Anthony to contemplate it, even in the short run. We will screen next Thursday and judge in context.

  For Murch, the benefits of the foreshortened Sara scene seem numerous: narrative momentum toward the film’s resolution is regained; the audience is spared emotional trauma at a point in the story arc when they’ve earned a denouement instead; a precious three minutes of running time is saved; tang is reduced; and Inman’s character is bolstered in unexpected ways. He does not need to have any more tragedies on his shoulders—he has plenty of those already. Now the audience implicitly feels his resolve has been strengthened, since he chooses to finish his journey back to Ada rather than remain with the still-living Sara.