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(receive update alerts Thursdays bi-weekly) Enter your name and email address: Name: Email: Subscribe Unsubscribe continued from page 3 You began as a sound editor. Was it just a natural transition for you, to picture editing?

At school, I'd done picture editing, sound editing, and sound mixing. When we started Zoetrope, I did the post-production sound for Francis' The Rain People, which was my first experience with a feature film. Kind of a one-man-band: just me all by myself, without any assistants. And then I did the sound on THX-1138, George Lucas's first film. Also solo. And then I did the sound on The Godfather, which was Francis's next film, but a big studio operation down in Hollywood, so I was no longer working alone: I was what is today called a sound effects supervisor, overseeing a team of editors and the final mix. Then American Graffiti, Lucas's next film, which we did back up in San Francisco. When I was working with Dick Portman on Godfather, I had picked up his habit of voice-slating each reel: "Reel Four, Dialogue One," for instance, would mean "Dialogue premix one for reel four," and so on. Except he abbreviated it to "R-4, D-1," something he had picked up from his father, Clem, who had been the mixer on King Kong and Citizen Kane. You can see where this is going. One day I was mixing the second dialogue premix for reel two of American Graffiti and voice-slated it "R-2, D-2," and George, who's sitting in front working on the script of "Star Wars", suddenly stood up: "What did you say?" "Ummm, I don't know.. R-2, D-2--is that what you mean?" "R2D2!!....What a great name!" he shouted, and went back to writing his script. The rest is history. Before going on to make The Godfather Part II, Francis wanted to do The Conversation, which was a film he had written about a wire-tapper, and he asked me to be the film editor as well as the sound designer. I'd never cut a feature before, but I had edited documentaries and commercials, and he thought that it would be a good idea to have somebody putting the film together who knew what sound was all about, since that was the topic of the film. Since then, I've continued to do both picture editing and sound mixing for all the films I work on. I love The Conversation.

It's a good one. We're just about to do the DVD. It won't be out until the end of the year, but we're remastering the picture and sound. In 5.1?

It will be technically 5.1, but we're not going to use the 5.1 environment aggressively, because that wasn't the way we made the film. The Conversation was done in 1974, in mono--pre-Dolby--and so we're going to respect that aesthetic. The DVD will use multi-channel sound, but not so that you would be really aware of it. Were you involved with the Apocalypse Now DVD at all?

I had made a digital transfer of the 70mm mix in December of 1997, and that was the track that was used for the DVD. Now that we're talking about Francis Ford Coppola, I'd like to clear up an urban legend: is there really a nine-hour version of Apocalypse Now?

No, there's a five-hour version, but there never was a nine-hour version. Especially now with the Internet, that rumour lives on. Is that five-hour version just a rough cut? Is it something watchable?

It's the first assembly, with a few missing scenes. Apocalypse Now was a tough post-production, right?

Well, it was long. It was the longest post-production of anything I've ever worked on. I was on it for two years--a year editing picture and then another year doing the sound--which is double the usual length of time. Richie Marks was on for almost three years. It had to find its way, that film--how to tell itself. It was particularly difficult because there was a lot of footage: one-and-a-quarter million feet of film, which is four or five times the normal amount. This was more than twenty years ago, before non-linear electronic editing, so just physically going through that material and making sure that you had the best stuff took a lot of time. I was one of a team of four editors. I've heard The Conversation presented enormous editing challenges.

The first assembly was over four hours, so it was a challenge cutting it down to under two. Also, the production stopped shooting with two weeks' worth of material still left to do--they just ran out of money and time: Francis had to start preproduction on Godfather II. So he said, "Well, Walter, I don't know... Take the material that we've got, put it together the best way you can, and if we need to shoot anything more we'll shoot it once we can see the film together." As it turned out, we had to do just one extra shot, to link a couple of scenes. Wow!

The other challenge was to find a way to balance the character-study part of the film and the mystery part. Those are things that are not usually combined, and it was part of the whole aesthetic of the film to try to combine them: Hermann Hesse meets Hitchcock. It took a while to find the right balance. What we discovered was that when the film emphasized the mystery part, people were impatient with the character-study part. On the other hand, when we emphasized the character-study part, the mystery part felt superfluous. We had to find the right proportion of each, where the atmosphere was interesting and there was just enough story to allow you to follow what was going on. Another challenge was that the whole film is told from Harry Caul's point-of-view, and he's confused a lot of the time, so we had to make the film interesting and understandable, even though the main character is confused about what is going on until the very end. Then when he knows, it drives him nuts. You have to be able to appreciate that, enjoy that, without going nuts yourself! How do you choose your projects? These days do you have, as they say, the pick of the litter?

The three factors for me are: the script, the people involved, and the schedule. An editor will wind up spending a year working on a project, so you'd better be interested in the subject matter, because if you're not, it'll be a long year. The second factor is the people--the director, mainly. If I've already worked with him before, there's no problem. If I haven't, then I need to find some way to get a feeling for our compatibility, so I spend as much time as I can with them, going over the script, and maybe talk to other people they've worked with. And then the third factor is to have enough time in the post-production schedule to do a really good job. That's not always the case: some films have tremendously tight post-production schedules. You have to be very careful when it's that tight, because it doesn't allow the film to find its own voice. What length of time do you generally need to complete a project?

It depends on how many editors there are, but generally at least five or six months from the end of shooting until the film is in the theatres, including all the sound mixing. You can do the work in less time, just like you can cook things quickly, but the result tends to be like fast food--full of empty calories. How did you become involved in the reconstruction of Touch of Evil?

It was a call out of the blue. I had given a lecture on The Conversation, at the Los Angeles County Museum, in the summer of '97. And Rick Schmidlin, the producer of the reconstruction, was in the audience. He just called me up a couple of months later and asked if I was interested in working on this project--and I was--and our schedules worked out. Rick is an independent producer, a Welles enthusiast, and a bit of a detective. He got wind of this fabled 58-page memo that Welles had written after he had been fired off of Touch of Evil. All traces of this memo except for a few pages had been lost, but Rick somehow found a copy of it.

The watcher becomes the watched... Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation "[Character-study and mystery] are not usually combined... It took a while to find the right balance for The Conversation." So I wanted to see it--show me the memo! The other things that were crucial were the condition of the negative and the soundtrack. It turned out the original negative was in very good shape--that's not always the case, particularly for a film that's 40 years old. And Universal still had the 35mm magnetic master, with separated dialogue, music, and sound effects. That was essential in giving us the flexibility to accommodate Welles's notes. Did you piece it together on film or video?

It was edited on an Avid. There was also digital optical reconstruction of some shots that had been damaged. The negative was in good but not perfect shape, so Bob O'Neil at Universal redid those sections using Photoshop-type techniques, getting rid of scratches and tears, old changeover marks, etc. Plus the challenge of removing the titles from the opening shot! Again, was it a lengthy process?

The picture editing part of it took about a month. Really?!

Yes. Welles' notes were very good, clear and inspiring, and I was able to do the work at home, which was nice. I set up an Avid in the barn next to my house, where I had also done The English Patient. The sound editing, the cleaning up of the soundtracks, was done at Universal Studios, and then the final mix of the master track, this new master track, took about five days, also at Universal. All in all, I was involved with the film for about eight weeks, but three of those weeks I wasn't working. The digital repairs on the image took longer--probably about seven months, but it was done on a piecemeal basis because they couldn't afford to monopolize an optical house. It was just done as and when they could afford it. Is it coming out on DVD at any point?

This fall. I've been anxious to own that disc.

Me too. Will you be involved in that in any capacity?

I hope they will show me a version of it before the final mastering. What kind of home theatre set-up have you got?

Nothing much. Oddly, I don't have cable or even an antenna. I have a monitor, a VCR and a DVD player... But my sound system is just a Sony, a mid-level consumer item. I spend so much of my life at the professional high-end of things that I almost ignore it when I come home. The shoemaker's children go without shoes. Do you know what your next project is going to be?

I don't, other than this remastering of The Conversation, which is not an involved process--it'll maybe take two or three weeks. I'm reading scripts at this point, but I don't know what's next. Thanks so much for your time! Post-script: Long after our interview, Mr. Murch advised me of his latest project, an expanded version of Apocalypse Now. "We have gone in to the 2,000,000 feet of negative stored in limestone vaults back east," Murch says. "We're reconstructing from scratch some of the scenes that were cut from the film back in 1978, and hope to include them in a new version to be completed later this year." The film's devotees have long awaited a 'Special Edition', and I, for one, am thrilled. -Bill Chambers page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4