The man who changed the way you see (and hear) Hollywood

To describe Walter Murch as the Yoda of editing wouldn't do the man physical justice. Tall, bearded, professorial, the 81-year-old triple-Oscar-winner has more of a wizardly stature. Murch's sagacity in the field, though? Well, pretty much unmatched, it is.
Not only the picture editor on such classics as Julia, Ghost and The English Patient, Murch was also the first person ever to be credited as 'sound designer' (on Apocalypse Now), having already mixed Coppola's first two Godfather films and The Conversation. There are few veterans of either discipline who have ever treated their craft more intellectually, or been more generous about passing on their discernment.
Murch, who prefers to edit standing up, returns to his elevated desk every few years for a project now, but devotes more of his time to lectures and masterclasses. (He's an honorary associate of the London Film School, and lives in Primrose Hill with his wife, Aggie.) Previous books include his 1992 long essay In the Blink of an Eye, and, in his spare time, a translation of selected works by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, which he released as The Bird That Swallowed its Cage (2012).
His new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, is a dip-in-and-out compendium, an evident passion project, the fruit of a life's work in cinema. There are 30 chapters, mostly adapted from lectures he's prepared in the past. All cleave to editing and sound as his main areas of expertise. (A second, longer volume on filmmaking's essentials will focus on the script, the casting and the vision of the director.) Murch goes off on a few technical tangents mainly addressed to film students; 'I am going to avoid keystroke-specific details about different non-linear editing systems' is intended as reassurance. And while his flights of erudition are wide-ranging – a Copernicus analogy, a tribute to the nymph Echo – they can dazzle and befuddle at once.
Luckily, the man is a outright genius at what he does, with rare and deep first-hand knowledge of the whole production process. He co-wrote THX-1138 (1971) with George Lucas, and was temporarily fired by Disney while making the audaciously dark Return to Oz (1985), his sole directing job. What happened there was an executive reshuffle, which cast doubt on his vision, and it took phone calls from Lucas and Coppola to restore faith.
We learn most from Murch when he digs into the nitty-gritty of particular problems he had to solve. For instance, when Coppola was yanked away from finishing photography on The Conversation (1974), because Paramount had him under the cosh to start The Godfather, Part II, Murch inherited a massive jumble of raw footage and a script that hadn't been completely filmed. There were holes. There wasn't really an ending.
His salvage job on that classic of paranoid surveillance, deservedly famous, gets back-to-back chapters, and even film buffs who know the details are treated to a fascinating blow-by-blow account, complete with QR codes to Vimeo links of animated graphics (these are eccentric to see on the page, but strangely charming). Murch reshaped that whole film using sound, trimming subplots, and moving scenes into a revealingly different order. He never even met Gene Hackman, but he was responsible for piecing together arguably the late actor's greatest performance.
The same ingenuity marked his work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) and his painstaking restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), when he was hired in 1998 to address all the complaints the late Welles had fired off, in a 58-page typed memo to Universal, when they re-edited it without his approval. Murch used all the available sources – a magnetic master of the audio, and a 15-minute-longer cut found in the 1970s – to refurbish the film in line with Welles's intentions. All of these adventures are charted, and make the book an enthralling treasury for anyone who cares about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking.
There's a chapter, too, on dealing with Harvey Weinstein, back when he was nicknamed 'Harvey Scissorhands' for his infamous meddling on final cuts (before the considerably greater infamy to come). Murch had helped to restore 'semi-cordial relations' between the bullying producer and Minghella when they couldn't agree on the right way to end The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). For surviving Harvey's post-production tyranny on Cold Mountain (2003), the author gives less credit to himself and more to his beloved border terrier, Hana. The dog pounced into Weinstein's lap in the edit suite. 'Within five minutes his personality transformed, as if he had been slipped a dose of ketamine. All the changes that we had made to the film were now 'wonderful' and we were 'geniuses'.' A dumbfounded Minghella proposed an executive position for Hana at his production company. He was barely joking.
It was Murch who wedded Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' to the helicopter raid in Apocalypse Now. When he did so, no one had bothered to check whether the rights to use George Solti's great 1965 recording had actually been obtained. This sent Murch scurrying off to purchase 19 other stereo versions of the piece from Tower Records, to find the closest approach to Solti's rubato. Nothing else worked quite so well. Thankfully, Coppola was able to seek permission from Solti directly.
One issue remained: this was so late in post-production that there wasn't time to source the magnetic masters for a state-of-the-art mix. 'What you hear in the film,' Murch explains, 'is a tape transfer from the LP disk, spread in re-recording to six channels of sound as if it were coming from those military speaker-horns that you see sticking out of the side of the helicopters. But perhaps this contingency lends a certain serendipitous truth to the scene, since Colonel Kilgore himself, now revealed to be a connoisseur of music, would doubtless have also copied his tape directly, as we did, from Solti's Decca disk.'
Other figures in cinema history have expanded the parameters of how we see or hear it. No one but Murch has welded sight and sound with such intuition for both.

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