The Switchfather: Walter Murch (Part One)

Walter Murch is a man who needs little introduction. Somewhat of a rockstar in the editing community, Walter has worked on films such as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, Cold Mountain, Jarhead and most recently Youth Without Youth (due for release Fall 2007).

At the NAB 2007 Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet, Walter was a special guest and he was generous enough to give me some time for an interview.

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MB: Walter, I just wanted to take a step back and talk about your transition from film editing to Avid. I understand you first used Avid in 1995, is that right?

WM: Yes, on The English Patient. I had initially proposed using Avid to Anthony [Minghella - Director] and Saul [Zaentz - Producer], but they both said no, Partly because we were shooting in Rome, which at that time was far out at the edge of the supply line and also because Anthony was nervous about the tendency of digital technology to be open to studio interference. So we started out editing on a Kem and I was perfectly happy with that and then five weeks into the shoot I got word that my 27 year old son, Walter had developed a brain tumor. I met with Saul and Anthony and told them that they’d better look for another editor, They were preternaturally calm about it, which in retrospect was the right thing to be. They said “No, no everything will turn out fine. We want you to stay on as editor, we’ll just stockpile the footage”.

So I flew back to San Francisco the next day and of course my main concern was Walter but I also couldn’t stop those words “stockpile the footage” from running through my head. The idea of being off the film for a minimum of eight weeks and then confronting all that stockpiled footage, I thought there’s just no way…

As soon as I got home, I realized the only way to make things work would be to switch to Avid so I could work from home and be there for Walter when he came out of hospital. In fact that’s what took place and luckily Walter not only survived the operation but it’s been eleven years and the tumor has not come back, touch wood. The transition to Avid was successful and I think it will probably be the only time a switch was made while the film was in the middle of shooting. It created all types of logistical dust storms but we managed it which was very much to the credit of my assistants, Edie [Bleiman] and Sean [Cullen]. The bottom line was that I was able to catch up with them and have an assembly done two weeks after the end of shooting which was an endorsement for Avid and the process of editing films in electronic format.

MB: How did you find the transition from physically editing film to digital non-linear?

WM: Well actually I think the hardest transition, is from editing on a Kem or Steenbeck to editing non-linear because the mindset is completely different. Luckily I’d started editing on a Moviola which is mechanical but still non-linear. You sit at the Moviola and you say to your assistant “Give me shot 734, take 5, B camera”. You hold out your hand and depending on how good the assistant is, a few seconds later, you’ve got the material and you put it in and cut it. Everything is broken in to bits, and the assistant is the non-linear vehicle by which you get this material so editing on a Moviola and editing on an Avid or Final Cut is more familiar than editing in these big 10 min rolls of film (Kem or Steenbeck) which you have to spool down to find the material.
Putting footage in big rolls has its benefits by the way - inevitably in the search for shot A, you bump into shot B which may be better than what you had in mind with shot A. So serendipity is an inherent part of the editorial process and there was an in-built serendipity to the linear systems of the Kems and Steenbecks and in various ways I’ve tried to rebuild that serendipity in editing electronically.

MB So in 2002, you switched to Final Cut Pro for Cold Mountain. How long had you been considering that switch?

WM: We’d been looking at Final Cut sideways since about 2000, and at that time I was working on Apocalypse Now Redux then Sean and I moved to work on Kathryn Bigelow’s submarine film, K-19 which I edited on Avid. I knew that Cold Mountain was coming up, so it was the spring of 2002 that we really began to get Final Cut in our gunsights and consider it as a realistic proposition.

MB: About a year ago, I read the excellent Behind the Seen book by Charles Koppelman which I thoroughly enjoyed.

WM: Yeah it’s a good book.

MB: I thought it was fascinating because you just don’t see books like that with so much in-depth coverage of the editing process.

WM: Yeah, also it’s a moment that will never come again, so to document those moments in a detailed way is very useful in the long term.

MB: From reading the book, it was clear that using Final Cut Pro 3 (as it was then) on Cold Mountain was largely a leap of faith.

WM: There were some uncertain elements about it. Apple had not yet come up with the change list, but we had some inside information that this was in the works, although as you can tell from reading the book, our communications with Apple were very sterile. In fact they were very nervous about us doing this with Final Cut 3 because it was such a high profile film. So they withdrew all technical support from us and we were on our own. Luckily, we had Digital Film Tree who were invaluable and they became our inside track to Apple. But you can’t launch a film like that on hope alone so we did have plans to come up with a change list that we were going to design ourselves. In the end we didn’t have to do that.

MB: I’ve seen it mentioned that value for money was one of the main reasons for switching to Final Cut Pro.

WM: Yes that’s a factor and it seems strange to say “Here’s an $80 million movie, so why would you be worried about the cost?”, but in fact editorial departments have budgets too and if you can get four FCP systems for the same amount you’d have to fight to get two Avid systems, then it’s worth considering. I think the biggest factor though was simply my curiosity. I am one of those people known as ‘early adopters’, I am just fascinated in the intersection of technology and art and there’s no better way to study that intersection than by actually doing it and risking something in the process of doing it. When you have to figure out some way to solve a problem in the next 24 hours, you frequently come up with a wonderful solution.

The other thing is that I felt it unhealthy for the art and industry of cinema for there to be only one system, and that’s what was developing in the early part of the 21st century. Avid was having a lock on the system and my own experience with them on [The Talented Mr] Ripley was that they were noticeably unresponsive to cries of help. Even from someone like me, who had won an Oscar for The English Patient which was the first film ever to win an Oscar for a digitally edited film and it was on an Avid! So if I was having problems getting help from them, you wonder what happens at other levels. So I think moving to FCP was a kind of provocative act but in a good sense to say “let’s get some more balls in the air” and clearly Avid at that time was bound by the fact that when they had launched their product, the computers of the time were not capable of doing what they wanted the product to do. So Avid became this mixture of software and hardware and the CPU. The appeal of Final Cut was that it took advantage of the advances in computers of the last 10 years, and computers could now do naturally what you’d had to force them to do with external hardware in 1995. That had great appeal on all kinds of levels.

MB: So I read you use a FileMaker Pro based system in the cutting room, is that still the case?

WM: Yes absolutely, more and more. It’s a very tight integration between FileMaker and Final Cut.

MB: How are you using FileMaker with FCP?

WM: Well it’s really everything but one of the main things is when I get the dailies, I string them together into what we call ‘Kem Rolls’ - these are every shot in the scene or sequence just butted up against each other. I choose a representative number of still frames that encapsulate what every setup is about - not every take but every setup: it could be as little as one frame or on Jarhead, it was up in the 20s because they were shooting everything with two handheld cameras. Ultimately those frames land in a FileMaker database where they are printed out to produce a book of all these frames in script order and also panels of frames which I mount on the wall behind me. That’s only one of many examples and I’ve been using FileMaker since 1986 on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s the same template but more than 20 years down the road every film it’s like a snowball that acquires a new layer, rolling downhill so it’s very adaptable.

MB: And I’m guessing the fact that FCP is based on QuickTime, gives FileMaker the flexibility to access that media far more easily than on Avid.

WM: Yes exactly. That was one of the original observations that Sean made who comes from a computer rather than traditional film background. He had to learn Avid of course but one of the things he noticed was this translational issue which is missing in Final Cut because it’s based on QuickTime. There’s a transparency there which is architecturally very interesting.

MB: So you’ve now used FCP on three major movies. Cold Mountain, Jarhead and most recently, Youth without Youth. As we talked about earlier, with Cold Mountain it was very much a leap of faith, has your experience of FCP changed at all since then?

WM: From my point of view, both because it was the first time I’d used it and because it was Final Cut 3, Cold Mountain had the most level of uncertainty to it and obviously the program has improved a lot since then. I have to tell you that the hugest benefit that any editor can have is an assistant who is perfectly comfortable and conversant with the system you’re using and that’s the case with Sean. In fact, it was mainly him saying “we should look at FCP, there are interesting things about it”. You know I think if Sean had been someone who was perfectly comfortable with the Avid and who I’d dragged in to Final Cut, I think the situation would have been very different. So he’s been my main technical support.

We go to Cupertino and have a debriefing with Apple after every film - we say “here’s what we learned, here’s where you guys may think about moving in this direction a little and here’s a trick that we did and you might consider incorporating elements of this into some future version”. So not withstanding our initial nervousness of Apple on Cold Mountain, there’s now a good relationship. I think the biggest headache, operationally from the earlier days, is that in Broadcast Wave files are now supported, that’s a big relief.

In part two of this interview, Walter talks about why Lightworks never appealed to him, his vision for the future of Final Cut Studio and Feng Shui for the cutting room.

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