The Switchfather: Walter Murch (Part Two)

In part one of this interview, Walter Murch talked about editing on Avid, switching to Final Cut Pro and using FileMaker Pro in the cutting room.

MB: One of the really big announcements at NAB this year has been the inclusion of Color, a grading application within the Final Cut Studio package.

WM: Yes it’s huge and a very interesting development.

MB: There are also major improvements to Soundtrack Pro which I’m really encouraged to see and I imagine it’s an app you’re very interested in.

WM: Yes, I have used earlier versions of Soundtrack Pro in a limited way and there are a lot of promising things about the product but I’m looking forward to a more seamless integration of the elements. Ultimately what I would love to see is a kind of FileMaker-style sharing of the project. FileMaker works by having a database which is open to whoever you allow access to it and anyone can be working on any part of the database at any time. However, if you are working on a record and someone else wants to access that record they’ll get a message to say they can read the record but can’t change it until you have signed off. So the only limitation is you can’t change something that someone else is changing but the flexibility that gives you overall is fantastic.

If there can be a way that I as an editor can say everyone - the sound people, the visual effects people, the color timing people, whoever - can have access to anything that’s in my project, but I’m working on this two minute section right now and I’m going to put barriers from here to here. The other people can freely work earlier or later in the sequence and can view the section I‘m working on but they’ll simply see the way it was when i started. When I’m done, I’ll take the barriers off and it will ripple through your systems and be available in that new form. That obviously can be something that happens physically in the rooms that surround the edit suite but also it could happen in real time through the internet, so that is a very interesting thing to look forward to.

MB: It’s interesting to hear you say that because that’s a concept I’ve been keen to see for a long time. When you break the processes down, video editing, motion graphics and sound editing are all essentially media placed in time and space. Ultimately it would make a lot of sense to have a universal timeline and have various people work on that simultaneously with different modules.

WM: Exactly. I mean who knows how many years down the road that may come but in terms of what a computer can do and in terms of a creative line, there is no reason not to have that and you simply intersect it at whatever level of detail you want to intersect depending on what it is you’re doing at the time. The interesting thing is that intersection can be both separate people or yourself at separate times.

MB: Since the first release of Final Cut Pro in 1999, Apple have aggressively made these tools far more accessible than they ever were before. What impact do you think this accessibility will have on the training of future editors?

WM: Well that’s one of the main things that drew me into Final Cut - for the first time in film history really, you have a system where the cost of the media (once it is captured) and the editing station is insignificant. That of course now also applies to Avid but certainly in 2003, the cost of the Avid station was a big capital investment.

Whereas with Final Cut, the cost of the station can be as low as the cost of a laptop and the software. I am able to download media onto a portable hard drive and say to an intern, “Here’s some dailies, go ahead and cut the scene”. That’s revolutionary in the sense of training because any editor knows that the only way you really learn how to edit is to do it. It’s like dancing. You can read about dancing, you can watch people dancing, you can learn the history of dancing but the only way to really learn how to dance is to get out on the floor and move your body. Editing is kinesthetic in that sense - it’s about body motion - and that’s the reason I stand when I edit because you have to internalize rhythms in very complex ways like you do when you dance.

So with the permission of the film’s producers, Final Cut allowed me to give all my assistants, apprentices and interns raw material and let them cut a scene. They would email me the sequence, I would open it up on my machine, link it to my media and we’d sit there watching what they’d cut on the plasma screen. I’d give them feedback then they’d go away, do a recut and I would make a few more observations before giving them something else. I’d take what they had edited and would start to work with it myself. So those sequences are actually in the film, cut by assistants and apprentices and I think that is a wonderful, encouraging thing. Of course the editor has to be open to doing that - I know there are editors who are not psychologically built that way, but I’m just the opposite, I’m very interested in making these opportunities possible and it was one of the reasons why I was drawn to Final Cut in the first place.

MB: Just looking at Behind the Seen, one of the things I enjoyed most was looking at the photographs…

WM: Oh great.

MB: …particularly of your cutting room, because there was a real Zen-like simplicity about it and it really appealed to me.

WM: Yes I call that the Feng Shui moment. I’m always moving all over the world and editing in the most unlikely places and if I’m going to be anywhere for any length of time, the Feng Shui of the room has to be correct else I get kind of crazy. I spend a lot of time, meaning days, working out the placement of the editing station in the room and wondering if I have enough wall space and all of these things.

Plus you’re inviting people to come into the room and evaluate the film critically. Frequently on Cold Mountain we would push things back and we could get 15 people in to the room to look at a 50 inch plasma display. Same thing on Jarhead and the room is a very significant portion of it. Strangely enough one of the things that seems to help the most is simply cutting panels of black foamcore and putting them around the monitors so the focus is on the image itself not on the ‘dangling wires phenomenon’. I’ve been using the same $90 architects’ table that I bought for The English Patient for the last 10 years and there’s a bread rack in the back that’s holding the monitors. The whole set up probably cost no more than $150 and dressing it up with black foamcore is inexpensive. It’s all very simple things but they make a big difference.

MB: One final question, have you ever used Lightworks?

WM: No I haven’t.

MB: Now that surprises me.

WM: You know, I didn’t like the shark.

MB: Oh really?

WM: Aesthetically I was put off by the idea that I would have to be looking at a shark! If I had many lifetimes to live, I probably would have tried it but for various reasons including the shark, it didn’t happen.

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