reviewed by Norman Hollyn

It's often said that the arts of writing and editing have a great deal in common -- that the two complement each other in their concerns and intents. With the publication of Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, we have proof that the same holds true for the artists behind these crafts as well. Ondaatje, a poet and novelist whose books include The English Patient and Anil's Ghost, and Murch, a film and sound editor and mixer with credits as wide-ranging as Julia, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient and the upcoming Cold Mountain, balance one another perfectly, and as a result, their dialogues become a fascinating exploration of not only editing and filmmaking, but of the thought processes behind them as well.

In his classic book In The Blink Of An Eye, Murch presented a number of theories about the philosophical and cognitive nature of film editing. In the Blink of an Eye was derived from a talk the author gave in 1988, and though it was updated and reissued in 2001, its perspective is limited by its origins as a lecture. In this new book, Ondaatje asks Murch specific and detailed questions, and we see the editor's thought processes in much more depth.

The genesis of The Conversations dates back to the time when Murch was editing Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Ondaatje's novel The English Patient. Ondaatje became fascinated with Murch's approach to his craft -- the shaping of moments, the plasticity of the medium and how his editing of the movie helped to both clarify the footage and elevate it as well. During a later radio interview, Ondaatje discussed with Murch a scene in which the Willem Dafoe character is questioned by a Nazi lieutenant. Murch, who had been reading Curzio Malaparte's discussion of the character of the Nazis, was intrigued by the notion that the Nazis hated any displays of weakness. Using this psychology, he edited Dafoe's interrogation scene to create an arc in which the lieutenant first idly threatens to cut off Dafoe's thumbs but only decides to actually perform the deed after Dafoe begs, "Don't cut me." Ondaatje was fascinated by the way Murch opened up that moment and added a second, more pleading, unscripted reading of the line, so that he could shape the lieutenant's reaction to suit Malaparte's thesis. Murch then dropped all sound out of the mix at that exact moment. Ondaatje reasoned that any editor who shapes a performance based on his reading of a scholarly book is someone whose ideas were worth pursuing more deeply.

Walter Murch

And that is exactly what this book does so perfectly. It is a series of five separate conversations between the two spread out over time. The questions cover Murch's earliest influences (he created sound montages as a child), his years at USC's film school where he met George Lucas and other future filmmakers, and much of Murch's career -- including his sound and film editing, his writing (there's a great story about his writing of Lucas' THX 1138) and his directing of the film Return To Oz. Under Ondaatje's intelligent and careful probing, enough details are discussed to make this book an invaluable examination of the film editing process.

At one point, Ondaatje inquires about a problematic scene in The English Patient, in which its characters respond to news of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Using the metaphor of a game called Negative Twenty Questions, Murch talks about the limitations of editing, which is always constrained by the reality of what has been shot, rather than by the intent of the original material. At the suggestion of his assistant editor, who noted, "A bomb is a bomb," Murch restructured the scene so the characters' reactions were about a smaller bomb

Michael Ondaatje

that killed the friend of a major character. "The film was so much about those five individual people ... that to suddenly open it up near the end and ask the audience to imagine the death of hundreds of thousands of unknown people ... It was too abstract," explains Murch. "So the bomb of Hiroshima became the bomb that killed Hardy, someone you knew."

The book is filled with gems like that. In a discussion about The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Murch talks about how he condensed forty hours of documentary footage into a short fifteen-minute section of that film. He introduces the concept of what he calls "striking images," (that is, contrasting images). "Not just visually striking, but striking in all senses. Then [you find] ways to put those images together so they enhance one another, both by resonance and by contradiction. ... That's where you start. What you're constantly trying to find, as you distill [the footage], is ways that these images can go together at deeper and deeper levels."

The range of Murch's thoughts and experiences is truly inspiring. Using philosophy as well as filmmaking, readings as well as real examples, Murch has assembled, under Ondaatje's acute probing, a cogent series of tools for the analysis of script dynamics, character presentation and editing possibilities across sound, music and picture. There may be no other filmmaker around today who could accomplish this.

There are many books that profess to explain how editing works, with greater or lesser degrees of success. This book rises above them all in terms of its readability, usability and depth of thought. It is a work that deserves to be on the shelf of every filmmaker who wants to better understand the dynamics of the editing process and how to intelligently shape films for the better.