Cutting-edge surgery on a film

Walter Murch walks to work over Primrose Hill, following Parkhill Road until it meets Fleet Road. There, set back from the gently curving corner, is the Old Chapel Studio. He lets himself in and goes upstairs to begin the 255th day of editing “Cold Mountain.”

The landing at the top of the stairs is a slab of translucent green glass. One doesn’t walk so much as float across it into the realm of film editing. Murch opens a heavy wooden door to his room at the end of the hall and goes inside. Not one frame of film is in sight.

Only Murch’s picture boards tell the story of what goes on in here. He turns on his Mac. Murch is using Apple’s Final Cut Pro to edit “Cold Mountain” -- the first time a motion picture of this magnitude has been edited using this $995 digital editing system. While there have been technical and logistical hurdles since production started in July 2002, so far Murch and his assistant editor, Sean Cullen, have surmounted them all.

Murch crosses the rough wooden plank floor to his simple desk at the rear of the room. He takes his Mac PowerBook out of its black carrying case, wakens it and makes a journal entry while his editing workstation comes to life.

Over the last six weeks, since Murch finished the first assembly, he and director Anthony Minghella have removed 53 minutes of material from the film. The current edited version of “Cold Mountain,” four hours and 14 minutes, is still a huge amount of footage -- equal to the entire first assembly for Minghella’s “The English Patient,” (which Murch also edited), itself considered a high-volume motion picture. In his journal Murch describes this revealing statistic as “sobering.”

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Like MOST DAYS NOW, THIS ONE WILL BE DEVOTED to structural issues in the film, one of three strands in Murch’s editorial process. First there is the logistical wrangling of all the footage -- getting it into the system correctly, in sync and properly logged, then getting it out the other end when the creative work is finished.

The second strand is what Murch calls the “performance” of editing, that is, selecting takes with the right line readings, putting them in their proper places relative to each other and intuiting how long to hold each one before cutting to the next. “You can be a perfectly good logistical editor, but if you don’t have the feel for the right choices and the right rhythms, it’s like somebody playing a musical instrument who gets the notes all right, but something somehow just doesn’t feel right.”

The third element is the analytical part, the things Murch says a book editor might tell an author about basic structure: “Well, this is a great chapter, but it may be too long relative to the other chapters. Why don’t you try dividing it in half and take the first half and put it ahead of the other chapter? And this, here? Maybe you don’t need it. Maybe it should be in a different place.”

Structure, for Murch, is distinct from either the “tone or touch” of performance or the “systems functions” of managing film inventory. “You can’t survive without all of them interweaving,” Murch says, “although various editors have more talent in one area than in another. The impossible goal is to be equally good at all three.”

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Murch STARTS AT THE BEGINNING, WITH THE opening battle scene. He is on the prowl for redundancies: Where is the fat to cut. He plays the scene. There. A shot of the Union charge feels like it goes on too long. He’ll remember that. There. The Confederates are slow to move their cannon into place. After watching the entire sequence play, noting all the possibilities for trimming shots, he returns to the beginning.

Now he sets Final Cut Pro into trim mode so it will loop, or replay, the same shot over and over. Murch holds his index finger over the “K” key and watches the shot play on the large wide-screen monitor on his left. As he feels the moment where it ought to end he presses the key. The shot is trimmed by six frames, and a small readout “--6” appears. Thirty-five-millimeter film runs at 24 frames per second, so that trim equals 1/4 of a second. The shot replays. Again he feels the moment and presses the “K” key: the readout again reads “--6,” which means he hit the same frame twice in a row -- that’s a reflex of 1/24th of a second.

“You have to feel the musicality of it,” Murch says later, speaking about this edit-on-the-fly technique for making outgoing edits.

Other editors may freeze the two sides of an edit (with the outgoing frame in one window, the incoming frame in the other window) to carefully study how they relate. But this isn’t Murch’s way. At the crucial moment of the cut, he insists on working from instincts to give him the kind of emotional connection to the film he wants.

February 9, 2003. Murch’s Journal

It is a miracle: the ability -- more often than not -- to think this shot needs a one-frame trim at the tail. And then be able on the first try to run the shot and hit the trim marker, and get a reading of -1. How is it done? It is mysterious to me. By looking at the rhythms of the image as a kind of visual music, I guess, and then hitting the mark when the new instrument (the new shot) should enter. Musicians do it all the time. Not coincidentally, the frame corresponds to the smallest interval in music: the hemidemisemiquaver. The hdsq is 1/32 note, corresponding to a film frame at a metronomic setting of 180.

“If I can’t do this,” Murch wrote in his book on film editing, “In the Blink of an Eye,” “if I can’t hit the same frame repeatedly at 24 frames per second I know there is something wrong in my approach to the shot, and I adjust my thinking until I find a frame I can hit.”

Murch’s on-the-fly technique derives from his theory of “the blink.” The edit in film -- “a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another” -- isn’t so different from what we do thousands of times every day in real life when we blink our eyes.

While editing “The Conversation,” the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola movie starring Gene Hackman, Murch realized his decisions about where to cut shots were coinciding with Hackman’s eye blinks. Early one morning, after staying up all night working on “The Conversation,” Murch walked to breakfast. He passed a Christian Science Reading Room with a display copy of that day’s paper. It featured a story about film director John Huston, who had just directed “Fat City.” Murch stopped to read the interview.

Huston said an ideal film seems to be like thought itself; the viewer’s eyes seem to project the images. Huston observed that we regularly cut out unnecessary information by blinking as our gaze adjusts, say, from a person sitting next us to a lamp across the room. Huston’s idea connected to what Murch had himself just experienced editing scenes of Harry Caul in “The Conversation.”

Murch took the idea further by noticing that we also blink when separating thoughts and sorting things out. “Start a conversation with somebody and watch when they blink,” he says. “I believe you will find the listener will blink at the precise moment he or she ‘gets’ the idea of what you are saying, not an instant earlier or later.”

Murch now understood why his edit points were aligning so closely with Hackman’s eye blinks in “The Conversation.” The actor had so thoroughly become Harry Caul he was demonstrating his completed thoughts and feelings in this physiological way.

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For SEVERAL HOURS MURCH ADVANCES THROUGH the “Cold Mountain” battle sequence to locate each shot in the battle scene that had felt excessive on that earlier pass. Using his reflexive technique to make a new cut point, he marks then removes the superfluous frames.

After finishing this pass, he watches the results. How does it feel? Does it move along properly? Is there a rhythm to it? Did he drop anything important? Were any telling moments compromised? No, it looks fine for now. The battle is now shorter by one minute and a half. He will show it to Minghella later in the day.

An editor’s responsibility, Murch says, is “partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to ‘ask’ for it -- to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time.”

There’s another reason Murch edits in real time -- why he doesn’t hold frames on his monitor to make decisions about where to end a shot. This stems from his “rule of six,” a hierarchy of what constitutes a good edit. The list upends a traditional film school approach that normally puts “continuity of three-dimensional space” as the top priority of editing.

For example, you see a woman open a door and walk halfway across the room in shot A. In closer shot B, you find her at that same halfway point as she continues across the room. Not maintaining that spatial logic “was seen as a failure of rigor or skill,” as Murch writes in “In the Blink of an Eye.” Murch puts this objective at the bottom of his list. Instead, emotion, “the hardest thing to define and deal with,” is at the top. “How do you want the audience to feel? What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camera work, not the performances, not even the story -- it’s how they felt.”

The Rule of Six, from “In the Blink of an Eye”

1) Emotion 51%

2) Story 23%

3) Rhythm 10%

4) Eye-trace 7%

5) Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%

6) Three-dimensional space of action 4%

An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”; 4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace” -- the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects “planarity” -- the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the dimensions of stage-line, etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).

Emotion ... is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom. The values I put after each item are slightly tongue in cheek, but not completely ... emotion is worth more than all five of the things underneath it....

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Film EDITING MEANS AIMING AT A moving target. A shot length that feels appropriate today might not seem that way later, when adjacent scenes and sequences have been changed or reordered. Every edit decision, no matter how trivial it seems or how few frames it involves, throws a pebble into a placid pond. It ripples all the surrounding material. That’s why there is a constancy and perseverance to film editing -- viewing, reviewing and rethinking. Through it, the work itself takes on a persistent rhythm.

Murch and Minghella’s principal task now is the overall narrative arc of the film’s architecture. They focus on the stories of the protagonists, Ada and Inman, whose narratives alternate on screen throughout most of the film. The characters appear together for only a short time at the beginning and at the end of the story. This “double helix” structure, as Murch calls it, comparing the narrative to the shape of DNA, is a difficulty inherent in the premise of “Cold Mountain,” the book. Minghella had no choice but to carry over this configuration in the film adaptation.

The movie’s shape must accommodate that fact, yet also keep the Ada-Inman relationship in the forefront of the audience’s mind. Their romance has barely begun when they are separated by the onset of the Civil War. They remain separated by place and by the dramatically different consequences of the same war. Their desire for each other must be present, accessible to the filmgoer, yet remain unfulfilled until the end of “Cold Mountain.”

This is a formidable storytelling challenge. And one that Minghella and Murch felt from the start.

In his post-first-assembly journal entry, Murch called the opening “long and eccentric.” He meant there are two different problems in the beginning section: 1) two principal characters, Ruby and Reverend Veasey, don’t show up until the end of the first act, approximately 50 minutes from the start; and 2) asynchronous shifts in time and place between Cold Mountain in 1861 and the Battle of Petersburg in 1864 may be too demanding.

Shortly after screening the first assembly, Murch and Minghella discovered a possible solution to these problems in the first act: Ada’s letter-writing to Inman.

February 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

We go over the “bungee cord” section during the letter writing to see if we can restructure “tenses” of the film (past-present) to lie easier next to each other.

Ada’s difficulties at the beginning of the film, after her father dies and before Ruby arrives, could be condensed by adding material to her letters in a voice-over narration that is “expandable and contractible.” This “bungee-cord” section is one of those “hinge” scenes that Murch expects and needs in every film -- a section capable of absorbing major structural changes that occur before and/or after it while also being malleable enough to enlarge and shrink as necessary over the course of editing.

Originally, a series of scenes were linked to each other in real time: Ada’s father dies, she tries to cope with Black Cove Farm on her own, she suffers in the winter, she is threatened by Major Teague. But these scenes seem to drag. They could be used, however, as fragments if they are elements in Ada’s letters to Inman.

Production-wise, augmenting Ada’s letters beyond the original screenplay (and what was shot on location) is relatively painless: Minghella sends Kidman more letter text to read; she records the new voice-over in a sound studio in New York; a sound file of the material is e-mailed to Murch in London; it’s integrated into the audio flow within Final Cut Pro; and Murch can start to sketch out a structure, relating the new audio to the appropriate scene fragments.

Some directors dislike the process of adding dialogue to their films. Minghella loves the opportunity to record newly written lines that either deepen his original intentions or revise them completely. Like the editing itself, it’s another opportunity to rewrite the film.

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There ARE 11 TIME SHIFTS AND SIX LOCATION changes in the first 33 pages of the “Cold Mountain” shooting script. Some of these movements shift both dimensions simultaneously. And time moves at a quicker pace in Ada’s “Cold Mountain” scenes than it does in Inman’s war and recovery scenes.

Eventually, about an hour into the film, at Page 34, when Inman encounters Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Inman and Ada’s stories have caught up with each other. Both characters now occupy the same time frame. Thereafter, the two main characters are intercut by location. After showing the lovers in parallel time, they finally converge in space at the film’s climax, in the Rocky Gorge on Cold Mountain.

Minghella and Murch come to the conclusion that asymmetrical shifts in space and time at the beginning of “Cold Mountain” might be too complex for the good of the overall story. Having Ada recount more about her plight in a longer letter would simplify the story arc without giving up important information or dramatic scenes.

“This allows us to be brief and succinct,” Murch says about the change. “We will hear her voice reading the letter and then there will be a scenelette, then she’ll read some more, then there’s another scenelette. That gives us a well-defined area where time can be freely elastic. She’s bringing Inman (and us) up to date on everything that happened to her over a three- or four-year period.”

Soon after Inman hears the final lines from Ada’s letter, “Come back to me,” he escapes through the hospital window and begins his journey home. Now he’s caught up in time with Ada.

“That morning he’s hitting the beach,” Murch says, “is the same morning that Ada goes to sell her father’s watch at the store, so all the acceleration in time -- the bungee cord -- happens in the turbulence of the letter.”

Expanding the letter has another unexpected benefit: It strengthens a connection the film wants to make between Ada and Inman even while they are away from each other. She writes and he reads; they are intimately together, at least in spirit, while being apart physically. And it’s believable that letter-writing nurtures their bond -- it’s in keeping with the reality of the Civil War.

To get the film down from four hours to a releasable length, Murch and Minghella will have to do more than trim fat from specific shots, as in the battle scene, and restructure to compress time, as with Ada’s expanded letters. They must look for whole scenes that might be dropped.

Murch and Minghella know full well that Miramax doesn’t want its showcase Christmas release, the film being positioned for top Oscar contention, to be three hours long. It’s largely a matter of economics. Theater owners and distributors hate it when a movie can have only one decent evening showing. The cutoff point is about 2 1/2 hours.

To avoid conflict with the studio about the running time, Minghella and Murch want to stay in control of the edit -- by making the cuts and rearrangements they choose. Minghella has final cut on “Cold Mountain.” Nevertheless, Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein is notorious for trying to force directors to make severe, last-minute cuts to their films. So the more Murch and Minghella do now to get ahead of the curve, the better.

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With THE FILM UNDER FOUR hours, Murch goes back to the beginning, looking for wholesale cuts. The first prospect is a scene between Inman and Swimmer, a Cherokee from Cold Mountain, that was designed to open the film. The two soldiers sit together behind the Confederate lines and Swimmer recites a Cherokee battle curse to Inman, in Cherokee.

April 1, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Still wrestling with the curse at the beginning. The problem is that the opening in Cherokee puts everyone’s brain to sleep, and so they don’t listen when he translates it.

One of Minghella’s methods for taking his film’s temperature is to invite peers from the filmmaking, literary and theater communities to work-in-progress screenings every three weeks. And at one such screening, it was clear that the curse “was just sailing over people’s heads,” Murch says. “Even very bright filmmakers couldn’t get what was going on. There’s something about beginning a film in a foreign language without subtitles that says, ‘What people say in this film, isn’t important. It’s just syllables and sounds.’ ”

The scene is cut.

A week later Murch is midway through this same round of revisions when Minghella recommends another scene for removal: Ada and Ruby at Black Cove Farm talking as they fix each other’s hair. It’s an intimate tableau with moments that flash with humor, but reveals little about the class and cultural differences between the two women that we didn’t already know.

The cutting continues, and a few days later Minghella and Murch agree this new version is ready. The film is now 3 hours, 26 minutes. In the two months since completing the first assembly they have cut out 1 hour and 40 minutes. Coincidentally, this rate of cutting, which averages 13 minutes a week, is exactly the same rate at which Murch first assembled dailies as they became available during production.

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If THE FILM EDITOR SEEMS FATED, LIKE SISYPHUS, TO keep repeating his or her work endlessly, well, there’s truth to that. Each round of revisions leaves material in new arrangements, which in turn requires revision. And so it goes, for weeks and months. Get to the end and start over from the beginning.

Murch describes this process as a requisite way for him to find the film. “The first assembly, like all subsequent versions of the film, is a lens through which we can glimpse the film itself. And in its transubstantiation, it not only gives us a way of seeing, an approach, but the image in the lens eventually becomes that thing itself.”

At its extreme, this formulation helps explain why many filmmakers (and other artists) can’t bear seeing their work once it’s finished. When the tinkering comes to an end and the work is no longer pliant in the creator’s hands, it might as well not exist anymore. The process is a reward. And the incentive to keep showing up for work.

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Excerpted from “Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema” by Charles Koppelman. Copyright 2005. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit Press.

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Charles Koppelman, author of “Behind the Seen,” is also a film director and screenwriter. He lives in Berkeley.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘Behind the Seen’

For his new book, “Behind the Seen” (to be published this month by Peachpit Press), Charles Koppelman tracked the shaping of “Cold Mountain” as film editor Walter Murch worked with director Anthony Minghella to “find the film” using a practiced eye and pioneering software. In this excerpt, Murch and Minghella use “bungee cords” and “the rule of six” to cut a 4-hour, 14-minute version of the film to a releasable length.