One could argue that Walter Murch’s finest achievements are invisible. For what are film editing and sound design if not the joining of disparate pieces of celluloid, so that, as we sit in the darkened cinema, we can’t imagine they ever existed any other way? But look (and listen) closely, and you will recognize Murch’s handiwork: in the opening sequence of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), the whirring rotor of a helicopter gives way to the blades of a fan spinning in a Saigon hotel room; in THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996), the strokes of a painter’s brush become the sinuous folds of a vast desert.
His interest in sound stems from childhood (his nickname, Walter McBoing Boing, came from the Dr. Seuss character who speaks in onomatopoeias). But you can’t make a living from sound, Murch reasoned, and so he studied
oceanography at Johns Hopkins, then art history and romance languages in Europe. In Paris, he was seduced by the films of the French New Wave. When he returned to America, he took up graduate film studies at USC, met George Lucas and Francis Coppola, and did the sound mix on THE RAIN PEOPLE (1969).
Afterwards, all three filmmakers settled in San Francisco, where the dream called American Zoetrope was born. Its THX 1138 (1971) was directed by Lucas from a script cowritten by Murch. The movie was ahead of its time, and a flop, but then a little thing called THE GODFATHER (1972) kept the dream going and kept Murch in steady demand: mixing AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973) at night while cutting sound and picture on THE CONVERSATION (1974) by day; then THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and JULIA (1977), before enlisting for two years of active duty on APOCALYPSE NOW. Around the same time, Murch did uncredited work on the script of THE BLACK STALLION (1979), then directed RETURN TO OZ (1985), a children’s picture that’s darkly lyrical, sometimes terrifying and badly in need of rediscovery.
Murch has since returned to editing and sound mixing with renewed vigor and monastic discipline: he works standing up, as if performing surgery; and he refuses to visit the sets of the films on which he is employed, lest any information from outside the edges of the frame enter his field of vision. His fascinating theories on his chosen craft have been published in two books. And he has been handsomely rewarded, with nine Oscar nominations and three wins. To be sure, there have been films less than deserving of his talents, but THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY have proven him a master of difficult material and one of the most inspired collaborators any director could hope to have. To call Walter Murch a mere “editor” is to consider Michelangelo nothing more than a common house painter. –SF