Eavesdrop On These Inspiring Conversations
“For every shot, there is one specific place to end and no other. A specific frame.… So the question is, How do you decide which frame that is?”—film editor Walter Murch
Submerged as I am in the completion of a new novel, I’ve spent significant time consulting the
Grand Shaman of Creative Thought: film editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley).
If I lack a direct line to Murch himself, I have the next best thing: a book that’s been indispensable to my creative life for several years now.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje, presents transcripts of five mesmerizing conversations between the legendary Murch and poet/novelist Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, Divisadero).
The result is a deep and prolonged meditation on all aspects of the creative process, a dialogue reaching into Murch’s expansive mind to encompass gothic cathedrals, Thomas Edison, spaghetti sauce, the musical notation of a tenth-century monk, the meaning of a squeaky door, and the rate of travel for invisible waves crossing the San Francisco Bay. Under the spell of Murch and Ondaatje, the reader finds these divergent subjects all marvelously relevant to the challenges confronting the creative worker.
Here are four little gleanings, really just grains of sand from the pyramid. The book is packed with this wonderful stuff. If you’re a creative thinker, read The Conversations and give thanks.
On Being Personally Invested
-Murch: I…try to choose projects that dovetail with my own interests. That’s a significant part of the process—where you are really casting yourself, in much the same way as actors cast themselves in a role. In an ideal situation…an actor chooses a part that represents some emotional truth to her as an individual, which pushes her somewhere she has not gone before.
-Ondaatje: That is very precisely what writers do, or should do.
On the Importance of Seeing the Bigger Picture
-Murch: …And as I was removing that scene, at two in the morning, it began to speak to me, as if it were Job, saying, Why are you removing me, me of all scenes who has been so faithful to you, who has tried so hard to accommodate your every wish? And I said, I know what you’re talking about, and believe me, I’ve spent many hundreds of hours on you and yet I’m willing to throw all that work away for the benefit of the whole.
On Inspiration in the Mundane
-Murch: Hermann Hesse talked…about how a writer is influenced. He said there are various stages of influence. Kind of like chakras. The lowest, least noble method of influence is, say, reading Hemingway and then deciding to write like Hemingway. This is natural, it’s something we all go through, but you have to go beyond this to higher and higher levels until you reach the point where you’re influenced by reading something like the equivalent of the back of cereal boxes. Somehow just purely mundane or accidental things have such magic to them that they influence you and make you see things.
On the Inner Editor
-Ondaatje: The talent to edit and the talent to conceive or write a film, how distinct are they?
-Murch: Pretty distinct. Everyone creative has elements of both. …When I’m writing I have to find a way to let these two parts work safely with each other. …I realized the danger was that I would come up with an idea and then, immediately, the editorial part of me would begin to attack it. And you never get anywhere that way.
When I write a script, I lie down. …I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and…I pretend the film is finished and I’m simply describing what was happening. …Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I’m lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I’m not looking at anything…there’s nothing for me to criticize. It’s just coming out.
That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is as opposite as possible to how I edit—both physically and mentally.
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