The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje

Author:Michael Ondaatje
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Art
ISBN: 9780307518170
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

dream of Harry's, which seemed to be the way to preserve it within the film…. When you have restricted material you're going to have to restructure things from the original intent, with sometimes felicitous juxtapositions.

O: Were there other scenes like the park sequence where you needed to adjust or even reshoot material?

M: In the end, the only additional shot we had to film, to make it all work, was a close-up of Harry's hand pulling a reel of tape off the tape recorder, so we could reveal that Meredith, the woman who seduces him at the party, has stolen the crucial tape. In fact, the idea of Meredith as an agent of the Corporation was created in postproduction, and it clarifies and shapes the whole story.

O: It's almost as if you're inventing the script, discovering it, as you work on it.

M: Inventing elements of it. That was necessary, given that there was unshot material.

O: When films are worked on in this way, they seem to give off a novelistic air. I felt the same way watching Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, where I believe he created a “story” during the editing from a much larger canvas of possibilities that he had filmed. And in The Conversation, we get the sense that there's a complete story behind the selection of material—it's back there in the distance. That's similar to the kind of thickness that a novel gives off. We are not held hostage by just one certain story, or if we are, we know it is just one opinion: there are clear hints of other versions. Not many films do that. I think youachieve that effect by always suggesting through sound that something is going on off screen—in The English Patient, the sounds that come from outside the torture room when we are inside suggest other worlds and other plots: we don't see them, but we hear them through the layering of sounds. In The Conversation, something like that is achieved by altering and colliding the order of events.

M: One thing that made it possible to do that in The Conversation was Francis's belief that people should wear the same clothes most of the time. Harry is almost always wearing that transparent raincoat and his funny little crepesoled

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