David Koepp on Screenwriting and Walter Murch on Editing

Published May 18, 2021, 4:00 AM

Screenwriter David Koepp and film editor Walter Murch have both carved out legendary careers in film. David Koepp has written or co-written the screenplays for more than thirty films, including many Hollywood blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Spider-Man, Panic Room, Carlito’s Way, and Mission Impossible. He’s directed six films and released one novel. Walter Murch was part of American Zoetrope, the groundbreaking film production company founded in the late 1960s by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. His long collaboration with Coppola earned him his first Oscar nomination for sound editing on the 1974 classic, The Conversation, and an Oscar win for editing on Apocalypse Now. He also collaborated several times with Anthony Minghella, winning two Oscars for his work film editing and sound design for The English Patient. His most recent work is a documentary he co-wrote and edited, Coup 53, about the U.S.- and British effort to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953. 

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This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. In filmmaking, there are public roles like the actors and directors, and there are critical behind the scenes roles filled by people who rarely become household names. Among them screenwriters who provide dynamic material to work with and editors who in the end shape the film. You see. My guests today are two of the most successful people in the film industry. Screenwriter David Kepp and film editor Walter Merch have worked with legendary directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Brian de Palma, just to name a few. Walter Merch started his career as a sound editor. He received his first Oscar nomination for his work on the nineteen seventy four classic The Conversation. He worked on Apocalypse Now, for which he won his first Oscar, and he later picked up two more Academy Awards for the English Patients, becoming the first person to win for both sound mixing and editing on the same film. But first, I'm talking to writer and director David Kepp. He's written some of the biggest blockbusters in movie history films like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Spider Man, and Mission Impossible. He's also directed several of the films he's written, including last year's You Should Have Left with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. David kept says he started writing because, as a boy, he found a typewriter in his family's basement in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. He quickly tapped into the human condition. I thought it would be great in my room to have this typewriter on a typewriter stand. And then I think I was probably ten or eleven, and I thought I should write a story because I had him. Now I had an office product. So the next step was writing a story. So I would write stories about some kid who didn't want to go to camp, but his horrible parents made him go to camp, and then something terrible happened to camp, and uh. Then in high school I'd write stories about some teenager who was misunderstood by young women and one of the things that were a little close to the bone. I just enjoyed it. I mean I had a lot of fun. I remember in English class in high school, I had a friend who hated writing, so I said, well, I'll write your story. So I wrote him a story which was sort of blagiarized from John and Mary, the Dustin Hoffman movie, which I'd seen on TV a few nights before. But his story won a prize, which really made me crazy. So that was I started. I just I liked that I didn't need anybody's permission. I could just go upstairs and start typing. So I'm assuming you were a movie buff as well while you're starting your writing career. Yeah, absolutely, I love movies. Were you watching phonos when you were a kid. Yeah, you watched what was on TV? It was Channel four, six, twelve and the uh F Channel eight teens, and so the ones I really remember vividly were the uh F Channel eight teen ones because they were the cheapest ones they could get. It was a lot of Godzilla movies. I remember for years they ran the Basil Rathbone Nigel Bruce Slock Holmes, and I was watching one the other day, Terror by Night. There was one during World War Two which bends with them in a car in front of a rear projection of the like the Washington Monument and stuff and talking about how America is going to come into the war and save democratic values. It still makes me kind of misty. But I remember my mother telling me when I was about ten that I needed to stay up late tonight because there was a very special movie on TV and I had to watch it with her, and it was Notorious Hitchcock movie. And I it's a great movie, and even at ten, I could appreciate it was a great movie. But the concept of staying up till midnight on a school night for a movie, I think kind of fused this idea that movies were fun and you could get away with stuff and have a good time. What do you think it was that your mother wanted you to stay up the midnight watching movies. She wanted a movie companion. I think she and my dad were not getting along very well. I was in the identical situation and my dad was the movie goer. The very first movie that I began that to do with my dad was Sorry, Wrong Number, which to this day I have an annual appointment with Burt mine Caster and Barbara Stammick and Ed Bigley Senior. Sorry Wrong Number is one of my favorite because I love a confined space thriller, and it also contains the classic barbera stand mclin operator. Operator, I'm a hopeless invalid, and I just likes the idea of describing herself as hopeless. I love that actor. What was that actor who plays the old man? And he says, I can be reached the Bowery to one thousand, and then she calls back said, no, we can't take no messages. Yeah, man, what number am I calling? He says, the city Morgue. Man, that's not a music queue. Don't know what now? Where Where did you go to college? I went to several I started at the University of Minnesota. I was born in Wisconsin, but I didn't get into my first choice college and they had the latest application deadline. It wasn't a great plan. And then I transferred to went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a few years, which was great. I wanted to be an actor in those days, and I did tons of theater. But over the course of those couple of years, I realized writing was the thing I wanted to do. Had you been writing while you were in college or you and I had a playwriting teacher who was directing me in Arsenic and hold Lace at the time, and I asked him how I was doing, and he started complimenting my my play that I was writing, and I said, no, no, no, I mean in the show. I I know what you mean, Mr kapp I, and he encouraged me to get out. He said, if you want to make movies, which I did by then go west or go east. But we don't really do them here. So I applied to u c l A's Film School and got in there for graduate school. No still undergrad. I stretched it out to a healthy eleven years. Junior year was three of the best years of my turn thirty in my film class and was the focus when you were at UC on screenwriting. Yeah, but then I knew that's I want to write scripts. And whether it distinguished moms or whether they distinguished mentors that come in guest teach or none of them. They didn't then, I mean you'd get the occasional person coming and showing you their movie and doing a Q and A. But in terms of faculty, the guy like best was a professor named Richard Walter who was there for probably forty years, and he was very good and very imitatable and very quotable, but he was also very brass tacks, which was great because he would interrupt someone midstream when talking about when they're trying to tell their idea, and he'd say, do you know what kind of movies I like? I like films that are not boring films and force you into move it, move it. Things must happen early and often, and that's how character revealed. And I like that when you're there and you're in a prestigious program, a teacher in a classic that what does he or she have to offer you? There are two things. First, you start taking yourself seriously, which if you're from a small town in Wisconsin, is an important step because everyone thinks you're, you know, an asshole for wanting to do what you do or in Midwestern terms, making kind of a production out of yourself. So to want to go off and work in Hollywood is absurd. And when you get to a place where people start to accept that as the norm and most other people want to do that too, it's a really important step. But the most important thing I think I got out of u c l A. Was relationships with other students, because everyone there it's a kind of writing where you really need community because especially because it's going to be so relentlessly collaborative as your career goes on, if all goes well, And to be surrounded by other people who want to write, who want to do what you want to do, and who are nowhere in their career so you don't have to worry about jealousy is huge. And you learn from them, and you see some who are better than you, and you see ideally some who are worse than you, and those were really important relationships. Remember Alexander Payne was he was getting his masters when I was getting my undergrad But we you know, y'all work on each other's films, and you just kind of you can spot the winners out of the gate. You can tell who's good. And Alexander was always supremely confident and his stuff was really good. There's a guy named Don Payne who since passed away, who went on to write a lot of the Simpsons in a number of films. Don and I were great friends. But you find those people who will read your work and be critical without devastating you, and those are essential relationships. When you finished U c l A. What happens next? I had an internship working for a guy who was a distributor's rap in the US, and so if there's a video distributor in Australia and they wanted horror to idols, we would buy horror titles like Sorority House, Massacre three and then get the deliverable elements to them in their home country. A certain amount of porn, but you know, a lot of slasher movies and a lot of stuff like that. So I would go to film markets, which was eye opening to see what they were like. I actually went to can when I was twenty four years old. He paid for it because we were picking up all these titles for foreign distributors and it was the Can Film Festival, but we weren't going to the festival. It was just at the same time we were going to the can Film Market, which is in the basement of the Pale. It is truly a horror show. But you know, I was making money to work in the movie business, and again I learned an enormous amount because I I saw a ton of movies and I read a lot of scripts and I felt like I can do better than this. And through that I met an Argentine director named Martin Donovan, not the actor Martin Donovan and he had an idea for a movie which we wrote together, and then just sort of a point at ourselves producers of and went out and raised money by hooker crook and credit cards and made our first movie, which was Apartment Zero. And then from there I started working. And how much money was the budget of the film here we call it was a million two, of which we'd raised about five hundred thousand when we started shooting it was. It was terribly planned, and I was twenty four years old, so I had no idea what I was doing. You didn't know how stupid it was what you were doing, so you just kept going no. And I was also for some reason we were comfortable lying to people. We tricked Colin Firth and Hart Bochner into being in the film, both of whom were you working actors at the time, and assumed that we would be able to pay our bills. And then we using that cast and a budget which we turns out had were in no way able to meet. We banked it with our c A Columbia home video with some help from this guy was working for and UH borrowed against the contract and and then there was an unscrupulous real estate guy from the Man who Died and it was really as a classic indie movie story. But we got our movie done, and then when we got to post and had no money to finish, I managed to sell a script which became this movie Bad Influence that Curtis Hansen directed, and so I just took everything from that script and put it into finishing Apartment Zero. And what was it like working with Donovan? What did you learn in your first experience about that relationship between the director and the writer. Martin was somebody who took me seriously I think mentors because he was a mentor figure. He told me I was good and valued the stuff I wrote. He was fourteen years older than me, which helped because I also took him seriously, and he had directed one indie movie before, very low budget like fifty sixty I think. And he also had a reverence for old Hollywood, so we watched everything. I mean, the look on his face when he would ask me if I had seen a film like a Place in the Sun and I'd say no, was one of joy. He wasn't looking down on me for what a terrible hole in your film vocabulary. It was what an exciting opportunity. We're going to rent it now and watch it tonight, and that kind of unbridled enthusiasm. You can't find any just everywhere, So that was that was important. He took me very seriously, and we wrote one or two other scripts together, another one of which was made. But then I was feeling more comfortable writing on my own and Altarphew points were wildly different when you worked with him when the film was being made. What was your initial experience with someone shooting your material? Because he was also the writer we wrote it together. He was more collegial about it. He was, but it was an unusual experience also because I was also the producer with him, and even at that age, was far more realistic about what we had and what we didn't have. And Martin would do things like come up with a tango scene in the street and call all his friends on the way to the set that day and then one of shoot at that night, and I would have to say maybe one or two answers in the background. Absolutely, I think no, there would be a hundred of them, would be there will be elephants. Yeah, I remember. I was horribly spoiled. Colin Firth, who was probably twenty eight at the time and was just getting some renown in England, came to me on one of the first nights and there was a line he wanted to change and he felt that the thing he wanted to say, but that I had at the beginning. He thought it would be easier at the end. And what I mind terribly if if he moved that a line to the end of the thing, And I said, no, that'd be great, go ahead, And I sort of assumed that's how it would always be in Hollywood. A request, I have a request, I'd like to fill out a form No. After the Martin Donovic experience, what was next? Well, this bad influence was the script I had written on my own. How was Hanson different from Donovan? Curtis was far more tethered in what can really be accomplished, what can be done? Martin is a brilliant but impractical dreamer, and Curtis it had been in Hollywood for a very long time. So we went and I rewrote the whole script with him in his garage office, and it was a tutorial specifically about screenwriting. I felt like I knew a lot about writing, but about screenwriting for movies that are about to go get shot. That's where I learned a ton. For example, there was a scene in Bad Influence where Roblow comes to be at a bad guy and we're worried about James Spader and James Spader's brother played by Christian Clementson, and we're going to Christian Clemenson's apartment and to make us worried, you know, I had a scene with Rob Blows two pages long. He was menacing somebody on the street and then he goes into the building and Curtis said, I'd rather lose track of him, and also, I don't have time to shoot that. There's a fence and it's got vertical spiky bars in it, and as we panned down, as we tracked down the line of vertical spiky bars, we see that one of them is missing and he pushed is in slightly the implication in the viewer's mind being somebody took the scary spiky bar out. And it was just brilliant screenwriting. It used an image to convey menace instead of a two page dialogue scene, which is again like the old Billy Wilder person of if you use the visual to show something, the audience will love you forever because they draw the conclusion in their own mind and their participants in your movie instead of just watching screenwriter and director David Kepp. In the annals of great film partnerships, few have been as long lasting and celebrated as Martin Scorsese's with his editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She's worked on every movie of his since Raging Bull. She told me their collaboration begins when she watches the daily footage. He wants me to look at it cold and tell him if it works. So that is my part of my job. So I tell him what I think. He tells me what he thinks them from those incredibly rich where actions of him. I then begin to create selection. Then I do the first cut before he comes in, when he's through shooting, and then from that point on we do all the rest of the twelve different edits of the movie together, very twelve different edits of the movie. That's what we prefer to do. If we can hear more of my conversation with film a Schoonmaker at Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, David kept talks about a time he disagreed with Steven Spielberg over a scene in the sequel to Jurassic Park. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. David kept as quick to admit he got very lucky early in his career. A turning point came when his script for a film he thought would be a small one caught a big name director as I Death Becomes Her a script I'd written with Martin that we had imagined would be another indie movie, maybe a five million dollar budget this time. But I was starting to get some notice at the time for bad influence, and so I managed to sell it to Universal. And I remember Casey Silver, who was the head of Universal. Universal thought it was sort of a lark and it was this strange black comedy that maybe they'd make or maybe they wouldn't, but it barely cost anything. And I remember Casey Silver, who was a great supporter of mine, who was the head of production at the time, called me one day and said, so I sent your script to a few directors and I said, oh good, and he had to go and he said, Bob's a mechis wants to direct it. And he sounded he sounded disappointed because Bob at the time for Universal had just finished the Back to the Future trilogy. No doubt they wanted something a little more surefire commercial out of him, but he took an interest in this bizarre black comedy which then he cast with In an Inch of Its Life with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis and made the delightfully bizarre movie he made, and then I was sort of off and running. Then that got Spielberg's attention, who wanted to meet and read some of the other things I've done for Universal, because I was writing for them at the time and was looking for somebody to help him with the Jurassic Park. It's a loathsome story mine from twenty four to nine years old. Really, it's a miracle I have any friends at all. Sad It's it's tough to tell because it went so riotously well for me, and it's just not emblematic of what you need to do really in the movie business. You gotta hang around and keep writing and keep writing and keep writing. I like to think those days came from me later, because you can't all go like that all the time, and it didn't. When you're working with the director who's a big director, and they say to you, I'm gonna cut the first two pages whatever their edict is, and then I'm talking about you earlier in your career. You just differ. What do you use it? And do you kind of push back? I would push back and I would invariably lose. I remember one of the first things I asked Bob was what do we do when we disagree? And he said, one of we talk about it endlessly, and one of us will persuade the other through logic, which sounds good, and I'm absolutely sure that he intended that to be the case, but that's not the case. A director will and must do what they see. And so I think that if you can get in their head enough to create doubt about something that you think is a mistake, did you do that? Did you did you succeed it that? From time to time I would try, and I would occasionally succeed, but not often. Now it went, it went very well. I liked our collaboration on death becomes or our sensibilities were a little different his, perhaps broader and more visual mind, a bit drier. There's a scene in which in an emergency room, when Sydney Pollock comes in and has to tell her she's dead, and I think that that's the tone I would have liked for the whole movie. It's a sort of masterpiece of dry, understated comedy. But Bob had different ideas and was thinking more in terms of the emerging CG and how to use it, and that's fine. The only one that really kind of bothered me and I could never get over. I felt there was a note that caused our structure to partially collapse in a later draft to meet Movies are structure, and that structural idea, to me, was sort of central to making the whole thing work. But in general it was great, and I was working with big, accomplished to Hollywood movie stars at the peak of their crafts as the writer, at what point did you discover that you had to process the notes of the star as well? What movie bad influence? Because Rob Lowe, who was very hot at the time, was attached to play the lead, and I thought that was a mistake because he's a sympathetical lead who we have to imagine it doesn't do very well with women, and I didn't see anybody believing that. But there was a sort of seductive bad guy character, and I felt he'd be much better off playing Nobody really agreed with me, so I got robbed to have lunch with me. I remember talking about Donna Reid and from Here to Eternity and saying, you've never done this, they won't see it coming. Of course you should be the bad guy, and he agreed, and so I managed to turn things around a little bit. So I saw, also, though, the importance of getting the star on your side, because they're the ones who have to do it, and I really have. I really felt like my high school and college acting was has been beneficial to me my whole career, because you're the one who has to do it. You're the one who's doesn't want to look stupid. You're the one who doesn't want to look fat in these clothes, and I can't run in these shoes, and those are really valid points. I've been frustrated by actor's notes sometimes because because their difficult or I don't agree with it or whatever. But a really good actor always comes like their character's lawyer. They're sort of just passionately different. Well, my client, my client simply wouldn't do that, and I get it. You're their advocate for that character, and they must see it from that character's point of view. You have to juggle everybody's. But when you come two, the Spielberg experience, and of course Jurassic Park was a novel. Yeah, it was a Creton novel. They tried a couple of different versions of the script. They tried one with Crichton, one with one or two other writers, and it wasn't working out. But Stephen had some very clear ideas about how to make these things real. So he wanted someone to commit and start over, and you shared credit with Yes. The problem with Stephen is, you know, when I was thirteen years old, Jaws came out and I had to ride my bike to the Lake Theater and Milwaukee to watch it because my parents wouldn't let me go. So from the years when I was thirteen till I would say twenty was Jaws Close and Owners, Raiders of the Lost rk et. These are your formative, sponge like years. So for a writer of my generation, it's Spielberg's it. So now to write for him and to disagree with him and to offer critical assessments of his ideas was really tough, and I'm he was used to it, so I remember in our first couple of meetings he went out of his way to say things like, you know, well, when I'm working with a peer like yourself, what I It was obvious he was trying to tell me to relax. All I had going for me was my opinions and if I was going to come in and just pair it his a certain amount of that. Sure, sure everybody likes it, but you don't want a newtered collaborator. You want somebody to come in who's going to have some ideas to contribute and possibly resist some of yours that might not be good. How did it go? It went fine. I think it took me a few movies I've written for his that he directed, and I think it took me a few movies to get more into my stride on that. There was one kind of clarifying moment was in the second movie, A Lost World. There was a bit where Jeff Goldman's adopted daughter as a gymnast, and Stephen wanted a sequence later in the movie where she spins around some bars and kicks a velociraptor and makes it fall over. And I never liked it. I just I thought the idea of the little girl kicking the velociraptor was bad for her character and bad certainly bad for the velociraptor's character. So I would just not write it and not write it and not write it, hoping it would just go away. You know. One day, the double golden rod pages had gone in or something. We were shooting, and he said, hey, I know you forgot again to do the velociraptor thing on the bars. You gotta write that up because we're when we shoot that, we're gonna blah blah blah blah blah. And I said, well, Steven, I don't want to write that. I don't think it's gonna work. I'm afraid people will laugh at it. It was as straightforward and negative about it as I could possibly be. And he paused and he said, oh, no, you other. No you shouldn't, no, no, no, no, don't write absolutely, if you feel that strong, you should not write it when I shoot it. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring her right. And I realized what you have to get about directors is they must do what they see. You can't bend them to your will. But what you've worked with so many great really legendary directors, And I'm wondering, like, when you work with Spielberg, Among his many gifts, what's the gift that impressed you the most about him as a director? There's as a director and as a storyteller. As a director, his ability to compose on the fly. I've never ever seen anything like it. As a storyteller. What I most appreciate about Stephen is there's a real joyfulness and he has no contempt for the audience. He is the person in the audience with popcorn. So in your filmography, from one legendary director to the next, you go from Crichton's World of Dinosaurs to Machina was a Puerto Weecan crime boss in New York. And I'll never forget the getting a shot of that film, a great opening shot. He's on the Guerney, the overhead shot that film with Brian Dipoma. What was the Dipoma experience. Curlyto's Way was the first of three movies Brian and I would do. And again, yes, very very hands on, but Brian wants you to do the writing. He's not there to do it himself, or he do it himself. He's probably written about half the movies he's directed, or more so, he is certainly there for your viewpoint and wants to listen to you and would like you to be right. What I found Brian and Stephen both had in common. If there was a shot they wanted to do or a sequence they wanted to get to, and they saw it very clearly, and they told it to me. They were really happy to let me figure out how on earth is the story're gonna accommodate this? How is that going to end up in this movie? And I was happy with that because then I got to go away and do the work. You usually don't want someone to try to figure out your problems for you. Tell me what the problem is, tell me what the challenges Brian was There's just a great sense of comradeship. You know you're really in it. Brian's a lot of laughs. He's a very funny guy, clever. He's very clever, and he I think probably of all the directors I've ever worked with, Brian is the one who listens the most. That doesn't mean he's going to go along with whatever you have to say, but he's genuinely listening when you're talking and processing and enjoys the debate, and we'll tell you if you're wrong or why he thinks you're wrong. What was the hardest one for you to write? I did an Indiana Jones movie, and it was just the weight of expectation of twenty years history, thirty years of cultural expectation. And you know, everybody who's seen those movies and loves those movies has a feeling about what it ought to be. Steven's feelings about what it ought to be, George lucas Is feelings which are not always the same Harrison's. It was just it was a crushing load of things to try to satisfy. It would have been far easier to write the heartbreaking story my parents divorce. Let's talk about directing. Whim May you decide to take the ultimate leap? I think I should direct the script. Actually I knew that writing is what I love to do the most, is what gives me the most satisfaction. Directing is what you do when you have something that you would like to see the way it is in your head, and for better or worse, you have a far better chance of seeing it the way it is in your head than you do. Working with even a talented director. That doesn't mean it will be better, but it means it will be yours, and the mistakes that are made are yours. And I really most wanted the chance to edit and to work directly with actors. As a screenwriter, you're censoring yourself with actors because you don't want to undercut the director. It's a sort of sacred relationship they have and you don't want to get in the middle of that. So you offer your insights, but you can't say everything you'd like to say. And when you started directing, that later on. But when you began, what was your shortcoming? What was the thing you needed the most work on. I remember a director friend of mine, who is far too blunt but I love him for it, occasionally said, when he saw my first cut of it, he said, you shot your script. I said, yeah, did you laprt? I love that you didn't interpret your script. My god, you shot the script. It's so you He said, no, he said, you didn't interpret it. You shot it. Literally, everything everywhere of your script is there. And that's great if that's what was your intention, but it doesn't have you didn't take the step away from writing and into directing. It because they're different, and I didn't know for a couple of movies. Are you going to direct another movie you're directing against soon? I hope so I got you know, I got a lot of writing to do at the moment. I just finished another book and I have a few things, so I would like to yet. I am your biggest fan. I mean the breadth of your work, that the distinctive styles of films, Carlado mission, all of them. Thanks for doing this pleasure, David Kepp. His most recent work is a film he wrote in erected You Should Have Left, starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. It came out last year. Walter Merch is a legendary film and sound editor. He was part of the early days of American Zootrope, the film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. He is well known for his long partnership with Coppola and later with the late Anthony Mingela. Walter Merch's most recent project is a documentary he wrote and edited called Kup fifty three, about a US and British led effort to overthrow the Iranian government in nine. I met the director Tuggy on Morani when I was editing another documentary, Particle Fever, about the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. We hit it off because Tuggy graduated in physics from Nottingham University and this was particle physics. We just kept up a relationship and I never thought i'd work on it. But I was editing for Brad Bird on his film Tomorrow End, and that came to an end, and I was at loose ends, and my wife and Toggy put their heads together and said, what Walter needs is to work on a little documentary for six months. And it sounded good. It still is good, but the six months has turned into six years. I watched the film and it seems that almost the beginning is like a preface. You linger with that guy, that's Taggy, that's the director, Taggy Armarni, and you kind of stay with him for quite a bit of time. It's about half an hour, I mean half an hour in a film comedy turny, but but but you with him, it's almost like the film becomes a completely different film and it takes off into the case if you will, well, we were just following the structure of Psycho, which does a similar trick. You know, you're with Marion Crane for thirty five minutes and then she's gotten rid of dead and you follow the rest of the story. I'm going to quote you on that Psycho was the template for fifty three. If Hitchcock could do it, so could we. But it evolved organically. The film took off really from the discovery of this transcript of the m I six agent, and if we have the transcript, there must be tapes or there must be a film that goes with it. And it was the search for those missing ingredients that we never found, but we found contradictory evidence. Some people said they don't exist, some people say they do exist. So the question that was a trail that we followed for about fifteen minutes actually of searching for them, and then at that point we said, we've reached the end of the trail and we're going to ask Rathe Fines to walk over them. I love that For those who don't see it, Raith Fine creates this character, this real this real person, and he inhabits that character. And what a coup no pun intended for you to have Rafe Finds part in your film. He's such a wonderful actor. I met Rafe when we were doing English Patient back in the middle nineties, and we kept up over the years, and we came to this fork in the road, which is, we have the transcript, but how are we going to turn it into cinema, And well, let's get an actor to read the lines. Why don't we got Ray Finds to be the actor, and then why don't we stage it in the very same room at the Savoy Hotel, And which all of these other interviews were done in the mid eighties, which revealed the essence of what had happened in this coup, which was a British American co production, so to speak, and which successfully unfortunately deposed this name democracy in Iran and spoiled for it. Ever since, history is the wiser for what happened back then. Now to wind it back in the origin story, you grew up in New York and when you went to Hopkins, you were going to go into into a scientific field, correctly, oceanography and geology. Yeah, my interest in film didn't really evolve until a couple of years later, and that dovetailed with a teenage obsession which I've had with tape recording and the manipulation of that tape, cutting it up into little pieces is basically a simple kind of filming. So that was where I kind of returned to my roots in a sense that the passions that you have when you're ten or eleven years old or somehow more fundamentally who you are than before or after, because you know, you know thing about the world, but you're not yet infected with peer pressure in quite the same filtering. Yes, you're less filtered. Yeah, Now when you're there at Hopkins, you meet Deschanel when you're there, correct, and you guys decided to head off together. He's a year younger than me, so yeah. Matthew Robbins and I who I met at Hopkins. We went off to USC Cinema as a graduate students, and Caleb phoned us up a couple of months later and said, how is it out there? And we said it's great, come on out, and he did. He followed us and immediately became known as a great cameraman. There was something about his his knees that allowed him to move with a camera with a kind of steadicam camera before Steadicam was with the Human Steadicam. So you're out there and you're at USC for two years, you're in the graduate program, and what's the first thing you want to do when you're out there, Like you're at USC in school for what you know? That's the lecture that they give on the first day of school is we know you all want to become directors, but we're going to smash that dream immediately. You're going to have to do everything and it's only at the end that you will discover where your real talents lie. And even if you've become a director, having experienced all these other crafts, you'll know what it takes to be a good sound recorders. When you finish at USC, what are you saying to yourself? So I want to go do what I'm married about to have a kid, and you just try to support job. Yeah, So when you leave there and you've got to get a job, what's your first job sweeping floors at Encyclopedia Britannica Films. And I graduated there from sweeping floors to editing one of their dotmentary films, and then I was out of work and you trying to pick up gigs. It's sort of the gig economy. Can you think a d R lines? Yeah, I can do that, and then I got all of it. You'd studied that you at at USC. Yeah, you had that that background from us. You know, you had to do everything so exactly whatever they asked you to do, you would say yes, even if even if you didn't know how to do it. You said yes, I can do that, and then you learn how to do it, and you meet Lucas before Coppola. Correct, well, I met George. You knew Lucas in school. From school, Yeah, Francis was a legend. He was four years older than us at U C. L A. And he'd done this hat trick, which is he not only got a job directing a real film, but he handed it in for his master's thesis. So the fact that somebody from film school actually directed a film. Who who? Somebody who had no connection with the film industry. Francis came out of the blue, and he was an inspiration to us and George and I at school had been up for a scholarship at Warner Brothers. George one naturally, because even back then he was George Lucas and he wanted to be an animation you know, he founded what later on became Pixar, which his connection. But he arrived the day they shut down the animation studio at Warner Brothers. So he just wandered around and he saw somebody directing a film on the lot. One person. The guy had a beard, George had a beard. So beards connect with each other. And it was Francis understand each other, Yeah, they understand each other, and it was Francis and Francis said, Okay, George, come up with a one good idea every day and I'll shoot it. And George did. This was on the film Finean's Rainbow, Fineans Ring. So George and Francis bonded and one thing led to another, and I got a call from George in early nineteen sixty nine saying could I cut the sound for the film that Francis had just directed, The rain People. And that started my relationship with Francis, which continues to this day. Then, assuming that once you go to northern California and we'll get into the American Zoo trope and Francis or a bit there, what was the impetus state for you to move there? For you to relocate there. Why did you do that again? George and Francis they had were both they were both living up there. Yeah, well they had been. They had shot the rain People and ended up shooting the last four weeks in Ogelona, Nebraska, operating out of an old Tom McCann's shoe store that had gone out of business. And at the end of it, they thought, wait a minute, we've been making a motion picture out of an old shoe store in the Aska. We don't have to be in Los Angeles. We can be anywhere, you know, youthful idealism, and that's when Francis decided to set up a studio in San Francisco, which became trup Trump. What was it about Coppola? You won an oscar for cutting his film? What was it about him? You think was his gift? The quote I love from him is when he was shooting Cotton Club and the reporter asked him. They were on location and things weren't going well, and the reporter said, well, you're the director, why don't you just make it happen? And he said, you misunderstand what a director of a film is. The director of a film is the ringmaster. Of a circus that is inventing itself. So there's this collaborative aspect to it that Francis holds everything together at the same time, and it's always veering into chaos, but chaos can be very productive if you can control it. I mean. An example of his directorial essence, I think is something that happened almost on the first day of shooting The Godfather. And he had made a pact with himself and with all of the actors that there was to be very little motion of the hands with the Italians, that he wanted things to be very sober and business like. And he was shooting the baker coming to ask for permission for his daughter to marry the prisoner of war that was working in the bakery, shooting over Marlon Brando's shoulder, and okay, take one, and the baker starts giving his speech and the hands come up and the hands are doing this incredible dance, and Francis later said his heart sank because this is exactly what he didn't want. This is like an alman for the whole film was going to be things he didn't want. So what do you do in that case? At the end of the take he said, cut very good. In fact, the performance was fine except for the hands. So he said Tom, meaning Tom Hagen, Robert Duval, Tom, you would have already given we need to do it again because I made a mistake. Francis said, we're coming in in the middle of this scene, and Tom Hagen would have already given you a glass of brandy because he knows you would be nervous. So Robert Duval came over and filled up a little glass of brandy right to the brim, put it in the actor's hands, and then said, that's okay action. So you know, I'm gonna remember that the hands are moving, but you can't spill the brandy. But they're they're not the over gestural problem that happened with take one, So Francis said, it's my fault, and so the actor. The performance on the second take was even better because now the actor was going to save Francis from francis mistake. So that's the take that's in the movie. Oh my God. Oscar winning sound and film editor Walter Merch. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow. Here's the thing on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Walter Merch talks about Francis Ford Coppola's controlled chaos style of filmmaking. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. In the early years of American zoo Trope, Walter Merch was often juggling various projects between founders George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. We were making Tight while Francis was shooting The Godfather, and when we finished d h X, we took it to con It played on the kind of the anti festival there, and then I came back to work on the sound of the post production sound of The Godfather, the mix the sound effects in the mix. Did you kind of have a sense when you were doing that, because when you're doing the sound, you're given a final cut of the film to mix the sound and the film is locked correctly. No, it was. It was evolving as we were working on it. That's part of the Zootrope aesthetic is that the sound influences the editing, and the editing influences the sound. Is that common? Is that ordinary? No? Certainly not back then, but it's part of this controlled chaos idea that it's risky, but we felt it was worth the risk. Well, I want to get to the controlled chaos, and we talked about apocalypse. But what I want to also ask you is you're the first person to win an Oscar for a film cut on an Avid correct. Yes, and you are one of the only people to be nominated and or win Oscars on multiple platforms. I think you've been nominated and you've won Academy Awards on like four different iterations of editing equipment. Correct right, Yes, true. Films are edited now so much quicker than they were forty years ago. Do you feel that something's lost as a result of that. I think the amount of time has remained essentially the same. What's changed is that as you edit it, you can investigate lots of different ways. But the distance from the end of shooting too, when the films are in the theaters, that's pretty constant. That it's about a year from the beginning of shooting to the film in the theater, whether you're editing on a digital platform or not. If you really want to edit fast, if that's the only goal, yes, you can do it faster now using digital tool, But that's not the only requirement. We want to make a good film, and to make a good film, you have to take the time, and that's the creative time is the determinament on this Now. I just want to have a quick glance at Apocalypse when he first contacted you, like, how did you get involved in that film? How would you describe because Apocalypse is always presented even from his wife's documentary, eleanor that it was this chaotic experience. What is your recollection of the making of Apocalypse? It was it? Like for you? It was crazy. I was editing the film Julia in London and I got a call from Francis can you fly to the Philippines to discuss the final mix? Sure, so a trip was arranged over the weekend to fly from London to Manila and then to the location. And people were coming from all over the world. Tomita, who was going to do the music for the film, was coming from Japan, and Richard Begs Richie Marks were coming from San Francisco. So it was a big meeting that was planned. But that was right after Marty Sheen had his heart attack. So we all arrived and everything was in this wonderful chaos, you know, but we had the meeting. I mean, this is another example of Francis's determination. His main actor has had a heart attack and he is now hosting a meeting to discuss the technicalities of a mix that won't happen for an ultimately for another two years. That was where the idea of inventing a totally new format for this film was born. How long have they been shooting when you showed up almost a year? Are they done shooting or they're getting close to being done? There are three months away from the end of shooting, which is the normal schedule for film. His three months there in the final thing that that says it all. We're in the final three months of shooting, two and fifty six days of shooting. Had you been looking at footage prior to that? There was a typhoon, speaking of chaos in the summer of seventies six. Francis had been shooting for perhaps four months, and the typhoon destroyed all the sets, so production was shut down. Francis came back to San Francisco and we had a meeting. He showed me what he had shot up until then, and he said, is there anything missing, And I thought, well, there's a scene missing I think, which is it would be good to have a scene where the boat does what it's supposed to do as it goes up river. This is a patrol boat that is supposed to stop contraband material from getting down river. So let's write a scene where the boat does a police action and something goes bad and people get killed, and they kill the family in the boat. Right, And he said, okay, right, that scene and we'll do it. So I sat down and wrote the Sampan massacre scene, and the Francis took it back to the Philippines and you know, obviously changed it and actors do what actors do. But essentially, the idea of that scene was something that occurred to me from reading and looking at the material of things that have been shot up to that point. Now you cut the film, you edited the film. Well, I mean, that's another story. I was hired just to do the sound because when I joined the film it was August seventy seven, and the idea was somehow improbably that the film would be in the theaters by Christmas, And you know what, did I know, maybe maybe it's possible, but it was pretty clear to me at that point that this was not going to happen. And that's when I joined the editorial team. There were two editors working on the film at that time. I became the third editor on the film. Now, when have there been moments where you fought for a cut and you were right either to lift out or preserve something, and you fought for a cut and the director you were wrong and they were right. Before I answered that question, we were doing eight final a d R with Marlon Brando on The Godfather and we got about halfway through the film and Francis said, well, I gotta go now, so you guys continue. So I was whatever, I was, twenty six years old, and here I am in the dark alone with Marlon Brando supposedly directing him in a d R. And they're changing reels and in the dark, I hear this voice that says, people say I mumble. I thought, what am I going to say to Marlon Brando about that? I said, yes, that's true. People do say that you mumble. And he said, well they're right. I do mumble, and I'll tell you why. Because when we shoot the films, I don't know what these scenes are going to be in the film or out of the film. I don't know what order the scenes are going to be in. So when I'm doing the scenes, I don't move my lips very much so that if it comes to it, we can change the dialogue, I can change my performance and nobody I never thought of that. Oh my god, in my mind, you couldn't think about it in terms of what drove the story. It was all about behavior and and and performance. Correct, Yeah, yeah, I have to say at that point in the film there were two editors, and I was editing the first half of the film up to and including the Sampan massacre, and Richie Marks was handling everything after that, so I was an observer to what they were doing, but I didn't know all of the ins and outs of that. I mean, the famous should we cut this scene in that film is the French plantation scene, which was a huge restored for the Redux, A hugely huge operation, the very expensive, very detailed set, lots of characters, and as we were editing the film, the scene shrink and its strength and its strength until I think in the end, just before it completely disappeared. There were maybe two or three shots from it. It was like a kind of a mist of a scene. It was just some images and you didn't know what to make of them, and then finally it disappeared completely. We put it back in Apocalypse Redus. In fact, putting that scene back was the whole reason for doing the reducts the French Canal Plus people wanted a DVD extra because Christian Marcon, the actor in that scene, had just died and they wanted to see him. And then as these things happened, one thing led to another, and it became this huge operation of rehabilitating an umber of scenes that had been cut out. But the scene essentially comes too late in the film for you to know how to take it digest it. So you directed one film, returned to OZ and it was a disappointing experience for you from what I read. What was your feeling about directing again after that experience? No, I mean after it was finished. You know, there's inevitably a period of recovery on any film, and then I tried to get a couple of other projects off the ground. So you wanted to direct again after? Yeah? But no, I have four kids, and there's the old joke, you know, how do you spell directing? W A I T I n G that when you're directing trying to get something off the ground, there's a lot of downtime unless you're completely established. Director Returned to Oz was a financial failure and critically extremely mixed results. It's a wonderful film, by the way, it just didn't happen. I directed one film, and I had the resources to make a wonderful film. I had a great script, had a great cast. What I learned about directing was that patients you need to help see everything. You're You're being asked about everything, and for me, the patients to stand there all day long, because when you're an actor, you go back to your trailer and you go read a magazine. And with the director, you can't hide in your trailer. You've got to be there and you've got to answer the questions and you're in charge, so to speak. And I found I didn't have the patients to direct other actors to tell the cinematographer no, no, put the camera here. I wanted here. And I just didn't have the patients to negotiate with all those people, you know what I mean. Wonderful quote from Warren Beauty who also is an actor director, and he said, the key to acting is to be in control of being out of control. The key to directing is to be out of control of being in control. And that's the thing that drives you crazy when you go in front of the camera and then go behind the camera. Is the alternating between you know, searing heat on the one side and ice on the other. So you also have to be in the moment, which is what's you're shooting right now, but you also have to live in the past, meaning taking to generation everything that you've shot up to now, and you have to live in the future, which is, what are we going to do tomorrow? What are we gonna do next week? So it's a highly uncomfortable state of being unless you're completely adapted to it, I think, And that's why you become a director. When you're a combat age, which is to say, you know, twenty years old, then it kind of becomes part of who you are. That wasn't the case where I was. I was forty when I directed returned to OZ and in a sense I knew too much. I was already to set in my ways a certain thing, and I was I had to learn how to undo some of those assumptions. I'm assuming you have some thoughts about how the COVID has affected the way we shoot and exhibit films as well. Does that trouble you? Well that that's actually it helped us in a weird way with KU fifty three because we had a great premiere of the film at Tell You Rode and London, but no distributor would pick it up. It's there's some kind of third rail aspect of the film that makes distributors I don't want it's still unseld today. You haven't seld it yet. No, no, So we're distributing it ourselves, and we're doing it through v o D and we're doing it in a cooperation with Arthouse Theater. So so so where would people go to see the film? How would they see the film? You go to KU fifty three dot com and say what country are you in? You know, United States, UK, Ireland or Canada at the present moment, and then select a theater and you click on that theater. It's twelve bucks is the ticket? We split fifty fifty And it's how that's how it works. But without COVID, it wouldn't have gotten the momentum that it got because of all the closing of the theaters and thank god, you know, thank god you benefited from that. Yeah, in a weird way, we benefited from it. How would you say the methodology by which you choose which films you're going to do? How has that changed over the years. It's three things, and it's always remained the same. It's the script. I like a script that I can connect with, but that moves me out of my comfort zone because I don't want to just keep doing the same thing over and over again. Are there the resources to pull this off? And who am I going to be working with? You know, as an editor, you are in a room with the director for the better part of a year ultimately, so it's an intense thing and you have to get along. So those are the three categories. If all three of those are in place, then oh it's rare that you get all three cleanly. You You usually have to make an educated guess. I've got two out of three. Okay, I'll make a bet. The film Tomorrow Land I was working with Brad Bird, and they obviously had the resources because it was a hundred and eighty million dollar film. Or something with Disney, But I never got to read the script before we started shooting. He was working on the script and finally I was on location in Vancouver two weeks before shooting, and finally the script arrived. So you can never tell exactly how things are going to work out. Is it safe to say that to the extent that any one of the characters you've mixed that you are? That character is the little boy who's cutting the tape together? Is Hackman in the conversation? Is that you? Yeah? I think that probably would you know. That's ultimately why Francis asked me to edit the film. He said, it's a film about a sound man, and you're a sound man and you've edited films. So no, that was my first editing job on a feature film because of that feeling of identity. Listen, I'm a great admirer of yours. You you've made a lot of great movies. You've made a lot of great movies, and you've been a part of movie history. You know, it's really exciting, and thank you so much for doing this with us, and good luck with the film. My pleasure. Thank you. Oscar winning sound and film editor Walter Merch my thanks to him and to screenwriter director David Kepp. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening. That's if trying to come

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