Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center May/Jun 2001| [Headnote] |
| Editor Walter Murch discusses the process of revising Apocalypse Now with novelist Michael Ondaatje |
Walter March iS a true oddity in Hollywood: a genuine intellectual and Renaissance man who appears wise and private at the center of various temporary filmmaking storms. He has worked on the sound and/or editing of films such as American Graffiti, The Conversation, The Godfather (Parts I, II, and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Two years ago he re-cut Touch of Evil following Orson Welles's ignored 58-page memo to the studio. He has also written In the Blink of an Eye, a sort of "Zen and the Art of Editing" - a book as pertinent for writers and readers as it is for filmmakers and audiences.
As a writer I've found that the last two years of work on a book is given over to editing it. I may have spent four or five years writing in the dark but now I have to discover the shape of the object I have been struggling to create. Having made two documentary films, I've found that my fictional works tend to follow a similar process - shooting or writing everything for months or years, then shaping the content into a new form, until it is almost a newly discovered story. And often it is only at this stage that one discovers a work's moral tone or voice.
During my peripheral involvement with the film of The English Patient, when I watched Murch at work, what I saw confirmed that this was the stage of film that was closest to the art of writing.
In the spring of 2000, at the suggestion of Francis Ford Coppola, Murch began to reedit Apocalypse Now, a film he had worked on back in 1977 to '79 both as sound designer and as co-editor. Now, 20 years later, all the takes and discards and lost scenes were brought out of vaults to be reconsidered. Apocalypse Now is a film that has entered the mythology of filmmaking and become a part of the American subconscious. So for those working on the new version, there were going to be problems connected with their dis-- mantling and restructuring of a "classic." Because it was now public property.
"It has become part of the culture,"says Murch. "And that's not a one-way street. As much as the work affects the culture, the culture mysteriously affects the work. Apocalypse Now in the year 2000 is a very different thing than the physically exact same Apocalypse Now in the second before it was released in 1979."
The new version is more humorous. The patrol boat crewmen are more closely linked to the people they meet in the landscape they go through, and they seem now to respond more to the situations they find themselves in: they don't just witness Kilgore's speeches, they talk back, mock him, and even steal his sacred surfboard. By restoring bridges between episodes that had been cut for reasons of time, the film has also become less fragmentary. Most of all, Coppola and Murch have reconstituted three large sequences that were cut from the film. These are a medevac scene involving the Playboy Bunnies; a ghostly funeral, dinner, and love scene at a French rubber plantation; and further scenes with Brando in the Kurtz compound. "Those previously missing elements," says Murch, "were casualties of the hallmark struggle in every editing room: how short can the film be and still work?"
The above sections are drawn from The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, a book of interviews between Ondaatje and Murch to be published next year from Knopf in the USA and Bloomsbury in the UK.
APOCALYPSE THEN
One of the things that you as an editor had to deal with is Apocalypse Now's episodic quality.
It is episodic. I think it's just the nature of this particular beast. But counterbalancing that, there is also the river. The river is the liquid track that keeps this story moving forward despite those episodic interludes. Maybe there's also the problem of the quest genre, where the central character just responds to the events that he travels through. Willard is not an overtly dramatic central character.
It's true: in the 1979 version, Willard is almost entirely inactive until he kills Kurtz at the end. The one non-reactive thing he does on the trip upriver is take out his pistol and kill the wounded woman on the sampan. He's slightly less passive in this new version. Slightly. Incidentally, I think this was one of the reasons why Francis, who started out with Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard, switched to Martin Sheen after a month of filming. Sheen has an openness and a softness to his face that allowed the audience to easily accept him as the mirror through whose reflection they were able to watch this incredible war. Keitel was perhaps more believable as an assassin, but you tended to watch him rather than watch things through him. If Francis had continued in that original direction the film would have been very different. But after a month of shooting he realized that he had to stop and make some very big changes. Not only Keitel but all kinds of people associated with the production left.
The remarkable opening sequence seems to cradle all aspects of the film as well as introducing Willard - can you talk about how it was conceived and built?
After Francis hired Martin Sheen, he felt that there were things within the character of Willard that were available to Marty but that Marty had made inaccessible because they were too dangerous: a certain kind of anger and vulnerability. So Francis set up the scene in the hotel simply as an acting exercise. But he shot it with two cameras, at right angles to each other, almost as a documentary. It's a technique that Francis had used before: to do a rehearsal but with the cameras turning, to burn celluloid at the same time - almost like a kind of incense. Because it's a natural human reaction to take things at a deeper level when film is being exposed. It raises the specter that this scene might wind up in the film. If the conditions are right and if you're lucky, this has a way of branding certain things into the psyche of the actor that ordinary improvisation doesn't quite achieve. Again, the original intention was not to use it in the film, but there were certain things about it that were provocative, that made that whole opening scene coalesce around them.
THE NARRATION
Was Michael Herr voiceover narration for Willard always in the script, or was it added?
John Milius' original script had narration - Willard had an internal voice. By August 1977, however, the decision had been made not to have narration. And yet we were originally supposed to have the film finished in four months, for a December release. In retrospect, that was not a realistic schedule, given the state of the film at that time. I thought that if we were even remotely going to consider December as a possibility, the only way to do it was to reinstate the narration. So I recorded myself reading the original script's narration and put it into the film. It seemed necessary because Willard is such an inactive, inarticulate character - if he's not going to talk to us, and if he's not going to do much of anything, the only way to get inside his head is to have him relate to us through the medium of narration. And it was an idea that eventually took.
And then Herr was brought in to rewrite narration because of his book Dispatches?
I believe Milius had adapted some of Herr's Esquire articles in writing the screenplay of Apocalypse Now. I'm guessing this was done without Michael's approval. So it was also a way of bringing Michael into the fold as a collaborator on the film, and not having him be somebody on the outside, saying, Wait a minute! That's my stuff up there! Eventually, Herr rewrote all of the narration.
I love the voiceover. Not just for what it's saying, but also the way it's been done, the way we are made to hear it. How was that very intimate, inner voice created?
It's interesting. There's a direct connection from the narration in Fred Zinnemann's Julia and John Huston's Moby Dick. The sound-effects editor, Les Hodgson, whom I met on Julia and who cut sound effects on Apocalypse Now, also worked on Moby Dick. We wanted the narration for Julia to have an interior quality, but how do you do that? Les told us that when they were recording narration for Moby Dick with Richard Basehart, Huston was unsatisfied with how it was sounding, for particularly this reason: rather than being intimate, it had a declamatory quality. Huston was downstairs and Basehart was up in the booth. He just happened to lean forward close to the microphone and said: "John, what should I do next?" The microphone was right against his mouth. And Huston said, "That's it! That's what you should do next! I want you to do all the narration that way." It's essentially that. I asked Sheen to imagine that the microphone was somebody's head on the pillow next to him, and that he was just talking to her with that kind of intimacy. Was it mixed and re-recorded in any special way?
In the re-recording we took the single soundtrack and put it equally on all three speakers behind the screen, so there's just a wall of this intimate sound coming at the audience. Whereas the normal dialogue between characters in the film only comes out of the center speaker. So there's a distinct shape to the narration as it hits the screen, and it's very different than the rest of the dialogue.
Did Brando contribute anything to the script during the filming?
He arrived in the Philippines claiming to be dissatisfied with the script. The discussions that followed were exacerbated by the fact that he was heavier than he said he would be and therefore couldn't reasonably do what his part called for. When they reached an impasse, Francis said, Well, just read Heart of Darkness. And he answered, I've read Heart of Darkness and I hate it. The production shut down for a week. Marlon and Francis were on Brando's houseboat, battling it out. Finally, by chance or design, a copy of Heart of Darkness was left on the houseboat. The next morning he appeared with his head shaved and said, "It's all perfectly clear to me now." He had thought John Milius, original script was Heart of Darkness.
Somehow, he had never come in contact with the novel. Prior to that, when he'd read the script, he said, "I don't like the name Kurtz. American generals don't have those kinds of names. They have flowery names, from the South. I want to be `Colonel Leighley."' So Francis agreed to that. Now, suddenly after reading Conrad, he wanted to be `Kurtz.' But many scenes had already been shot with his character being referred to as Colonel Leighley, for instance in the scene where Willard is given his mission, so we had to re-record the dialogue.
WILLARD'S GAZE
Were there particular challenges to editing the film in the way it was shot?
It's fascinating - Francis' use of actors looking directly into the camera in Apocalypse Now. You never allow anyone to look into the camera unless you want to break the frame and have the characters directly address the audience, which usually stops the action. Yet in Apocalypse Now actors look into the camera all the time and it seems to integrate effortlessly into the story. You don't feel that it stops anything. I've never read or heard anyone talk about it - it's never referred to in any studies or observations about the film. In the scene in the trailer, when he's being briefed by the general, all of them - the general, the CIA agent, the aide-de-camp - look straight at the camera when they talk to Willard. If they are doing that, the mathematically correct thing would be to have Willard looking at the camera too. But he doesn't. Instead he's looking correctly, according to conventional film grammar, to the left of the camera. With the general, you never feel that he's looking at the audience: you believe he is looking at Willard.
The camera operator for this scene didn't speak English. Francis instructed him: "Whenever you're bored, just move the camera." The rationale being that Willard is very badly hungover, and this camera position is his point of view. It was the most complicated thing to edit, however. I could never tell when anyone was going to be on camera: right in the middle of a big speech, the camera would drift off to the left. That the actors weren't sure when the camera was going to be pointing at them gave an unsettled feel to the performances, which was great.
But in other scenes when Willard looks at the camera, you feel he's looking at us - at the audience - and thinking: can you believe all this? I guess it has to do with the intense subjectivity of the film: the fact that Willard is the eyes and ears through which we experience this war. It's logical, all of that, but it's still amazing that it works as effortlessly as it does. I don't know of any other film that's done it.
THE NEW SCENES
The new scene where Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard and gets into the boat, laughing like a kid, alters everything for me. He's a teenager. It's his happiest moment in this story. Everything else in our portrait of him gets rejiggled.
How did they promote Ninotchka?
GARBO LAUGHS!
By moving the water-skiing scene to later there is now an earned delirium and joy. It's more powerful - a real need is fulfilled.
In the 1979 version, the water-skiing scene happens fairly early, before the Kilgore sequences. We've moved it to where it was originally in the script, which is after the whole Playboy Bunny show. What it originally said, in 1979, was "This boat, this crew is, already and always, kind of wild and crazy." Because immediately after the introduction of the members of the crew, Lance is water-skiing. Now you see the progression of the crew toward something carefree but kind of mad. There's a smoother arc, which helps reduce the feeling of the film being episodic. You've survived the Kilgore madness, you've been through the tiger in the jungle and the Playboy show.
What about the added medevac sequence? How does that alter the film?
In the original film, in the sequence when Willard is reading Kurtz's letter to his son, the boat passes a burning helicopter, with bodies hanging from trees. And you hear the Chief radioing for a medevac. In the new cut he's calling ahead to the medevac camp, which is upriver, but he can't get through. Something's wrong. So now we dissolve from the burning helicopter to this new scene of the boat arriving at the medevac station. Willard jumps off the boat and discovers that their commanding officer stepped on a landmine a couple of weeks ago and nobody has replaced him. The soldiers are just wandering around, the whole camp is in complete disarray, it's like a beehive without a queen. Also, you find out that the Playboy Bunny helicopter has landed here and been commandeered to shuttle wounded and dead from the battlefield, but has now run out of fuel. So Bill Graham and the three Playboy Bunnies are stranded in this mud-hole. Willard negotiates with Graham and makes a deal - two barrels of diesel fuel for a couple of hours with the girls. Then there's a double scene, with Chef and his dream-come-- true Miss December, and Lance and the Playmate of the Year. It's funny, sexy, very peculiar stuff. The problem was that the scene between Willard and Bill Graham was never filmed.
How do you deal with the missing scene?
What we've done is treat the moment elliptically. You see Willard being beckoned into the tent, and we intercut that with a fight that's beginning among the members of the patrol boat crew - just kind of laughing and hooting and rolling around in the rain. The audience becomes preoccupied with this sort of schoolboy brawl. Then Willard comes back and stops them by announcing that he's made this deal. For me the most remarkable addition is the French plantation scene. It deepens the politics of the film, and is also haunting. Why wasn't it used before?
Probably the trickiest thing was how to get into it, but even more, how do we get out of it? It completely foxed us in 1978. Structurally, the events seemed to happen too late in the film for what they are. That kind of passionate but reasoned discussion around a dinner table about the French involvement in Vietnam seems to want to come in the first third of the film, not two-thirds of the way through as the film is progressively getting crazier and crazier.
Francis had reshot the beginning of the sequence. The dock had been ruined in the typhoon, and he saw that and said, That's much better. I like it ruined. Francis was responding, even at the shooting stage, to an understanding that these can't quite be real people, so late in the film. Just the practical questions of where do they get supplies, how do they get in and out of this place, how do they sell their rubber?
But there was no way to end it. The ending of the sequence had only been shot once and involved the dock in its intact form. Having these images in mind, I was looking at the raw material for the first time. During the original editing, I was not working on the French plantation, and I hadn't seen all of this stuff. There's a scene between Willard and the French woman played by Aurore Clement. She gets out of bed, undresses and closes the mosquito netting around the bed, and talks to him through the netting. He pulls her down through the netting and they make love.
I was looking at this captured frame of her silhouetted against the mosquito netting and I thought, She looks like a ghost. Then I thought, If we begin the French plantation much later than we'd ever begun it before, after Cleans death, and if we allow the boat to go into the fog and spend some time there, then the French plantation can emerge from it in a ruined state, and the ghosts can come out of the fog. Then it can get into what Francis described as this kind of Bunuel-like absurdity of a dinner discussion, talking about the passions of what was then 25 years earlier. Then Willard and the Aurore Clement character prepare to make love by smoking dope, and now she's this ghostly, silhouetted figure on the other side of the mosquito netting. Now the film can go back into the fog, with fog elements introduced visually that begin to take over the image and you're left more and more with the silhouette of this woman, hovering against a completely milky white background. We end the scene at that point, before Willard pulls her through the mosquito netting, holding the image of his hand caressing her body through the netting. It's a very sensual thing. But she's turned into a non-physical being at that point.
Then you realize that you're back on the boat. Did any of this happen at all? Was it a dream? Did they pass through some kind of psychic forcefield, where these people had lived, intensely, 25 years earlier? And Clean had just been killed, and his body was to be buried in this ghostly place... so were they now in a state where they were thinking about death and ghosts and here they came?
In Conrad's story the moral debate between Marlow and Kurtz when they meet is never actually spelled out there's just one chilling paragraph of Marlow talking about fighting to save Kurtz's soul. The film's finale didn't have the danger and clarity that was there in the rest of the film. There was a "mythical" pitch I didn't fully believe. Was there a lot more material you found in the process of reediting?
There are two monologues by Brando, each about 20 to 25 minutes long.
Were they improvised?
Yes. In the sense that Brando hadn't memorized any text. But he and Francis had worked out what he was going to talk about. The "snail on the straight razor" line comes from the first monologue, as well as all the material about the inoculated arms. From the second monologue, the only words in the film are "The horror ... the horror."
For me, the problem has always been that the Brando sequences at the end are so-shaded and abstract.
Another scene we've added is the lead-up to Brando's inoculation speech. It's the last in a series of scenes where Willard is being broken down in Kurtz's compound - he's baking in a metal shipping container that has been left out in the sun. He's in there in the dark, the door opens, and there is Kurtz. He sits down, surrounded like the happy Buddha by all these Montagnard children, and reads Willard three short paragraphs from Time magazine, circa 1967, about how well the war is supposedly going. He makes little ironic comments about that. Then he says, "You're free now to wander about the compound. Don't try to escape or you'll he shot." And then Kurtz leaves. Willard tries to stand up, collapses, and then he's brought into the temple. This way you see the end of the process of torturing Willard. And you see Brando in the daylight, which is significant - full-figured, and he's coherent, ironic, and authoritative.
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Michael Ondaatje is the author of The English Patient and most recently Anil's Ghost. Michael Ondaatje, 2001 |
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