Back in May, Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Letters on Walter Murch, the legendary Hollywood editor and sound designer with three Academy Awards to his name. That he would be celebrated in Canada is not so far-fetched – although his parents met in New York, both were born and raised in Toronto, where his father was a well-known artist who studied at the Ontario College of Art.

The directors he has worked with, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, may be better known to audiences, but Murch’s involvement in the advancement of sound and picture technology has forever changed the way we experience movies. No one else has been Oscar-nominated on four different kinds of editing systems – Moviola (Julia), flatbed (Apocalypse Now, Ghost, The Godfather Part III), Avid (The English Patient) and Final Cut Pro (Cold Mountain). And he’s probably the only editor who works standing up.

Murch, who is currently working on an HD project for Coppola, talked to Playback before the ECI ceremony about digital filmmaking, the magic of movies and his need for both chaos and control.

Is it unusual for one person to do both sound design and picture editing on a film?
I’d like more company out here [laughs]. The only other person I know who does both is Ben Burtt [Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith]. The irony there is that we have exactly the same birthday, so there may be something about July 12… I think it’s not something that will become the norm, simply because you have to have interests in both areas. Technology is enabling it to happen more and more, but it had already begun to happen in the ’60s, when I started. With computers, you can flip back and forth from editing sound to editing picture. You’re effectively mixing sound on a computer, and there are really no hard and fast divisions between doing that [and picture], whereas, 50 years ago, there were very good technological reasons to keep those things separate.

You told Michael Ondaatje [in the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film] that you love control and randomness. Does Final Cut Pro allow you to work with both?
No. On that level Final Cut is very similar to Avid. It’s in your approach to it and in the infrastructure of everything that surrounds the system. One of the advantages – which is also a drawback to any computerized random access system – is that those systems will take you immediately to wherever you tell them to go.
In the old days of working on film, you knew where you wanted to go, but then you had to get the roll of film and actually physically wind down in that roll to get there. The hidden advantage of doing it that way is that frequently you would find something in that process you could recognize as being better than what you were after in the first place. You went out to go climbing and you came back with a swordfish.
In these systems, if you want to go climbing, it’ll take you climbing. So I have a system of captured frames that I print out and put on boards, and I take very detailed notes. I do everything I can in my personal approach to the work to create opportunities for random collisions between things – because the equipment itself is not necessarily going to do that.

You worked in standard def on Cold Mountain and HD on Jarhead. Are there still limitations in resolution compared to working with film?
There are some limitations, but they’re getting smaller and smaller. The film I’m working on now is shot in hi-def, so we’re working at the resolution at which it will be seen. The main thing you have to watch out for in any kind of proxy situation is that you’re looking at one resolution, but when you’re done it will be at a different resolution, and if you’d known then what you know now, you would have made different decisions.

Watching HD on a small screen versus watching it on the big screen is another factor, right?
Yes, and we will have screenings where we see it on a big screen and take it into account. You can also trick your brain into thinking something is bigger than it really is. It’s a skill that I had to develop even when I was working in the old days on the Moviola, which is a screen about the size of an index card. I had to find a way to imagine that screen to be 30 feet wide, rather than being five inches wide. The real limiting factor is the resolution of the image itself. If the resolution isn’t there, it’s hard to imagine what it will be unless you see the final product.
When I was working in standard definition, I would make it a policy that I had to see the dailies in film in order to tell when things were out of focus, but also just for the sheer impact of seeing it on film. The first time I ever saw the image, I would need to see it on a big screen in a theatrical setting, and I would take notes. I still do that, but when I work in hi-def it’s less important, because the quality of the image is so high.

Stanley Kubrick said that all he needed was a camera and some actors. Are we moving back in that direction?
Yes. But I think there’s a little hyperbole in what Kubrick said. Ultimately, of course, he’s right – if you have a good story. The quality of the image is almost irrelevant if it’s good enough for you to register the emotion on the actors’ faces. And if you’ve got a good story, it can be any kind of resolution.
The real advantage of something like Final Cut is that for the first time in the history of film, really, the cost of the media and the cost of the apparatus with which you manipulate the media are relevantly insignificant. That’s a very good thing for the training of new editors. They’re able to learn how to edit by actually editing professionally shot material. That’s never been possible before.

Is video good or bad for filmmakers?
There’s more footage being generated now, simply because the economics against turning off the camera just aren’t there. How disciplined the material is, that’s a whole other question that has to do with the nature of the director in question. The two don’t necessarily go together. The trend is toward editors having to deal with more hours of footage than when shooting film.

Directors such as Robert Rodriguez do so many things. Does shooting digital make filmmakers better?
If you talk about Rodriguez, you could always talk about Charlie Chaplin. He worked within a decade or two from the birth of film, and he wrote, directed, acted, wrote the music, produced. He was a quintuple threat just like Rodriguez, and arguably produced some of the greatest films in the history of film. It comes down to the individual, the budget and the time you have. There’s certainly something to be said – and very loudly – for collaboration. It encourages a multidimensional aspect to the film because of the different points of view that each person contributes.

Do you see the end of film origination?
Absolutely.

Are you soon going to be editing not for the big screen, but the home theater?
Is the tail wagging the dog, or has the tail become the dog? I don’t know. We’re in a paradoxical state right now. Jarhead made $27 million in its first week in the theaters, and the DVD made $52 million in sales. I don’t know.