Five TIFF 2012 Studio participants attended the co-production market and other events at the now completed Berlin International Film Festival. They’ve been blogging about their experiences and insights gained from conversations with international producers and industry execs. In the final installment, Scythia Films producer Daniel Bekerman hears about the craft of sound design from Walter Murch, and the filmmaking process of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai.

The Campus is renowned for getting top-notch guests. This year Walter Murch, Paul Verhoeven, Jane Campion, Matty Libatique, Ken Loach and a secret “grandmaster” graced the Hau 1 stage with fawning young filmmaking minds at their feet.

Walter Murch bestows the light of postproduction wisdom on someone's head.

Walter Murch is a true icon of postproduction film theory with vast credits including The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now. In person he made the theory exciting funny and personal.

“We hear ten octaves of sound, we see only one octave of light.” That’s an interesting idea, which came to life when he played Beethoven through a compressor that approximated what it would sound like if our hearing was as spectrally limited as our vision. It sounded like we had all dunked our heads in a fish tank.

Murch’s presence was a reminder that there is a higher level of craft that is possible in our business than we normally aspire to. His ideas were first introduced to me by Canadian sound designer Fred Brennan, who also preaches the importance of collaboration in the script process.

When Murch deconstructed the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now (which I now have to re-watch) – the helicopter sound juxtaposed with the ceiling fan shedding light on Sheen’s mental state – it really did inspire me to bring more rigor to the sound process on my projects. He brought us all back to the womb, recreating the sounds we hear in utero: the heart beat, the sloshing of the organs; it’s loud, and hearing is the first sense we develop. Then we’re born, and introduced to something new – silence – which is terrifying.

A potent way to frame the impact of silence in sound design.

On the last day of the campus, I was woken up by a knocking on my door and a chant: “Wong Kar-wai! Wake up! Breakfast with Wong Kar-wai!” I got dressed and went into the hall where I joined a procession of chanters knocking on doors repeating, “Wong Kar-wai.”

Wong Kar-wai, not eating his croissants.

Nobody ate breakfast. People literally kneeled at his feet (there were not enough chairs) as the “grandmaster” helmer gave thoughtful feedback about his process. He admitted he struggles in the script stage, and that he rarely knows what his movie is going to be until part way through shooting. I asked him if he thought about his identity as a filmmaker as being consistent or if he approached every project as starting from scratch. He looked at me for a long time (which made me slightly nervous my Wong Kar-wai story would be a dressing down) and then answered that each project had to speak to you deeply, so yes there was a consistent identity. This grasshopper was satisfied!

Photos by Daniel Bekerman

The Studio program is TIFF Industry’s first year-round program, open to Ontario-based producers and aimed at developing next-level creative and business skills and knowledge of the global marketplace through panels, programs and seminars with Canadian and international film experts.