Chapter 10. Time and Endless Patience

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2003—EDGEWATER, NEW JERSEY

It’s 9:30 p.m. and the audience in Theater 4 is watching the concluding reel of Cold Mountain—the final 20 minutes of the last preview. Inside the stadium-style auditorium, 300 moviegoers will soon be filling out survey cards with their likes and dislikes. About 20 others will be invited to stay afterward for a focus group.

Walter Murch sits right in the middle of the upper section of the theater. A Russian émigré sits behind him. Earlier, before the lights went down, he leaned over and asked Murch, not possibly knowing who he was, “Is this a good movie? Is this going to be a good movie?” Before Walter could answer, the man continued: “Is it like Scary Movie? That was a good movie!” Walter just chuckles.

New Jersey filmgoers are a vocal audience, and they watch the film’s big explosion scene with awe, the Russian vocalizing their general sentiments: “Oh, yeah—wow! Look at that!”

They’re also amused. When Ruby first appears at Black Cove Farm and meets Ada, she picks up the rooster that’s been terrifying Ada and breaks its neck. Zellweger, playing Ruby, gets a big laugh. When she adds, “Let’s go put it in the pot,” there’s another round of laughter. “Kill the rooster!” the Russian guy exclaims.

These are moments that must reassure director Anthony Minghella. Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, who is sitting behind Minghella, should also be encouraged.

In the middle of the screening, Weinstein leaves the theater for a few moments during the scene of Inman recuperating at Maddie’s, the goat-herder and healer played by Eileen Atkins. On returning to his seat Weinstein passes behind Minghella, taps him on the shoulder, and says, “It’s good.” You’d have to know Weinstein well to discern whether this is a genuine conviction, meaning he will not have much criticism later, or if he’s posturing for the moment. Minghella and Murch will find out the next day, during a debriefing in Miramax’s offices.

So far, Weinstein has been mostly supportive of Minghella. The previous preview on August 20, also here in Edgewater, received very good audience ratings. Miramax offered to extend Minghella’s delivery date to November 15, giving him one extra week.

This version of Cold Mountain is 2:37 hours long; the end credits will add another six minutes or so. On top of all the major surgery that was done previously to reduce the running time, Murch has spent the last few weeks making little nips and tucks. One week earlier, on locking the picture for this final test screening, Murch took the film’s measurements, reminding himself how far below the theoretical 30 percent limit it now is—sometimes even he forgets where all the cuts come from.

September 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Almost 50% cut out of film. Actually 48%. When did we pass 30% (at 3:33) and how were we able to cut out almost another hour below that? Cut out the Inman-Cold Mountain-Long Walk cycle. Sara’s final character beat cut out. Veaseytown and other Veasey development cut out. Swimmer. What else?

Film is 2.36.55: now that we have locked all reels. It is 2.15 am. Congratulations!! Now finished conforming the tracks at 3.30 am.

Feeling good despite the eight-hour turnaround. Home at 6am and back at work at 2 pm.

Mom said I was a happy kid until I was two, and then I became suddenly serious and preoccupied. What changed?

As Murch puts it, the story question that drove the five months of editing from the day he completed the first assembly (February 16) to the first edited version for public test screening (July 16) was this: “Will the audience engage with the characters—these strange people meeting other strange people under strange circumstances?” In particular, since Inman is quite a reticent protagonist, Murch felt the need to better reveal what is going on inside Inman’s head. When his journey goes, “slightly off beam,” as Murch describes it, the audience needs to see through Inman’s eyes to know what he is thinking.

“With Apocalypse Now we had the same problem only more so,” Murch explained late one night in his editing room. “In that film we’re with Willard (Martin Sheen) the entire time. The film is told from his point of view, yet he hardly speaks, nor does he do very much until he finally kills Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Narration was the only way in. Contrary to Apocalypse Now, with Inman there are ways to find out what is going on inside. He talks—though not very much—and does things. Since Ada already speaks in voiceover through her letters, it didn’t feel right for another character to also speak with a narrative voice.”

After getting the balance of Inman’s interior and exterior selves provisionally balanced to Walter and Anthony’s satisfaction, largely through pulling Inman’s actions into tighter contact with each other, Murch and Minghella spent much of their edit time from July until now focusing on Ada, both as a character and in relation to Inman. “Just as Inman goes from being a golden-haired youth to a scarred, bearded veteran, Ada matures from being a porcelain doll to having her hands dipped in blood. And it is she who survives, not Inman. In that sense the film belongs to her,” Murch explains. “She is Cold Mountain’s Ishmael, who survives ‘to tell thee.’”

In this screening of Cold Mountain, even though the film is fairly complex in its intercutting, flashbacks, and time-place discontinuities, one can feel the audience engaged, leaning into the film like a long distance runner, anticipating, but not falling off balance.

During a sequence of Inman’s journey back to Cold Mountain, soon after he leaves the hospital, a close-up shot fills the screen with crabs crawling in the mud. “He’s going to eat them,” the Russian sitting near Murch says out loud, even before Inman is established in the scene. Audiences participate like this, using clues dropped for them, whether or not a film director plans for it. Intelligent filmmakers craft this kind of relationship with an audience, and constantly evaluate their film-in-progress from the point of view of the spectator. Murch and Minghella respect this “dialogue” with their imagined audience and as a result, moviegoers benefit from a richer film experience. Murch and Minghella benefit, too. While they work, the specter of a future audience hovers in the edit room with them, challenging their decisions and raising questions, like a Socratic third party.

One major area the phantom moviegoer questioned was Cold Mountain ‘s violence. During editing Murch and Minghella shifted the tenor of the film’s bloodiest scenes—what Murch dubs a process of “desanguination.” At this point in the screening the audience is watching “the Sara sequence.” It may be the best example in Cold Mountain of not only how a scene can work better without being too full of “tang,” but also how story and character get transformed as they travel from book to screenplay to film.

From the beginning when Murch first read the screenplay, he took note of potential problems with this powerful scene between Inman and the young Sara (Natalie Portman). It is Inman’s last stop before making it back to Cold Mountain and to Ada. Sara is widowed and alone with her sick baby. In giving Inman shelter, she looks to him for companionship and for protection from three marauding Union solders. It is Inman’s final temptation: a world and a woman are offered that are completely familiar to him, that need him, and to which a part of him responds more immediately than to the mysterious Ada. In the screenplay, Minghella intensified the scene with more violence (Sara is about to be raped) and tragedy (Sara kills one of the Union soldiers herself, her baby dies, Sara commits suicide) than were in the original novel. By now, however, it may be too late in the film to bring in a new major character like Sara and then ask an audience to spend emotional capital on her without deducting it from somewhere else. As producer Bill Horberg commented during editing, the viewer may begin feeling “donor fatigue.”

All through post production the Sara scene seemed to galvanize people; some were moved, others felt overwhelmed. In either case, it seemed to be too much weight for the movie to carry right at that point. When Murch provided the scene to Apple in March to use as part of a presentation, word came back that they found it too depressing. In May, when Sydney Pollack came to the Old Chapel to see the cut at that point, he told Walter he thought the way it was assembled implied Sara and Inman had sex. This would jeopardize the whole purpose for the scene, which was to set up the final reunion between Inman and Ada. In June, after the first screening in New York for Miramax executives, co-chairman Bob Weinstein, Harvey’s brother, felt there was more heat between Sara and Inman than between Inman and Ada. In early September when Harvey Weinstein visited the Chapel for a day, he suggested taking out the shot of Sara breastfeeding her baby as Inman introduces himself to her.

The Sara sequence didn’t achieve its ultimate form until just before this final preview. The overhaul began with a relatively minor change, when Murch tried cutting Sara’s explanation of her predicament, a few lines of dialogue spoken to Inman while she breastfeeds baby Ethan:

Click here to view code image

                         SARA

Used to have a cow; few goats. Raiders took them.
Made me kill our own dog on the porch. That poor
creature watched over me. Nothing left now save a
hog and a couple of chickens to live off till spring.
I'll have to kill that hog and make sense of the flesh
and divisions—which is something I never did.

The cut seemed to work. Not only did the lines disappear without a trace, but in retrospect they seemed slightly out of character: why would she have revealed her vulnerability and lone resource so early to a complete stranger? Murch showed it to Minghella, who liked it and said he felt the cut put more emphasis on their tender exchange of names at the end of the scene. Maybe this was the hidden problem, the “referred pain,” that had triggered Weinstein’s suggestion to cut out the entire scene.

Pollack and Horberg arrived on September 11, a week after Weinstein’s visit, to spend three days in the editing room going through the film inch by inch. This would be their last opportunity for such detailed work before the final preview and, given the inflexibility of the schedule, their last such opportunity, period.

When the Sara scene was run, both Pollack and Horberg liked the lift of the expository dialogue. But a few minutes later—after the Union soldiers have been killed—Inman’s helpful butchering of the hog now appeared gratuitous and inexplicable, almost aggressive, because Sara’s explaining her need to have it butchered (and her inability to do it herself) had already been removed. The choice was clear to everyone in the room: restore her explanation or go deeper and remove the hog butchering and everything associated with it—leading inescapably to cutting out the death of the baby and Sara’s suicide. Anthony suggested cutting it all out and seeing what happens.

One simple extraction had triggered a major “lift,” as editors call a wholesale removal of a scene or large portion of a scene. Will this radical cut work?

September 13, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Lifting Sara’s suicide became inevitable when we saw that the scene on the bed worked well without the exposition, and then Inman slaughtering the hog afterwards was redundant. Unintended consequences. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it turned out. So we cut the Sara death scene—slaughtering of the hog, the baby’s death, her suicide. Brave of Anthony to contemplate it, even in the short run. We will screen next Thursday and judge in context.

For Murch, the benefits of the foreshortened Sara scene seem numerous: narrative momentum toward the film’s resolution is regained; the audience is spared emotional trauma at a point in the story arc when they’ve earned a denouement instead; a precious three minutes of running time is saved; tang is reduced; and Inman’s character is bolstered in unexpected ways. He does not need to have any more tragedies on his shoulders—he has plenty of those already. Now the audience implicitly feels his resolve has been strengthened, since he chooses to finish his journey back to Ada rather than remain with the still-living Sara.

September 14, Murch’s Journal

Sara scene thoughts: Inman now leaves her of his own free will. Formerly, he had to leave because the baby died and she died, so fate took the decision out of his hands. It is actually better for his character this way. In addition to the time and structural issues.

A lift may work for itself, but what about the film fragments that remain around it? How will they sit next to each other? After Sara shoots the third soldier, the altered scene ends with a devastating closeup of Inman. He looks blankly at scudding gray clouds, which dissolve to Black Cove Farm and Ada waking to the first heavy snowfall of the year; then a short scene of Stobrod, Pangle, and Georgia leaving prints in the fresh snow as they make their way back up the mountain. When Inman next appears, he’s cresting the snowy ridge above the town of Cold Mountain and sees the valley below. His expression and his body language still convey the weight he carries. He is pulled downward, but not by Sara’s suicide and her baby’s death, since they no longer occur. Instead Inman’s heaviness is a larger social malaise: that a young widow like Sara, who wanted to eliminate all weapons from the world (“every blade, every gun”), is so beaten down and hardened that she shoots and kills the one Union soldier—a young man probably very like her dead husband—who tried to protect her baby from the cold.

Days later, while mixing the soundtrack at De Lane Lea for this last preview in Edgewater, Walter was still pondering the story implications of the Sara scene, turning them over and over like worry beads.

September 27, Murch’s Journal

The three soldiers are killed and their horses are left for Sara—she can make it through the winter if she sells them. She still has the hog. So she is better off now than before Inman arrived. Just her sick baby.

The re-imagined Sara scene prevailed. And with it, a new lesson emerges for Murch about the changing relationships between book, screenplay, and film. “It was as if film reached over the screenplay and went back to the book,” Walter says later. “There was something fundamental in the book that transcended the screenplay. It was difficult for Anthony because Sara’s death was something he added to the story, and he loved how the hog butchering had turned out in the shooting. It was a real ‘Book of Job’ moment, where a good scene was sacrificed for the larger good of the film.”

Beside the removal from the Sara scene, Murch and Minghella had made two other major alterations prior to the last preview. These changes occur in the sequence when Inman and Reverend Veasey are captured by the Home Guard at Junior’s, and they attempt to escape. One of the principles in editing Cold Mountain the last few months has been, “Don’t let Inman sit down.” Inman’s story momentum must always be toward Ada and Cold Mountain. Murch and Minghella felt that a scene of the chain gang sitting on the street back in “Veasey Town,” where Inman resists Veasey’s whispered suggestion of trying an escape, violated that principle. The scene had great production values and redeemed Veasey’s character—he wanted to escape with the slave girl he made pregnant. But it was backwards movement geographically, and Inman’s reluctance to try an escape was hard to read: he seemed to care more about his own safety than trying to get back to Ada at any cost.

The lift of Veasey Town gave a palpable momentum to the film. It juxtaposed the night scene of the chain gang leaving Junior’s with the gang on the road the next day, moments before a troop of Yankee cavalry appears in the distance. The chain gang boss, a southern Home Guard bounty hunter like Teague, is desperate not to be seen by the Yankees. He forces Inman and the other prisoners to hide behind a small rise and to remain silent until the Yankees pass. As scripted, Veasey decides this is as good an opportunity as any to try an escape, and he initiates a scramble up the hill, Inman futilely resisting.

Without the town scene, Veasey’s urge to escape and Inman’s resistance make no sense. The alternatives were either putting the town scene back or finding some other solution.

Remarkably, like Murch finding Frederic Forrest’s alternate line reading for “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” in The Conversation, the same thing happened here. “There was a line of Inman’s,” Murch says, “where he said, ‘Come on’ by way of resisting Veasey’s escape. And I remember before shooting began I made a note on the screenplay that this was an odd thing to say under the circumstances. Anthony said, ‘No, no, what it means is, ‘Come on, don’t do this.’ In fact, in a different context, ‘come on’ could mean ‘let’s go, let’s do it!’ And it turned out there was one take where Jude Law’s emphasis was like that: wrong for the original scripted intention, but perfect as a way to initiate and lead an escape.”

“So we were able to recut the scene and create the illusion that it was Inman who led the escape—he was so desperate to get back to Ada that he seized the first opportunity to present itself. His line reading flipped the scene’s polarity 180 degrees—it became white rather than black—and it was consequently easier to understand what was going on in his head: Inman wanted to get back to Ada at any cost.”

Murch says it’s common in editing, and normally easy, to steer scenes five or ten degrees in either direction from their intended course. Shading intensity, favoring a character, softening a moment—that’s “the bread and butter of film editing,” as he calls it. “It also seems that flipping the polarity of a scene—going completely the opposite way from where things were originally intended—is something relatively easy to do in film editing. Somebody good is now bad, or somebody who was—in this case—an unwilling participant, is now the lead conspirator.”

Back in Theater 4, Cold Mountain is concluding. Inman and Ada are reunited, spend the night together in the old Cherokee village, and, with Ruby’s assent, make their plans to be together on Black Cove Farm. Then comes the inevitable confrontation, the shootout with Captain Teague and his Home Guard. Together, Inman and Ada get Teague cornered, and the audience cheers when he is killed. Inman tracks Bosie, the albino Home Guard, and shoots him. Inman seems to survive, but his eyes glaze over and he coughs up blood. Someone nearby says, “Oh, no,” pretty loudly, and there is a groan from many people. The Russian expresses their collective regret: “He’s not going to die?”

Since the credit roll is not done yet, the film ends on a shot that cranes up through the trees from the Easter meal at Black Cove. A Miramax representative quickly speaks into a microphone, asking audience members to please take one of the survey cards being passed out, and to fill it in before leaving the theater. Meanwhile, producers and the other film people use this opportunity to go out into the lobby to talk, compare notes, grab their Diet Cokes, and stretch their legs before the focus group begins. Walter stays seated. He makes a few notes on his laptop then uses the walkie-talkie to reach young Walter up in the projection area. “Good job, looked great. Tell Howie and Eddy and Tim for me.”

The Russian is in the lobby. “I filled out a card. I liked it,” he says. “It’s a good story, but I hate what happened at the end.”

The focus group process that is about to begin originated in the advertising business. Ten to 20 consumers are selected who represent the age, gender, race, educational levels, and other desired traits of the market for a particular product. Clients and ad agency account executives observe the proceedings from behind a one-way viewing window. The purpose is to probe for subjective responses and latent feelings that may not come out in a strict multiple-choice questionnaire. Murch calls it “a black art.”

When the focus group method is applied to films-in-progress, though, the session is held immediately after a screening, and the “clients” are sitting right there in plain sight a few rows back.

Murch moves down toward the front of the theater where the others, including Anthony Minghella and Harvey Weinstein, have regrouped to listen in on the moderated discussion that follows. “If you wrote this up for a scientific journal,” Murch whispers, “and said we ran the film once, then changed it profoundly and ran it again for a different group of people a month later, and got results to compare with the first, the scientists would say that’s insane because there is no control. You would need to run the two versions of the film for exactly the same group, who also need to be insulated from contact with the creators. But of course we never do that.” Focus group participants are picked on the fly, based on appearances, so one never knows if the deck is loaded one way or the other. Sean Cullen was buttonholed by a focus group recruiter after the July preview because he fit the demographic. Cullen was tempted, but said he was with the film.

The focus group moderator, an energetic middle-aged man, begins by asking broad questions about how the group rated the film. Twelve of 23 raise their hands on “excellent,” six respond to “good.” These are called “the top two boxes,” and 18 of 23, or 78 percent, for the top two boxes is considered high. Of the other five people, the moderator wants to know the reason they did not say excellent. Most of them say it was predictable. The next issue is length and pacing—close to the bone for Walter. Nine say it was just right, but thirteen hold up their hands to say it was it too long. Only three agree that the pacing “was just right.” Six say it was too slow, and ten indicate it was okay, “but dragged in spots.”

After another ten minutes, when the discussion is nearly over, the leader asks a final question: “Would you recommend this movie to your friends?” The people from Miramax lean forward in their seats. “The key question,” Murch whispers. “Nothing else really matters.” For a movie to be fully successful at the box office, word of mouth is a must. When 17 of the 23 raise their hands, the onlookers appear relieved.

Says Murch: “With more than two-thirds saying yes, you have your radio-active core, the critical mass.”

It’s nearly 11 p.m. when the session concludes and the participants collect their cash payments in sealed envelopes. The producers and Miramax staffers gather in the lobby and on the sidewalk, quietly discussing the screening and the focus group. One of the marketing consultants breaks in with a tally of the questionnaire results: “Top two boxes: 81, our best so far; 59 definite recommend, tied with Charleston for best; female under 25, 86 top two boxes; male under 25 top two boxes, 78.” Everyone seems buoyed, except Minghella, who looks glum. Perhaps he’s already thinking ahead to the next morning when he and Murch have the official post mortem with the Weinsteins at Miramax.

Wednesday, October 1, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Audience same reactions as previously, loved Ruby, felt that the film didn’t start until she arrived. This is the Bob Weinstein comment from June, that there wasn’t enough of Ada and Inman in the film. Most of these problems are endemic and will not go away no matter what we do. I am tired and trying not to be dragged down by the incommensurability between the effort it took to get here and the results. I kept wanting to say, “Yes, but we cut out two and a half hours.” Fell asleep in my clothes when I got back to the hotel, reading the book on clouds. Woke up about 6am and haven’t been back to sleep.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 2, 2003—NEW YORK CITY

At 3:30 p.m. Murch goes into the Broome Street Bar on West Broadway for a late lunch. Since mid-morning he’d been a few blocks away at the Miramax offices with Anthony, Sydney, Bill Horberg, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa. He sits in the quiet back room of this old-style New York bar and restaurant, “a relief after the neighborhood’s sometimes cloying precocity,” as one online guide describes it.

There were 15 to 20 people attending the morning meeting at Miramax. Murch quotes Weinstein as saying, “This is the last we’re going to get together like this because we’re running out of time, so I want everyone to say anything that they have to say, because you won’t be able to say it again. So, Albert?”

Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa spoke first. Then, according to Murch, Sydney Pollack said, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about these things in this sort of format. So I’ll just talk privately to Anthony.”

Murch recalls Weinstein saying that the Miramax staff got together the previous night to make their set of notes: “Here are our consolidated notes.” Then Colin Vaines, Miramax’s London executive, read them. “And then on top of that,” Murch continues, “Harvey gave his own set of notes, which were different. So I wrote them all down. It’s five handwritten pages.” The commentary Murch recorded represents the producers’ and studio’s thoughts. By contract, however, Minghella retains ultimate authority over the film—he has “final cut.”

Murch paraphrases the gist of the group’s thinking: “Whatever you did between the last cut and this cut, do something like that again. Whatever rabbit you pulled out of your hat that suddenly made Inman the leader of the escape from the chain gang, we liked that. Do more stuff like that. There are some specific things, but it’s more like, ‘This scene now seems a little slow. Do something.’ But no suggestion as to what it might be. Meanwhile, people are starting to yell about how we’ll never make the date unless reels are locked today, and at the latest on Monday.”

Murch is supposed to begin the final mix in ten days at De Lane Lea in London. To start sound mixing, he and Minghella must lock the picture first—finalize the picture cutting so the soundtrack can be mixed in sync with the picture. The studio wants the picture locked three days from today so the digital intermediate (DI) can be prepared in time to meet the release date.

So far, the DI is a huge data file that resides on the computers at Framestore/CFC in London. And while the director of photography, John Seale, already spent three weeks making thousands of color corrections, only a handful of DI material has been output from the computer onto actual film negative. That process takes 36 hours per reel—20 days total for Cold Mountain. From that negative the film lab still has to make an interpositive, followed by an inter-negative, and from that, film prints. Then Minghella and Murch must review and approve the quality of nine reels of film print, or send them back for fixes. “It’s a complex process,” Murch says, putting it mildly.

The incongruity of three competing deadlines—a re-edit leading to a final lock of the picture, a final sound mix beginning in ten days, and outputting film from the digital intermediate—reminds Murch of a similar situation on another film he worked on, The Godfather.

“There was a crucial issue with Nino Rota’s music, which Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, didn’t like,” Murch says, finishing his lunch. “He really didn’t like it—felt that it dragged the film down.” Murch was there with Coppola, at a crucial 1972 meeting at Evans’s house.

“Evans wanted to bring in Henry Mancini to replace the score, but Francis threatened to take his name off the film if that happened. So Evans decided on a compromise: he, Evans, would recut Nino Rota’s music and preview the film, then Francis would recut Evan’s recut, have another preview and may the best version win. I looked at Francis, and he looked at me. We both knew that this wasn’t going to happen—there was only time to mix the film once. Whoever got to go first would win. It was one of those moments when everything hung in the balance.”

“Just then actress Ali McGraw comes out, Evans’s wife at the time,” Murch recalls. “She says, ‘Bob, don’t forget, we’re going to Acapulco on vacation.’ ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right,’ Evans says. ‘Okay, Francis, you guys do your thing first and then I’ll do mine when I come back.’”

“I looked at Francis and we both knew we had won, but we also knew we had to maintain the fiction that everything was going to go the way Evans had proposed. But it was obvious to us, and to anyone who stopped to think about it, that there just wasn’t time to do two versions, evaluate everything, have the debates that would inevitably happen, and then produce a final mix.”

Coppola and Murch mixed the music the way they wanted it. By the time Evans and Ali McGraw came back from Mexico, it was too late. The momentum was with the version of the film that was ultimately released, and Nino Rota’s music went on to become part of popular culture.

By now it’s after 4 p.m., and Murch’s return flight to London is scheduled to depart JFK at 9 p.m. Before leaving he’d like to talk to Minghella, who will stay one more day in New York to do more ADR. The two of them haven’t yet had time to discuss last night’s screening, the focus group discussion, the Miramax meeting, or their own set of notes. Murch, who doesn’t own a cell phone, borrows one to call Tim Bricknell, Minghella’s assistant, to see about getting together.

“I’m jolly!” Murch says to Bricknell, who is just down the street with Minghella inside the Mercer Hotel.

“Does Mr. Minghella want to talk to Mr. Murch?” Walter asks.

A pause.

“Okay, back in London, then.”

“We’ll pick it up Monday when he gets back,” Murch says returning the cell phone. “He wants to get some distance from the collective angst that surrounds the picture right now. It’s his way of reclaiming the picture.”

Murch looks at his watch and decides there’s time to go to the Apple store nearby on Prince Street.

Murch comes here not to test drive the G5 computers, pick up something for his Final Cut Pro system, or check his email, but to buy his son a birthday present—an iPod. Since this is Murch’s first-ever visit to an Apple store, he explores it, but does so quickly, taking only a few minutes to cruise through the crowded displays of computers and other electronics, then upstairs through the bookstore area. He swiftly purchases the music player and returns to the stunning transparent glass stairway in the center of the store that connects the two floors. For the next 15 minutes he examines the staircase, its materials, and how it’s put together. He pulls out a digital camera and takes several photos, moving a companion into position on the staircase to properly capture its scale and proportions—another case of Murch admiring Apple’s attention to design and function. “Maybe something like this could work for our place in Primrose Hill,” he says.

Murch is making a fair swap, being here inside the Apple store. After all, the Final Cut Pro team had come to the Old Chapel in London two weeks earlier to visit him.

Late at night on September 16, the day before the Apple delegation was scheduled to arrive, Walter walked through the quiet streets near Primrose Hill, heading home from the Old Chapel. “So, we have Apple sometime tomorrow,” he says. “We’ve worked up three or four pages of things that it would be nice to include in the next version of Final Cut. Sean was just talking to Ramy at DigitalFilm Tree, going over that list and double-checking with him whether some of those features had already been taken care of in Final Cut 4.0.”

Walter then recounted the list of surprises he’d been through the last few days. He crunched together a last-minute temp sound mix for a 35mm print version of Cold Mountain that Miramax could show in Tokyo to potential Japanese distributors. Pollack and Horberg were in the edit room for three days, going over the cut. Murch had expected them to be there for only one day. Since Murch has not heard anything more from Apple since the end of August, he’s not sure whether or not they’re still planning to come. “We haven’t heard a peep out of them, they haven’t told us whether they’re in town or not.”

Before leaving the Old Chapel a few minutes earlier, Anthony told Murch about one more surprise: Weinstein is flying in from New York the day after Apple’s visit so he can see the latest cut.

He’s asked about the relentlessness of it all. “You have to keep your knees loose in this game,” Murch said with a smile. “You never can tell what’s going to happen.”

His stamina is palpable, considering he’s just worked from 8:30 a.m. to midnight, on this, the 451st day of editing, which began in the morning in Soho at the premix, and ended with editing back in Hampstead.

“Is it midnight?” Murch asked guilelessly. He truly didn’t know what time it was.

By this point it seemed Murch was operating far outside the parameters of normal time. The feeling is akin to exiting a very absorbing movie—that sensation of having no idea what time it is, or if it’s going to be day or night when you get outside.

“Being in the zone? Yeah,” Murch said. “It’s even more powerful when I’m mixing,” Walter says as he looked up at the western sky. “Hey, there’s Mars.”

The guys from Apple arrived at the Old Chapel at 1 p.m. the next day, having first gone by cab to Fleet Street instead of Fleet Road. Walter welcomes them into his edit room and invites them to watch the first reel of Cold Mountain. After the battle scene finishes, the large monitor goes black and Murch turns up the lights.

Murch’s guests were astounded by what they saw, and a little stunned from the intensity of the battle, which is understandable.

“Thank you, that’s awesome,” Jeff Lowe said, breaking the momentary silence.

“Thank you to you guys. It was fantastic,” Murch responded, meaning Final Cut Pro.

“Thank you that it actually worked,” Hudson says, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow in mock relief. The group shared a laugh.

“It’s been all transparency, openness, and speed,” Sean Cullen said. “There were no train wrecks. No down time like we had with Avid.”

Murch pointed out to the Apple guys that his experience solving Final Cut Pro problems wasn’t all that different from what he previously had to do with Avid when it released a buggy new version of Film Composer just before editing began on The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Everyone on the ground—meaning people who were actually using it—had started to try and figure out workarounds on their own. Avid maintained that there was no problem, or if there were problems it was operator error. I said to myself back in early 2002 when I was contemplating Final Cut, that if this was the situation in Rome with Avid, what was it going to be like in Bucharest with Final Cut?” Another round of appreciative, slightly nervous laughter from the Apple delegation.

“You can still see the twinkle of the Atari game-playing kid inside these guys, even though they’ve grown up and become successful.”

“In the end, there was never anything,” Murch continued. “We would have the occasional crash, but they would be what I would term ‘friendly’ crashes, unlike the ‘smoke out of the back of the machine’ crashes that we would get with the Avid on Ripley. And we had this redundancy of having four machines rather than two. If one of them had really gone down, you can still roll a cart on three wheels. You don’t have to have four. You just have to rebalance things. But that never happened. We were able to use the four workstations the way we had designed it, me cutting on one, Sean doing file management and cutting on another, and the two others—one for digitizing material into our system, the other for burning DVDs. That all worked great, both for stability and for the security of knowing we had redundancy, which in the end, was never called upon.”

“I spent more time with the machines waiting for me,” Cullen said, “which is also a sea change. On the Avid, it’s always the machines telling you, ‘Well, you want that, I’m in the middle of making this, and it means I have to stop.’ Whereas whenever I needed to do something, if I needed more DVDs, I could always repurpose one machine to get out the DVDs I needed. It was just a whole different scenario for me as a first assistant.”

“It’s a great world,” Hudson said. “The confluence of the technology and the creative.”

“Shall we have a sandwich?” Walter asked. The discussion continues over lunch, with Cullen and Murch going over a list of suggested improvements for future versions of Final Cut Pro. Later that night, at 11 p.m., Sean and his wife, Juliette become parents for the second time, with the arrival of their daughter, Florence.

Friday, October 3, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Over Atlantic on way back tired but satisfied that we got the job done. Meet this morning w/troops and go over the landscape for the next few weeks.

All the suggestions coming out of the final New Jersey preview need to be analyzed, consolidated, reviewed, and put up against the changes Minghella and Murch also still want to try. Taking the upcoming weekend off to recoup and recharge, Murch has 12 days to do all of the remaining picture editing before locking the film.

So once again, Minghella and Murch begin from the beginning, making adjustments and removals. By Tuesday two and a half minutes are gone. Substantial changes are also still getting made—Minghella adds a third letter for Ada to read, voiceover, after Inman arrives at Cold Mountain, sitting atop the snowy ridge. Murch never leaves the old Chapel before 1 a.m. all this week. But now, at least, he has a companion on his walks home: Hana, his border terrier, who arrived with Aggie from California last June. The dog often accompanies Walter to the edit room, where she watches patiently from the couch.

Harvey Weinstein may not be there in body, but he seems to have an eye on the edit room.

Thursday, October 9, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Phone conversation with HW [Harvey Weinstein], talking to Anthony. HW suggests delaying the release if we can’t get the balance right. Disturbing words, to say the least. Why would he say such a thing, unless there is an ulterior motive, to frighten us into some “breakthrough” action? Which is probably what it is.

Heading home at 2.15am—another warm night like the last one.

While Anthony and Walter ought to be getting closure on sequences and reels, considering the mix begins in five days. Instead, true to form, they re-examine anything that does not yet seem quite right.

Friday, October 10, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Anthony thinking of working on the porch scene [between Ada and Inman] again. We looked at the assembly. His analysis of the problem with the scene is that Inman is a man who says few words, and then talks a lot about how words don’t describe the world of nature and feelings. Also, the way it is cut down now, there is no (or just a little) friction between them, so their romance is “too easy”—an old note of mine. What if we left the scene unresolved on “I don’t know you”?

One can feel that Murch is on a roller coaster now, professionally and emotionally. He is nearing completion of the picture—editing and anticipating the sound mixing—but without any final approval from the producers. It’s not surprising then to find two radically different journal entries on the same day:

Friday, October 10, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Amazing that we are where we are, with as few problems as we have. As intense as it is right now, it could be much worse.

Strong sense of suffocation. With all the competing agendas, complete the film but don’t complete it. Harvey is coming to London on Tuesday, so no doubt we will screen the film for him here at that time. Gurgle, gurgle. We will prevail, Inshallah.

On Sunday, a day off, Murch gives a three-hour lecture to the Association of Motion Picture Sound (AMPS) at De Lane Lea. He speaks about technology and movies: the first motion picture with sound made in 1894 by W. K. L. Dickson for Thomas Edison (which Murch helped to reconstruct for the Library of Congress), the vacuum tube theory of power and coherence, Final Cut Pro, and hidden regions of technical breakthroughs still to be discovered. Then, in the afternoon, perhaps suffering a bit from early “parade syndrome,” the sensation of moving backwards after the parade passes by, Walter tries to relax at his house in Primrose Hill. Sometimes stopping the momentum for even one day is not such a good idea.

Sunday, October 12, 2003, Murch’s Journal

What happens if we get to 2 hours 30 minutes and Harvey comes in and wants it to be 15 minutes shorter or will not release this year? Harvey talking about being worried about “Anthony and Walter’s health”—ominous. That is what you say when you are getting ready to take something away from somebody. “I am doing this for your health.” It is what they said when they fired me from Return to Oz.

Film is 2.32.21.

Things like that do happen in the film industry. Murch has a right to be paranoid. But neither he nor Minghella will be sent packing. It’s a passing moment of anxiety.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003, Murch’s Journal

CM is 2.29.40 (minus end credits): Under 2½ hours! Hard to believe but there it is. I restructured reel six, interposing the Christmas dance in the middle of Sara’s, and dropped “Goodbye Maddy,” “Goat meat in stream,” “Brown leaf hill.” One minute 40 secs disappeared. And the junctures are better I think. Nice cut from Ada closing the window to Inman in the rain heading for the “troll tree” with music, pre-lapping “Heathcliff” over the tree and then coming out of Heathcliff into the approach to Sara’s with good music taking us there. Most remarkable is the interpose of Christmas dance during the interval at Sara’s. Nice that the music creeps in as Inman is going to sleep on the corn cobs—then go to happy dancing, full flush of energy and innocence, and then out of that with thunder to Inman waking up and there is Sara asking him to come inside. So now we have cut out 2 hours 36 mins and change. In other words, we have cut The English Patient out of the assembly of Cold Mountain. Thank you for your guidance.

It’s 2:30 a.m. Wednesday morning when Walter leaves the Old Chapel with Hana trotting by his side. Later that day Harvey Weinstein and Colin Vaines, Miramax’s London executive, will come in for another viewing of Cold Mountain. Murch expects substantial conflicts.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Harvey and Colin visit. Now come and gone—3 to 7:30—went away happy, impressed with the work we had done in the last couple of weeks, tried a few ideas for cuts, loved the new reel six juxtapositions (Christmas music in the middle of Sara’s), the meeting in the gorge, the Cherokee village and the shootout/death. Liked the very ending, but Anthony has some ideas there he wants to try. “Let’s lock this picture,” said Harvey. “Lock it by Friday.” Congratulations to all. During the reel-by-reel, Hana made a beeline for Harvey, jumped up on his lap, and sat there, happily smiling. Much improved over the hangdog Hana of the last couple of days.

Murch fully recognizes what’s just happened, and its implications for film editing: “Harvey signed off on the film looking at it on Final Cut Pro. One of those milestones that will go unremarked but is actually a tremendous achievement. That the image and sound presentation was more than adequate for the head of a studio to make such a fateful decision on such an expensive film.”

Indeed, this same week, as if to comment on what’s just occurred, Avid Technologies releases Avid Free DV, a stripped-down version of its Avid Express DV software for digital editing. The Boston Globe, Avid’s hometown paper, reports: “Steve Jobs may have something to do with [the decision.] Today’s professionals pick Avid products first. But the up-and-coming youngsters who’ll be the video artists of tomorrow are buying Macintoshes and getting their first taste of video editing from an Apple product. When they’re ready to upgrade, they may think Apple instead of Avid. And Apple is ready for them with Final Cut Pro, a $995 video editing product that’s so good that film editor Walter Murch is using it to cut the upcoming feature film Cold Mountain.”

Friday, October 17, 2003, Murch’s Journal

2 am. Locked the film: Congratulations!! It seemed (as it always seems) anticlimactic, a kind of wobbling to a stop. But there it is. We will check screen it tomorrow morning and then release the reels to the various departments. Walking past the Chinese restaurant on England’s Lane—two waiters in there having a happy loud conversation at one of the tables—2:30 am. Got a hamper of Fortnum & Mason: foodie goodies from Harvey. “Thank you so very much for all your time and endless patience. All the very best, Harvey.”