Chapter 8. The Hemidemisemiquaver

MARCH 31, 2003—LONDON, ENGLAND

Walter Murch walks to work over Primrose Hill and notices that the morning shadows seem longer; daylight savings time is in effect. The trees are bare, but buds are visible, about to burst. The war in Iraq is ten days old and anti-war signs flutter along the iron fence of Primrose Hill Park.

Twenty minutes later Murch reaches the end of Parkhill Road where it meets Fleet Road. Here, set back from the gently curving corner, is the Old Chapel Studio. He lets himself into the stone building and goes upstairs to the second floor to begin the 255th day of editing Cold Mountain. The landing at the top of the stairs is a slab of translucent green glass. One doesn’t walk so much as float across it into the realm of film editing. Murch waves a greeting through the window to Sean Cullen, already at work inside his narrow rectangular room. The cubicle on the left, with its rewinds and other film accessories, is empty—neither of the two film assistants, Walter nor Dei, is in yet. They had a late night at the edit bench. Further down the main hallway is a closet-sized room that barely accommodates a four-plate Steenbeck editing table and a Final Cut Pro workstation. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are filled with boxes of film dailies. The trainee Susannah Reid, works out of this space.

Murch opens the heavy wooden door to his room at the end of the hall and goes inside. With a sharply peaked exposed-beam ceiling and white walls, this uncluttered space seems more like an architect’s studio than an editing room. The Final Cut Pro system sits on a chest-high drafting table. Not one frame of film is in sight. Only Murch’s picture boards tell the story of what goes on in here. He turns on the Mac, and crosses the rough wooden plank floor to his simple desk at the rear of the room. Murch takes his Mac PowerBook out of its black carrying case, wakens it, and makes a journal entry while his workstation comes to life.

Behind him, hanging on the wall, is a shiny brass “B.” Curious. Ask Walter about it, and he’ll tell you about aiming for a “B.” Work hard to get the best grade you can—in this world, a B is all that is humanly attainable. One can be happy with that. Getting an A? That depends on good timing and whims of the gods—it’s beyond your control. If you start to think that the gods are smiling, they will take their revenge. Keep your blade sharp. Make as good a film as you know how. It’s an Eastern-oriented philosophy, characteristic of Murch, as differentiated from the Western outlook, as expressed by the American writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”

Over the last six weeks, since Murch finished the first assembly, he and Minghella have removed 53 minutes of material from the film. The current edited version of Cold Mountain, 4 hours and 14 minutes, is still a huge amount of footage—equal to the entire first assembly for The English Patient, which was itself considered a high-volume motion picture. In his journal Murch describes this revealing statistic as “sobering.”

Back at his drafting table, Murch opens up the Final Cut Pro application. The splash screen comes on for a moment with its film clapboard logo and green eye, sister to the screen saver on Murch’s PowerBook—the “eye on the pole” photo he took in Bucharest.

Like most days now, this one will be devoted to structural issues in the film, one of three strands in Murch’s editorial process. First there is the logistical wrangling of all the footage—getting it into the system correctly, in sync, properly logged, and then getting it out the other end when the creative work is finished. “Even if there were no creative job at all,” Murch says, “it would still be a challenge to do that. How do you get this load of material from one port, across the ocean, to that port, intact and in good condition? I spend a good part of my brain thinking about that. Sean spends an even bigger part of his brain thinking about it.”

The second strand is what Walter calls the “performance” of editing, that is, selecting takes with the right line readings, putting them in their proper places relative to each other, and intuiting how long to hold each one before cutting to the next. “You can be a perfectly good logistical editor, but if you don’t have the feel for the right choices and the right rhythms, it’s like somebody playing a musical instrument who gets the notes all right, but something somehow just doesn’t feel right.”

The third element is the analytical part, the things Murch says a book editor might tell an author about basic structure: “Well, this is a great chapter, but it may be too long relative to the other chapters. Why don’t you try dividing it in half and take the first half and put it ahead of the other chapter? And this here? Maybe you don’t need it. Maybe it should be in a different place.” Structure, for Murch, is distinct from either the “tone or touch” of performance, or the “systems functions” of managing film inventory. “You can’t survive without all of them interweaving,” Murch says, “although various editors have more talent in one area than in another. The impossible goal is to be equally good at all three.”

February 24, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Bill Horberg and Elena and Jude screen the film [in FCP] downstairs in Anthony’s office. Jude comes at the halfway point. They like it, are excited and overwhelmed at the vastness: “where do you begin?”

Murch starts at the beginning, with the opening battle scene. He is on the prowl for redundancies: where is there fat to cut out? He plays the scene. There. A shot of the Union charge feels like it goes on too long. He’ll remember that. There. The Confederates are slow to move their cannon into place. After watching the entire sequence play, noting all the possibilities for trimming shots, he returns to the beginning. Now he sets Final Cut Pro into trim mode so it will loop, or replay, the same shot over and over. Murch holds his index finger over the “K” key and watches the shot play on the large wide-screen monitor on his left. As he feels the moment where it ought to end, he presses the key. The shot is trimmed by six frames, and a small readout “–6” appears. The shot replays. Again he feels the moment and presses the “K” key: the readout again reads “–6” which means he hit the same frame twice in a row. “You have to feel the musicality of it,” Murch says later, speaking about this edit-on-the-fly technique, for making outgoing edits.

Other editors may freeze the two sides of an edit (with the outgoing frame in one window, the incoming frame in the other window) to carefully study how they relate. But this isn’t Murch’s way. At the crucial moment of the cut, he insists on working from instincts to give him the kind of emotional connection to the film he wants. “I started this on the KEM when I was editing The Conversation, and I used the mechanical frame counter. I would set it to 000 at some arbitrary point upstream from a potential cut point, run the film, and would hit the stop button where it felt right, and read the frame counter; let’s say it was 145. And then do it all over again a couple more times, hoping for the same 145. The Avid was very efficient at this—better than the KEM, in fact. One of the first things I asked about Final Cut Pro was its ability to do editing on the fly.”

February 9, 2003, Murch’s Journal

It is a miracle: the ability—more often than not—to think this shot needs a one-frame trim at the tail. And then be able on the first try to run the shot and hit the trim marker, and get a reading of –1. How is it done? It is mysterious to me. By looking at the rhythms of the image as a kind of visual music, I guess, and then hitting the mark when the new instrument (the new shot) should enter. Musicians do it all the time. Not coincidentally, the frame corresponds to the smallest interval in music: the hemidemisemiquaver. The hdsq is 1/32 note, and it would correspond to a film frame at a metronomic setting of 180.

“If I can’t do this,” Murch wrote in In the Blink of an Eye, “if I can’t hit the same frame repeatedly at 24 frames per second, I know there is something wrong in my approach to the shot, and I adjust my thinking until I find a frame I can hit.”

Murch’s on-the-fly technique derives from his theory of “the blink.” The edit in film—“a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another”—isn’t so different from what we do thousands of times every day in real life when we blink our eyes. While editing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Murch realized his decisions about where to cut shots were coinciding with actor Gene Hackman’s eye blinks. Early one morning, after staying up all night working on The Conversation, Murch walked up from Folsom to Market Street in San Francisco for breakfast. He passed a Christian Science Reading Room with a display copy of that day’s newspaper in the window. It featured a story about film director John Huston, who had just directed Fat City. Murch stopped to read the interview. Huston said an ideal film seems to be like thought itself; the viewer’s eyes seem to project the images. Huston observed that we regularly cut out unnecessary information by blinking as our gaze adjusts, say, from a person sitting next us to a lamp across the room. Huston’s idea connected to what Murch had himself just experienced editing scenes of Harry Caul in The Conversation.

Murch took the idea one step further by noticing that we also blink when separating thoughts and sorting things out. “Start a conversation with somebody and watch when they blink,” he says. “I believe you will find the listener will blink at the precise moment he or she ‘gets’ the idea of what you are saying, not an instant earlier or later.” Murch now understood why his edit points were aligning so closely with Gene Hackman’s eye blinks in The Conversation. The actor had so thoroughly become Harry Caul he was demonstrating his completed thoughts and feelings in this specific, instinctually physiological way.

For several hours Murch proceeds with the Cold Mountain battle sequence. He advances through the Final Cut timeline by “scrubbing” back and forth to locate each shot in the battle scene that had felt excessive on that earlier pass. Using his reflexive technique to intuit a new cut point, he marks then removes the superfluous frames. After finishing this pass Murch sets the playhead back to the beginning of the revised sequence. He cracks his knuckles one by one, turns to his left, still standing, crosses one leg over the other, puts one hand on his hip and rests an elbow on the drafting table. He presses play and watches the results on the big monitor. How does it feel? Does it move along properly? Is there a rhythm to it? Did he drop anything important? Were any telling moments compromised? No, it looks fine for now. The battle is now shorter by one minute and a half. He will show it to Anthony later in the day, when he returns from a meeting at the British Film Institute. For now, he sets it aside.

An editor’s responsibility, as Murch sees it, is “partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to ‘ask’ for it—to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time.”

There’s another reason Murch edits in real time—why he doesn’t stop frames on his monitor to make decisions about where to end a shot. This stems from his “rule of six,” a hierarchy of what constitutes a good edit. The list upends a traditional film-school approach that normally puts “continuity of three-dimensional space” as the top priority of editing. For example, you see a woman open a door and walk halfway across the room in shot A. In closer shot B, you find her at that same halfway point as she continues across the room to sit on a sofa. Not maintaining that spatial logic, “was seen as a failure of rigor or skill,” as Murch writes in his book, In the Blink of an Eye. Murch puts this objective at the bottom of his list. Instead, emotion, “the hardest thing to define and deal with,” is at the top. “How do you want the audience to feel? What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.”

Film editing means aiming at a moving target. A shot length that feels appropriate today might not seem that way later when adjacent scenes and sequences have been changed or reordered. Every edit decision, no matter how trivial it seems or how few frames it involves, throws a pebble into a placid pond. It ripples all the surrounding material. That’s why there is a constancy and perseverance to film editing—viewing, reviewing, and rethinking. Through it, the work itself takes on a persistent rhythm.

Examining structure, not just of individual shots, but of the entire film, is Murch and Minghella’s principal task now. They gaze at the overall narrative arc of the film’s architecture. Naturally, its overarching forms are most apparent when seeing the work in its entirety. So it’s not surprising that after screening the first assembly in mid-February, Murch and Minghella now focus on the “two stories”—those of the protagonists, Ada and Inman, whose narratives alternate on screen throughout most of the film. The characters only appear together for a short time at the beginning and the end of the story. This “double-helix” structure, as Murch calls it, comparing the narrative to the shape of DNA, is a difficulty inherent in the premise of the book Cold Mountain. Minghella had no choice but to carry over this configuration in the film adaptation. The movie’s shape must accommodate that fact, yet also find a rhythmic equilibrium that keeps the Ada-Inman relationship in the forefront of the audience’s mind. Their romance has barely begun when they are separated by the onset of the Civil War. They remain separated by place and by the dramatically different consequences of the same war. Their desire for each other must be present, accessible to the filmgoer, yet remain unfulfilled until the end of Cold Mountain. This is a formidable storytelling challenge. And one that Minghella and Murch felt from the start.

In his post-first-assembly journal entry, Murch called the opening “long and eccentric.” He meant there are two different problems in the beginning section: 1) two principal characters, Ruby and Reverend Veasey, don’t show up until the end of the first act, approximately 50 minutes from the start; and 2) asynchronous shifts in time and place between Cold Mountain in 1861 and the Battle of Petersburg in 1864 may be too demanding.

Shortly after screening the first assembly, Murch and Minghella discovered a possible solution to these problems in the first act: Ada’s letter-writing to Inman.

February 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

We go over the ‘bungee cord’ section during the letter writing, and see what we can restructure to make the ‘tenses’ of the film (past-present) lie easier next to each other.

Ada’s difficulties at the beginning of the film, after her father dies and before Ruby arrives, could be condensed by adding material to her letters in a voice-over narration that is “expandable and contractible.” This “bungee-cord” section is one of those “hinge” scenes that Murch expects and needs in every film—a section capable of absorbing major structural changes that occur before and/or after it, while also being malleable enough to enlarge and shrink as necessary over the course of editing.

Originally, a series of scenes were linked to each other in real time: Ada’s father dies, she tries to cope with Black Cove Farm on her own, she suffers in the winter, she is threatened by Major Teague. But these scenes seem to drag. They could be used, however, more as fragments if they become elements within Ada’s letters to Inman. Production-wise, augmenting Ada’s letters beyond the original screenplay (and what was shot on location) is relatively painless and affordable: Minghella sends Kidman more letter text to read; she records the new voiceover in a sound studio in New York; a sound file of the material is emailed to Murch in London; Sean Cullen integrates it into the audio flow of FCP; and Murch can now start to sketch out a structure, relating the new audio to the appropriate scene fragments. Some directors hate the process of adding new dialogue to their films. Minghella loves the opportunity to record newly written lines that either deepen his original intentions, or revise them completely. Like the editing itself, it’s another opportunity to rewrite the film.

Expanding Ada’s letters may also smooth out the problematic shifts in time and place that Murch noted in his journal entry. Even before leaving for Romania, Walter wrote about this issue in his script notes to Minghella: “Time/space transitions in which the story leaps back and forth with an accelerating time scale; there is a tricky area between page 20 and 34.” It’s not a problem of simply using flashbacks—a device some directors and screenwriters consider a cliché and refuse to use—and it’s not a problem of parallel locations (Cold Mountain/Inman’s walking). It’s the complicated way those two dimensions interact.

Cold Mountain begins in 1864 at the Battle of Petersburg. After a big explosion under their trenches, Inman and his fellow Confederates fight the Federal army troops who are trapped in a death pit created by the blast they themselves set. Then the movie goes back in time to 1861, when Ada first arrives at Cold Mountain and meets Inman. After their love interest is established, the story returns to the aftermath at Petersburg. We see Inman get a bullet in the neck while on a night mission across enemy lines. When the story returns again to Cold Mountain, it doesn’t pick up where we left off. Time has passed, several days at least. And as the story progresses with Ada and Inman together at Cold Mountain during 1861, it makes internal leaps forward in time. Minghella likes this structural motif. He tells non-linear stories and expects an audience to work a little harder to follow them.

In the first 33 pages of the August 2001 version of the Cold Mountain screenplay (essentially Act I) there are 11 time shifts and 6 location changes. Some of these movements shift both dimensions simultaneously. And time moves at a different, quicker pace in Ada’s Cold Mountain scenes than it does in Inman’s war and recovery scenes. Eventually, about an hour into the film, at page 34, when Inman encounters Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Inman and Ada’s stories have caught up with each other. Both characters now occupy the same time frame. Thereafter the two main characters are intercut by location. After showing the lovers in parallel time, they finally converge in space at the film’s climax, in the Rocky Gorge on Cold Mountain.

Minghella and Murch conclude that asymmetrical shifts in space and time at the beginning of Cold Mountain might be too complex for the good of the overall story. Having Ada recount more about her plight in a longer letter would simplify the story arc without giving up important information or dramatic scenes. “This allows us to be brief and succinct,” Murch says about the structural change. “We will hear her voice reading the letter and then there will be a scenelette, then she’ll read some more, then there’s another scenelette. That gives us a well-defined area where time can be freely elastic. She’s bringing Inman (and us) up to date on everything that happened to her over a three- or four-year period, 1861 to 1864.” The volunteer at the hospital finishes reading the letter to Inman, who hears the final lines from Ada, “Come back to me.” We follow him briefly in his recovery, talking to the peanut vendor outside the hospital. When Inman escapes through the hospital window at dawn and begins his journey home, he’s now caught up in time with Ada. “That morning he’s hitting the beach,” Murch says, “is the same morning that Ada goes to sell her father’s watch at the store, so all the acceleration in time—the bungee cord—happens in the turbulence of the letter.”

Expanding the letter has another unexpected benefit: it strengthens a connection the film wants to make between Ada and Inman even while they are away from each other. She writes and he reads; they are intimately together, at least in spirit, while being apart physically. And it’s believable that letter writing nurtures their bond—it’s in keeping with the reality of the Civil War, as Ken Burns drove home with his PBS series on the Civil War.

Finally, the open structure to the newly edited letter scene allows Murch to find a home for a fragment of a longer scene between Ada and Captain Teague (Ray Winstone). Ada sits alone in the chapel that her recently deceased father (Donald Sutherland) had built when he came to Cold Mountain. Teague follows Ada inside, sits down behind her, and alternately threatens and woos her. In a beautifully Minghellian moment, not originally part of the book, Teague tells Ada to look him in the eye. Then, with a slight tremor he whispers, “I’m not nothing.” Minghella wrote the scene at the last moment, in desperation, as backup (“weather cover”) that could be shot indoors during a particularly rainy period on location. Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein had his doubts about the scene. Yet it’s one of those wonderfully revealing scenes that lets the audience understand, even sympathize, with the bad guy—always a very difficult storytelling sleight of hand. The fragment plays just right inside the augmented letter sequence, without needing a beginning to set it up, or much of a middle for development.

To get the film down from four hours to a releasable length, Murch and Minghella will have to do more than trim fat from specific shots, as in the battle scene, and restructure to compress time, as with Ada’s expanded letters. They must look for whole scenes that might be dropped. No magic number for Cold Mountain’s running time was pre-established. When Bill Horberg, one of the film’s producers, comes to visit in London, Murch notes Minghella’s aversion to being tied down.

February 26, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Bill Horberg visits: meeting with Anthony and me; discuss approach to film, how to make it better at the beginning, then how to cut it down. Anthony rejects idea of aiming for a particular length, quotes Godfather II in support.

Murch and Minghella know full well that Miramax doesn’t want its showcase Christmas release, the film being positioned for top Oscar contention, to be three hours long. It’s largely a matter of economics. Theater owners and distributors hate it when a movie is so lengthy it can only have one decent evening showing. The cut-off point is about two and a half hours. To avoid conflict with the studio about the running time, Minghella and Murch would rather stay in control of the edit by making the cuts and rearrangements they choose for getting the film shorter. Weinstein is known for asking directors to make last-minute changes to their films. So the more Murch and Minghella do now to get ahead of the curve, the better.

Now, at the end of March, the running time of the film is just under four hours. The amount of material cut out since the first assembly is approaching the 30 percent threshold—that borderline where Murch says further cutting can endanger “the patient.” So far, only two major scenes have been dropped entirely. Soon after Ada’s father dies, Captain Teague brings dead rabbits to Ada for her to cook and eat. Teague helps her with a few chores as he toys with her aggressively. She takes the rabbits but can’t bear to cook them, and buries them in the yard. In part the scene didn’t work because it was supposed to take place in winter yet it was shot when there was no snow. Also, the “tang” and double-entendre of Teague’s lines as written in the shooting script feel heavy: “Need a hand with that pump?” “If it don’t yield meat, or you don’t sit on it, or suck on it, it don’t have much value...and you’re sleeping all right?” Removing “the rabbits,” as the edit crew refers to the scene, would cut out two and a half minutes. Another complete scene featuring Teague near the end of the film was also cut. In it, the Captain and his Home Guard posse spend a night at Black Cove Farm while Ada is away, up on Cold Mountain with Inman. It may have said more than necessary about Teague’s sexual predilections when he lies down on Ada’s bed with her scarf draped over him.

These cuts bring the film below four hours, so the next screening will be a significant first: the whole film can be seen from start to finish without a break, since it falls within FCP’s limits.

Murch goes back to the beginning, looking for wholesale cuts. The first prospect is a scene between Inman and Swimmer, a Cherokee from Cold Mountain, that was designed to open the film. The two soldiers sit together behind the Confederate lines and Swimmer recites a Cherokee battle curse to Inman, in Cherokee. The novel has a more elaborate version of this scene, which takes place in Inman’s mind, as a flashback, just before he writes to Ada saying he’s decided to abandon the army and walk home to her. Minghella added this scene to the shooting script late in the game. It hadn’t been in the August 2001 screenplay that Murch read back home before production.

April 1, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Still wrestling with the curse at beginning. The problem is that the opening in Cherokee puts everyone’s brain to sleep, and so they don’t listen when he translates it.

One of Anthony Minghella’s methods for taking his film’s temperature is to invite some peers from the filmmaking, literary, and theatre communities to the work-in-progress screenings being held every three weeks. Respect among them is mutual and thorough going, so Minghella expects to hear the truth, regardless of its implications. These trial showings, like any preview, can be bracing. But this is what helps Minghella and Murch confront the film’s opening. “It was just sailing over people’s heads,” Murch says later. “Even very bright filmmakers couldn’t get what was going on. There’s something about beginning a film in a foreign language without subtitles that says, ‘What people say in this film, isn’t important. It’s just syllables and sounds.’”

The scene is cut.

A week later Murch is midway through this same round of revisions when Minghella recommends another scene for removal: Ada and Ruby at Black Cove Farm talking as they fix each other’s hair. It’s an intimate tableau with moments that flash with humor. For the most part, however, this episode reveals class and cultural differences between the two women we know already.

April 8, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Lost the hairdo scene and are starting to group in bigger chunks—Veasey is continuous from discovery through end of Ferrygirl, and Ada-Ruby is continuous from “what’s this wood” through “He left you?”

At times, pleasant surprises await filmmakers after they lift a scene and join together what remains: two scenes never designed to lie next to each other suddenly make a perfect fit, enhancing one another and the flow of the story. After Minghella and Murch take out the hairdo scene, two scenes remain that each work better in this new structure. The scene of Ada playing Inman’s song on the piano while Ruby listens now immediately precedes the sale of the piano for a flock of sheep. The intervening hairdo scene implied that it was Ruby’s idea to sell the piano, with Ada reluctant. Now it implicitly seems to be Ada’s idea, and playing Inman’s song was also her farewell to the piano the night before selling it. The scenes now do double duty; always a good thing to keep the audience from getting ahead of the story.

A few days later, while going through the last reel of the film, Murch tries removing another major sequence, perhaps the largest so far: a series of scenes in which Inman finally arrives at Cold Mountain town, goes to Black Cove Farm, then walks back up the mountain looking for Ada and Ruby. It’s nearly three pages in the screenplay.

April 11, 2003, Murch’s Journal

We cut out the Inman detour through Cold Mountain and Black Cove farm. Now he simply comes across Ada as she is shooting turkeys. A saving of 4 minutes, which is significant at this stage of the film, but more specifically it cuts out a loop and the energy-draining feeling that comes with “I’ve been on a long walk.” As long as he (and we) have walked, and reached his (our) destination, he now has to resume walking and go back up the mountain, and the audience would be forgiven for thinking, so long into the story, “Isn’t this film ever going to be over?”

Lifting the Inman sequence improves the final act’s pacing. The culminating Rocky Gorge encounter with Ada plays more powerfully and emotionally. Meanwhile, Murch can’t avoid a scientific analogy for the creative act he’s just performed.

April 11, 2003, Murch’s Journal (continued)

Organic molecule building is the folding of proteins into each other in particular and energy-efficient ways, facilitated by enzymes. The film editor is similarly a kind of enzyme, facilitating folding the giant molecule of the film into particular and energy-efficient patterns.

The watchword for this second round of revisions has been large-scale removals, but Murch also continues to make subtle adjustments as they present themselves—the moving-target phenomenon. For example, something now feels out of order in the Rocky Gorge scene. Maybe Ada and Inman’s reunion is more in the clear now, and without Inman’s walkabout, the rough surface of this scene is better exposed for polishing.

April 12, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Working on Saturday recutting Ada and Inman meet. Changing the POV to include Inman as well, and Inman’s incredulity at seeing Ada—is that Ada? Something didn’t seem right, though, and I eventually figured out it was the placement of her shooting the gun, which now comes after the “Ada Monroe?” dialogue rather than at the beginning. It seems better because he is also put off by the sound of the gun and a great image following it of Ada the black spike with smoke swirling around her—definitely not the girl he left.

A few days later Minghella and Murch agree that this new version is ready. The film is now 3 hours, 26 minutes: poised on the brink of the 30 percent barrier. In the two months since completing the first assembly, they have cut out 1 hour and 40 minutes. Coincidentally, this rate of cutting, which averages 13 minutes a week, is exactly the same rate at which Murch first assembled dailies as they became available during production.

If the film editor seems fated, like Sisyphus, to keep repeating his or her work endlessly, well, there’s some truth to that. Each round of revisions leaves material in new arrangements, which in turn requires revision. And so it goes, for weeks and months. Get to the end and start over from the beginning. Murch describes this process as a requisite way for finding the film. “The first assembly, like all subsequent versions of the film, is a lens through which we can glimpse the film itself. And in its transubstantiation, it not only gives us a way of seeing, an approach, but the image in the lens eventually becomes that thing itself.” At its extreme, this formulation helps explain why many filmmakers (and other artists) can’t bear seeing their work once it’s finished. When the tinkering comes to an end and the work is no longer pliant in the creator’s hands, it might as well not exist anymore. The process is a reward. And it’s the incentive to keep showing up for work.

Before plunging into the potentially treacherous “open-heart” territory below three-and-a-half hours, Murch and Minghella now decide to take stock by trying two completely new and different structures for the opening. It’s the only way to “see where the film leads us.” That non-linear digital film editing is non-destructive allows for this sort of playful, “Let’s see what it looks like” approach, and it takes only a couple of hours to execute.

The first new structure lets the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg continue unabated with no interruptions. It runs from the opening frames until Inman’s buddy, Oakley, lies dying while Stobrod the fiddler plays a tune for him. Only then does Inman recall earlier days in Cold Mountain. The story flashes back to the chapel being built and Inman meeting Ada for the first time.

A second trial opening uses a purely chronological approach: the film begins in Cold Mountain in 1861 with Ada’s arrival and remains there until Secession is announced and Inman goes off to battle. At that point we see the war itself, beginning at dawn when the Federals lay out barrels of gunpowder for the impending explosion.

Neither restructuring attempt is very satisfying. Yet the doing of it, having new lenses through which to understand the film, reveals insights.

April 29, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Screened the beginning restructure and it seemed all right. A little flat-footed—too Merchant-Ivory and not enough spin. The problem the other way was that there was too much spin. How to find the middle ground.

The two have a revelation: after Inman gets injured, he languishes as a character. It’s still early in the story, and Minghella and Murch decide it would be better if somehow Inman was up and walking back to Cold Mountain sooner. They had already removed the intervening scene of Teague coming to Ada’s with the rabbits. The expanded letter compressed other material in that area, showing Ada struggling after her father’s death. Now it’s a matter of stitching together the surviving scenes; the results inadvertently help advance Ruby’s arrival at Black Cove Farm.

April 30, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Tried new structure for after the letter: staying with Inman through to his going out the window, then go to Ada. Better, I think, because it gets Inman walking earlier, it separates his walking (big moment) from Ruby’s arrival (big moment), which were right on top of each other in the previous version. Shows the strong effect of the words “come back to me” on him, almost biblical healing. Puts a strong section of Inman where we need it, after a long time “away” from him, scenes where he is just a piece of suffering flotsam. We get that good superimposition of Inman running away with Bosie saying, “any man who deserts is a traitor.” Nice dissolve from well to tunnel of trees.

It’s a good day at the Old Chapel for analysis and structure. The two second assistants achieve their own distinction in film wrangling: Walter and Dei conform the first reel (approximately 2,000 feet, or 22 minutes) of 35mm workprint on the edit bench. This is the initial step for having a projectable film version of Cold Mountain to screen in a theater for producers and eventually for preview audiences. It’s the first full-on test of a cut list, or film assembly list, that Sean Cullen generates using FCP and CinemaTools. The 300-odd film splices in this first of nine reels must match, frame for frame, the version of reel one Walter edited on Final Cut Pro. Murch and his assistants squeeze into the tiny room with the Steenbeck editing table to watch and listen. Dei puts the reel on a spindle, threads it up through the viewing prism and Murch sits down at the machine. He runs the film, with the sound coming from a ProTools sound file. It’s in sync. There is much to celebrate. The digital alchemy of getting 24-frame-per-second film footage into 30-frame-per-second video, then back out with 24-frame information for the assistants to use has succeeded. The workflow works. The assistants are now confident that they will be able to get the workprint prepared for its debut screening on time and accurately.

On the other side of the equation, however, the sound situation remains unsettled, especially getting sound from Final Cut Pro into ProTools and back out again for the sound mixes. The sound editors have been working with Walter’s edited soundtracks as Sean exports them, so that part of the journey is accomplished. But it’s a roundabout route that uses another application called Titan. The question bothering Murch is how long the audio conversions will take once he locks the picture and then must turn right around to mix the sound. He will probably make changes to the picture at the last minute, just before beginning the mix. Might a lag in getting up-to-date sound files prepared in time delay the mix? That would mean not being ready in time for the first public screenings.

But an even higher tide is rising just over the horizon.

Since arriving in London from the film sets in Romania at the end of 2002, Minghella and Murch have been left to their own devices, editing on the equivalent of a desert island—screening, thinking, editing, and thinking again. They are free to try things without having to be accountable. Difficult and intense as it’s been to get Cold Mountain reshaped into 3 hours and 20 minutes, these two and a half months in the Old Chapel have been a lush life. The pair’s creative sanctuary is about to be invaded.

May 7, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Ready to show the film to Sydney [Pollack] this afternoon. Put the narration and Ada snow back in the film, followed by Stobrod and Pangle leaving footprints. Keep the “catastrophe”—Sara cut.

I feel as if the wind is at my back today. Thank you.

Tim [Bricknell, Minghella’s assistant] comes in looking sheepish: Harvey [Weinstein] is in town and wants to see as much as he can.

It’s not as if Minghella and Murch forgot they’re making a major studio motion picture. Having creative freedom in seclusion is just what the film needed at this stage. Smart producers know when to let filmmakers do their work uninterrupted. Like kids left home alone to play, they know Mom and Dad are coming back. But it’s still a shock when the door opens and there they are.

It’s right on schedule for Weinstein and Sydney Pollack, Minghella’s Mirage producing partner, to go up to the editing room to see the work-in-progress. The producers have obligations to make sure the enterprise stays on budget, on schedule, and arrives in theaters being the film they wanted to make. Minghella and Murch have done two pictures with Weinstein, so he’s not a stranger. Pollack is himself a fellow filmmaker, and Minghella has co-produced two award-winning films with him (Iris and The Quiet American). Nevertheless, Minghella and Murch are still figuring out Cold Mountain themselves. They may not be “skinless,” as Murch described Minghella at preview screenings, but their flesh is tender as the director and editor make space in the editing room for new onlooker/participants.

May 8, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Screening for HW: ok but not great. It ended well, but he dozed off briefly in the first hour. Felt that the opening structure was wrong and that the film really begins with Ruby’s entrance. When will we not hear that comment? Probably never. As it was on K-19: the film really begins when the reactor melts down.

Why did Ant ask Harvey how short the film should be? Couldn’t he guess? Was it a real question? He prefaced it with “make things difficult for me”—and he did, saying 2.30, which is fifty minutes less than currently.

Harvey wanted to cut out the Rebecca meeting in Veaseytown: “you’ve got your production value, just get in and get out.”

By this point in his career Murch is used to getting comments, or notes, from producers. It comes with the territory of being a film editor. He’s philosophical about it: “I transcribe the notes without prejudice. If they said it, I put it down, make of it what we will. Sometimes there are great ideas in there. Sometimes even a bad note is productive, because it makes you think, what caused them to say that? It’s like referred pain: ‘Doc, my elbow hurts.’ And the doctor says, ‘The problem in your elbow is a pinched nerve in your shoulder.’ So it frequently happens that third parties can see things we can’t. They’re freer in a sense, but at the same time they also don’t know the code as well as we do. So you have to listen carefully to what people say. You can’t take everything on board. But you have to be willing to give every question the benefit of the doubt. One person’s comment might shed light on the other’s.”

Despite their notes and comments, Weinstein and Pollack agree that this assembly, with some changes still under discussion, should have its first theatrical showing at the National Film Theatre in London to an invited audience of Minghella’s film friends and associates, and then in New York for a similar Miramax-invited group. These screenings will be held in mid-June. The picture editing of this version must therefore be completed, or “locked,” the first week of June to allow one week for a temporary sound mix to be done.

For the next four days, Pollack stays in London to go through the entire film scene by scene with Minghella and Murch, discussing and trying out ideas. As Murch says later about Pollack, “I have a lot of time for Sydney. It was intense, but enjoyable. He’s got a very good bedside manner about him.”

May 11, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Working with Sydney: got halfway through reel eight, the raiders arrive at Sara’s.

This is the week that we need the beta of FCP and figure out an exit strategy. Canadian geese honking overhead as I walk home at night.

Within the month, the crucial period begins for sound editing. Murch, Cullen, and the guys at DigitalFilm Tree have had their eyes on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which may allow a developer to create just the custom software they need to move sound files without any clumsy reformatting or file conversions. Although Cullen now has the upgraded Final Cut Pro application, version 4.0, on his workstation, it doesn’t contain such a plug-in. And up to now Apple has not been willing to let Murch and Cullen have a trial version of XML, even though DFT believes it will probably work based on the beta testing they are doing. Murch sent emails about XML to Hudson and Meaney at Apple, and to their boss, Will Stein, and to Steve Jobs. Up to now, there have been no replies.

John Taylor, a Final Cut editor working with DFT at this time, is in email contact with Sean Cullen about the sound transfer issue. Taylor confirms that Brooks Harris, an original designer of the OMF protocol, can create what Sean needs with the XML plug-in, if Apple gives permission: “It becomes more of a question for Ramy on how to make this a go.”

Ramy gets in touch with Brian Meaney at Apple to make a request on Walter and Sean’s behalf: “They will be starting to hand over to sound department in two weeks. Again, this is a critical juncture. Can we authorize Brooks to see what he can discover/do with an XML export from our Beta FCP 4? Brooks is willing to allocate time to do this.”

Meaney does not want to jump the gun on an Apple developers’ conference on June 23 when XML will be officially unveiled. Meaney writes to Ramy: “There is no way to do anything before the conference... I’m afraid the answer is still no, as we do not have the resources to do this. I know that it all sounds very enticing, but really don’t have the ability to do this. I would not recommend waiting or scheduling anything based upon things that are not finished being developed, there are too many unknowns in that process.”

Cullen must move forward and prepare sound files for the sound editors using the clumsy Titan system translation. He and Ramy Katrib decide to make one more attempt to convince Apple to provide the XML plug-in. On May 14 Cullen writes a three-page background email to Ramy with all the information Ramy might need to take another run at Apple. Cullen summarizes the set-up, workflow, and achievements editing Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro. He concludes with a plea that Ramy can pass on to Hudson, Meaney, and their boss, the director of professional applications at Apple, Will Stein: “It takes days to rebuild the sequence in ProTools when it could take less than an hour. If we had some idea about the timeframes involved for XML output: weeks, months or years, we could start making educated guesses about how to proceed. Without any hint of information, it leaves us out in the cold and we had hoped that Apple would provide a little more warmth. We are not asking Apple to take responsibility for any aspect of our show, we are only looking for information. We are not looking for a scapegoat, we are looking for a partner.”

Ramy and Zed later describe the ironic situation DFT faced, since they already had the XML plug-in from Apple on their computers. It was included in the FCP 4 beta test version Apple provided to them. One of DFT’s roles as an Apple development site is to help test just such new software. DFT could have emailed a file with the XML plug-in to London, surreptitiously, in a matter of seconds. “Instead we basically played it above board,” Ramy says later. “We appealed to Apple at the highest level—just short of Steve—saying we would like to have your permission to explore this new functionality with Brooks Harris, who’s world class, renowned.”

Murch keeps his eye on the XML issue and follows the email thread. For him and Cullen the sound transfer problem is the last Final Cut Pro hurdle standing between them and the finish line. Perhaps they will be able to get there without Apple’s help after all? Nevertheless, Murch offers to contact Will Stein.

In emails to Walter, Ramy expresses his anxiety about pushing forward with the XML solution in the face of Apple’s discouragement: “Knowing what Apple has done to those who’ve broken their nondisclosure agreements has me concerned about what they will do to our Tree. They’re in a position to slice our throat regardless of how good-looking we are.”

Meanwhile, a new creative demand arises in the Old Chapel. It’s time that music for Cold Mountain be further developed. Composer Gabriel Yared—like Murch, a veteran of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley—had earlier prepared sketches of musical ideas and given them to Murch for placeholders. This is the best way to work with music while editing movies, since anything composed, orchestrated, and performed too early in the process is unlikely to fit the rhythmic needs of the picture, which is ever-changing. Whole scenes and sequences fall away in the early part of editing so it’s a waste of resources to prepare music too soon. But there comes a point when an assembly is far enough along that scoring and recording can safely begin. Minghella will work closely with Yared on the music over the next six months, spend many long days in Yared’s studio generating completely usable music tracks from samples, and attend the final recording sessions with the London Symphony Orchestra at nearby Abbey Road Studios. Minghella is himself a musician, a singer-songwriter who performed and recorded as a young man before getting involved in theatre and film. When he and Yared get to work, it’s a deep collaboration—more so, perhaps, even than Minghella’s relationship with Murch because of all the facets in filmmaking, music is Minghella’s métier.

May 15, 2003, Murch’s Journal

A beautiful morning. Another backwards-walking person: a girl this time, going up Primrose Hill. Gabriel is hungry for Anthony and can’t write music without Anthony being there. An eclipse of the moon tonight at 3am.

Murch, too, feels strongly about music. He is the one who has to braid the music with his edits, and music choices shape a film’s personality. Moreover, Murch can make magic happen at the intersection of film and music by working a music cue into an existing scene so it fits comfortably. He will mix and match musical moments to support a sequence; or even steal music designated for one scene and find a better home for it elsewhere in the film. As lead sound mixer, Murch will also be handling duties with music volume, EQ, and its blending with other sound elements. Murch knows that writing and recording music, especially large orchestral sounds, takes time.

Murch begins anticipating the first temporary sound mix, which is only a few weeks away. He has kept his ears open to what the sound editors are doing. As a former sound editor himself, it’s second nature. He sends the sound department his revised scenes for sprucing up as soon as they become available. They send him back QuickTime files with rough drafts of their work. He incorporates those files into his Final Cut Pro system and links his version to their new soundtracks. So it goes, back and forth between Murch and the sound department, all aiming at the day when Walter will sit down at the sound mixing console. By that time he will have previewed and many of the key sound elements, including the music, so he can concentrate solely on blending them together into an artistic whole—itself a hugely demanding job.

A full-length motion picture has thousands of sound effects. An axiom for sound editors, as for picture editors, is that their work should be invisible. Moviegoers should only rarely notice a specific sound. Instead, the cumulative effect of the soundtrack should take the audience further inside the movie. Sound editors and sound designers describe their task as “sculpting” an audio environment. And if a particular sound isn’t already in their library of effects, sound editors will either go into the field and record it live, or recreate it using whatever object or tool gets the job done. Murch, like most of his colleagues, does whatever is necessary to capture a particular audio moment, and is wildly inventive at coming up with the proper facsimiles to create it if the real thing does not exist or doesn’t sound quite right for the movies.

One sound cue in the first part of Cold Mountain is a particular challenge. Having just arrived in Cold Mountain, Ada Monroe takes delivery of her much-loved piano. It arrives from Charleston in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, and Ada sits alongside it as the instrument is jostled up the road to Black Cove Farm. She stops the wagon at the Swanger Farm where she sees Inman at work, as she had requested, plowing Swanger’s fields as a favor. As the wagon jerks to a stop, the piano emits a clunking sound of jumbling notes. “That’s a fine-sounding thing,” Sally Swanger says sardonically. Murch is not happy with the sound the piano is making.

May 16, 2003, Murch’s Journal

The piano sound doesn’t work: “that’s a fine sounding thing.” It sounds like somebody is playing the piano badly. What would work best? A chattering kind of sound, with the hammers loose on the strings, dampened a bit. Bolt a paint shaker to the frame of a piano and let it go.

Sound editor Martin Cantwell eventually found a wrecked piano, extracted the harp, and coiled and uncoiled a thick rope across the strings. It gives a proper soft dissonance without sounding as if someone was playing the keys randomly.

Now that the first screening deadline is set, Final Cut Pro starts acting up. In part it’s a logical consequence of having a more evolved show for Final Cut to digest. The assembly now has more of Walter’s color corrections to the picture and his fine-tuned adjustments to the soundtracks. In a May 17 email to Ramy and to Aurora Video Systems, which provided the circuit card to digitize the video, Murch writes, “I am going through a bad patch right now with crashes—at least a couple a day—from trimming with color correction. The amount of color-corrected clips is increasing as we get more ‘presentational’ with the film. So this was always a problem lurking in the background but now it has come into the foreground. Especially foreground when Anthony and Sydney Pollack are in the room with me.”

“The Aurora guys were great,” Sean recalls later. “After a few phone calls and some late hours on their part, they fixed the problem, made it go away completely.” Aurora made a new software build of their driver to help reduce crashing with color-corrected clips when using Final Cut Pro’s trim window. Not only that, but they quickly posted the Cold Mountain fixes on their website for everyone to use.

The following week the other producers, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, arrive at Old Chapel to screen the assembly along with music producer T-Bone Burnett, who, with Minghella, had recorded period music prior to filming. Berger and Yerxa spend the next three days with Murch and Minghella going through the show scene by scene, just as Pollack had ten days earlier: critiquing the film, providing notes, and having Murch try out new things, such as having Oakley’s dying scene after the battle play out in real time, instead of intercutting it with the scene where Ada plays the piano as Inman plows Sally Swanger’s field.

During his second day working with Berger and Yerxa, Murch realizes Ramy has not replied to his last two emails. This is uncharacteristic.

“There was only one time where I exited the scene for a few days,” Ramy recalls later. “And Walter sent me an email saying, ‘Is anything wrong?’ It’s almost like he sensed it. He picked it up. I never said anything, that my dad had passed away. I didn’t make a big deal about it.

“I wrote back that I was with him at his deathbed for the last week,” Ramy continues. “He writes a response which really helped me process it. I got blown away by this. It’s just something I’ll never forget from Walter, of all people. To even take the time. It wasn’t just taking the time, he related it to his experience.”

A week later Zed informs Walter that DFT has not heard back from Will Stein about the XML plug-in request. Murch quickly sends an email to Stein—himself.

Stein relies promptly to Murch the next day, but the news is not good. He takes a firm position, saying the XML “is not as far advanced as the rest of the (FCP 4.0) application... it has known problems at this time that will prevent Brooks from being successful.” Stein goes on to acknowledge Murch is stuck with “an inefficiency... the current work-around process for audio is tedious, but I’m hoping it won’t slow you down too much. This was the one area we were most concerned about when you started Cold Mountain, and the biggest obstacle we were aware of for using FCP in a major film production. The XML interface should allow us to clean up this workflow in the future [probably July], but the timing is unfortunate for your current project. Best regards—Will.”

Murch is not easily discouraged. He sends an email back to Will Stein appealing the decision: “I appreciate the dilemma and understand your position, but I would ask you to please reconsider... We have gotten this far—ten months from the start of shooting—with very little in the way of hand-holding, and I wouldn’t want to stumble unnecessarily at this late stage... Please would you see if there is some way to grant my request.”

But Murch doesn’t stop there. He sends Steve Jobs a long email, restating the Cold Mountain update he provided Will Stein, and informing Jobs of Stein’s decision to turn down the XMl request. “Thank you in advance for any help you might give us,” Murch concludes, “and congratulations on the thorough reworking of FCP in version 4.”

Meanwhile, there’s a film that needs Murch’s attention. Along with music, sound effects, producer’s notes, and preparing to lock the picture for the June screenings, it’s time for Murch to take up a new post-production task: visual effects. Although it’s a period film, Cold Mountain, like most major films, requires a number of computer-generated special effects to either fix problems with the images, or supplement what’s there. Not enough stars are visible in a nighttime shot: add stars. A modern-day sailboat appears, a speck on the horizon in Charleston Bay: remove it digitally. When the Home Guard garrotes Esco Swanger, the fake sword can be seen bending slightly in the last few frames: touch it up digitally. Inman reaches the snowy ridge above Cold Mountain town and in his close-up we ought to see his breath: draw it in. And so on. One of Murch’s jobs is to spot, or call out, each shot that needs a visual effect. Dennis Lowe is the visual effects supervisor; he was on location in Romania offering advice and will produce the final effects, doing many of them himself.

May 30, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Finish going through film with Dennis and there are around 230 effects shots which Dennis thought was in the ballpark for what he expected. A lot of breath and snow shots as befits Cold Mountain.

At the beginning of June, with their first major deadline looming, Murch and Minghella are locking one reel a day. Working out of order, which is typical in film editing, they finally lock the last reel—number one, the battle. Murch considers it, “semi-refined... more work to do, but at least it is all on the table.”

The film is well below three-and-a-half-hours, and Murch is amazed that it still has most of its internal organs, despite the fact that they have cut out more than 30 percent of the original assembly.

June 3, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Total length of film is three hours six mins and two seconds, allowing two minutes for titles at the end of the tree shot, which is a fudge—it is really a minute and a half. But we have cut out just over two hours, which means 40% of the assembly. No main character is gone. Swimmer is hostage to this version, and barely there, and no extra loop down to Black Cove. That is a significant plot moment, but it was arguable that it was a mistake to begin with, since the book treated it as a flashback.

This latest assembly of Cold Mountain is done just in time. Murch has another milestone to attend to: back in California, his daughter Beatrice is getting married.

June 4, 2003, Murch’s Journal

Flying home: Walter came to Primrose Hill Cottage at 11, and we rode to the airport together. He is on this flight, though in economy and I am in business.

Bought Rise and Fall of Third Chimpanzee: by Jared Diamond. He wrote this in 1991 and it is good, and reminds me of Mysteries of Modern Science by Stableford—a remarkable book.

Have neglected this journal for the last three weeks, as the crunch intensified. Also neglected my morning exercises. Start up again. Cleaned up the house and put the dishwasher on—has not been on since Aggie left a month ago. The dishes in there were full of mold.