By Joe Cellini
The epigraph for Charles Frazier’s best-selling 1997 first novel, “Cold Mountain,” is a couplet from the Chinese poet Han-Shan:
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
Writer/director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Frazier’s book covers the long, treacherous journey of Inman (Jude Law), a wounded Confederate soldier, as he tries to return from the war to his love, Ada (Nicole Kidman), on Cold Mountain, where she runs her dead father’s farm with help from a drifter, Ruby (Renee Zellweger).
We talked to Murch about that decision, how it worked out and how it might affect industry practices and expectations going forward.
How did you come to work on “Cold Mountain”?
Anthony Minghella and I struck it off when we worked together on “The English Patient,” at the end of which he began to get interested in “Cold Mountain” as a project. He talked to me about working with him on it, but in the interim he got involved with “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1988), which I also edited. Eventually “Cold Mountain” re-surfaced. He wrote the screenplay in 2001, and we started shooting in July 2002.
Did you read the novel before you read the script?
I did read the book before I read the screenplay, which is my normal procedure. Generally, I try to immerse myself in the world of the book/film as deeply as possible, even reading secondary research material &emdash; things that the author used to help write the book.
Once I start editing, however, I let all of that go, and don’t even refer to the screenplay very often &emdash; I just respond to the story, images and sounds that are on the screen in front of me.
Were you on the set much watching the shooting?
I prefer to stay away. I like to see only what the audience sees. I don’t like to be reminded too much of how it actually got made.
How long did the edit take?
We started editing as soon as they started shooting in mid-July, so 16 months.
You’ve written that you normally edit images and sound separately. Was that the case on “Cold Mountain”?
Well, I create my first assembly without reference to the sound. I view everything with sound, and I take detailed notes about what the sound is like. But when I’m actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it’s a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying. I then refine it as a silent movie, and when I feel that it’s telling itself as a series of images, then I’ll light up all the tracks, and see what all of my cuts have wrought.
In some cases, of course, it’s wrong. But in other cases I discover serendipitous things I never would have come at had I been listening to the sound all along. So I listen to those serendipitous things and, of course, improve the things that are just clearly wrong.
Author Michael Ondaatje writes that every scene for you has a larger pattern at work in it that governs your cut. Is there a pattern guiding your work on “Cold Mountain”?
I remember Al Pacino saying that what guided his performance of Michael in “The Godfather” was the idea of an imaginary spotlight always trying to find him, and that he was always trying to evade it. So I believe no matter what the discipline &emdash; acting, editing, or whatever &emdash; these “meta-strategies” will give your work an extra depth and resonance, if you are lucky enough to find them. And if the material itself is rich enough to support them in the first place.
The audience doesn’t have to be consciously aware of them &emdash; in fact it is better if they aren’t. This seems paradoxical: why expend the effort for something that is not going to be directly perceived? It’s probably something like the effect of harmonic overtones in music. If a violin plays the note “A,” we are consciously aware of the note itself, but there is a whole array of harmonics that comes along with the note, and these overtones are what gives each violin its particular tone. They allow us to distinguish an oboe from a violin, and in fact even to distinguish a Stradivarius from a fiddle.
The “Godfather” script gave Pacino the lines of dialog, but it was his “meta-strategy” &emdash; those harmonic overtones &emdash; that told him exactly how to say them, and with what body-language.
One strategy I worked with on “Cold Mountain” was the idea that Inman was actually killed in the battle, and that it was his ghost &emdash; a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead &emdash; who goes through all these adventures trying to get back home. It’s contradictory, of course, because the Inman we see is a solid physical being who interacts with everyone he meets. But the overtones of that idea are always hovering around the edges of each scene, informing in subtle ways where the cut points are, what reaction shots we used, and so on.
Director Anthony Minghella says that film, like music, builds on restated themes. In “Cold Mountain,” the theme is renewal. How will viewers see or hear this theme in the movie?
There’s no question but that film &emdash; any film &emdash; is a kind of visual music: the alternation and development of individual shots being the equivalent of the alternations and development of phrases in music. Certainly film is more visually musical than theater, which mostly depends on the spoken word. I think this is one of the reasons why film and music work so well &emdash; and so sometimes mysteriously &emdash; with each other.
Anthony began as a musician when he was in his teens and 20s, and I naturally tend to think musically because of my involvement in sound. So “Cold Mountain” might tend to be more “musical” than some other films, in that sense, because Anthony wrote and directed it, and I edited the picture and did the final mix.
Specifically? There’s the visual repetition of reflected images: the film begins and ends with an image seen through water, and there are crucial moments in the story where this reflected imagery comes into play. Then there are the larger thematic alternations and repetitions of humor, anguish, cruelty and love throughout the film. Beyond that, it’s up to the audience to enjoy the discovery.
You’ve commented on how cutting films for absolute poetic compression can bend narrative structure. Were you surprised by the final structure you created for “Cold Mountain”?
I think so. It was clear just from reading the script that there were going to be very interesting challenges in the editing, because for the most part the film has a parallel structure. You’re following the Inman character traveling across a vast landscape trying to get home while Ada is struggling back home with a desperate situation, so we’re alternating back and forth.
Any time you have a parallel structure, the script gives you an indication of how it might go back and forth, but you only really discover that when you actually have the film in your hands. Because the image has a very different weight than the words that describe that image &emdash; sometimes it’s heavier, sometimes lighter &emdash; you have to take that weight into consideration.
So you might wind up staying longer with one person’s story than the script indicated because of the lightness of the image, and on the other hand, you might stay not as long, because of the heaviness of the other story. That certainly was our experience on “English Patient,” which in some ways had a similar forwards and backwards type structure.
The other thing is we shot and printed 600,000 feet of film, which is about 113 hours of material. The film is 2 hours 30 minutes long, so that’s a 30 or 40 to 1 ratio. The first time we put it all together it was over 5 hours long. So you find more inventive ways to compress the story to find out what can be eliminated that not only doesn’t affect the story, but actually, by its elimination, improves things by putting into juxtaposition things that formerly were not. It was a very complex orchestration, shrinking it by half.
How did you decide to cut “Cold Mountain” with Final Cut Pro?
Starting in March of 2002, Sean Cullen, my assistant, and I went over to DigitalFilm Tree, where Ramy Katrib runs a post and design consulting company that specializes in Final Cut Pro. When we told him that we were interested in using Final Cut on “Cold Mountain,” he was very enthusiastic. But we had questions because it hadn’t yet been used on a project of this scale. We brainstormed together over three days developing the “Cold Mountain” workflow.
Your decision to use Final Cut Pro shocked the industry. Were you nervous about the decision?
Well in a kind of a healthy way, I was. Over the last 30 years or so, it seems to be a pattern with me that I will plunge into a new technology, both for the benefits that it can bring me directly, but also because I’m very interested in systems, and how they work within a creative environment. I was one of the first people in the U.S. to use flatbed editing machines in the late 1960s, after having used the upright Moviola. At the time that was seen as a radical departure.
Were there bottom-line differences in working with Final Cut Pro than with other systems you’ve worked with?
At the basic everyday level of working, say when I’m assembling a scene, the differences were trivial. I felt very comfortable with Final Cut within a day or two of working with it.
But one of the significant things about Final Cut is that it’s not a software/hardware hybrid system, it’s a software-only system. That means it almost completely eliminates the natural tendency of editing systems to develop bottlenecks. That started to be an issue with the emergence of flatbeds, which were significantly more expensive than Moviolas. They offered real advantages, but the disadvantage was that you couldn’t simply say, “Let’s get another one.”
But on “Cold Mountain,” we are able to have four Final Cut Pro stations, fully-equipped, for less than we would have had to spend for one Avid station. And to have four stations working on a feature film is a significant improvement over what you usually have, which is two. It’s good to have four burners on a stove when you’re cooking dinner. You can put all of them to use. You can cook a big dinner on two burners, but you have to juggle the pots and pans a lot more.
In addition, we were able to create what you would call satellite stations on four laptops equipped with Final Cut, offload the media for a number of sequences, and continue to work. So if we ever got into a situation where suddenly there was a huge amount of footage, we were able expand out to eight working stations.
Did you use the editing technology to collaborate with Minghella?
Certainly we didn’t look at everything together, but for a number of scenes during the shooting, if there was an issue with something, I would go up to location and take a laptop and show him the cut. And we would explore certain other things with the footage that was in the dailies in the laptop.
We also burned DVDs with DVD Studio Pro. Each day, we would burn and distribute a DVD of the dailies not only to Anthony, on location about three hours away, but to producer Sidney Pollack, 8,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Everyone had a library of everything that had been shot, organized by the date that it was shot, as a point of reference.
You’ve cut a major project on Final Cut Pro. What’s your assessment?
Certainly it’s a great product, and it just got significantly greater with Final Cut 4. We were about as far out on a limb as you could be, 6 months in a country that 14 years ago was solidly part of the Soviet Bloc and is still one of the most hard-pressed of all the Eastern European countries. And there we were in the middle of it all with 4 Power Mac G4 Final Cut stations happily cutting away, with no serious downtime at all on any of the stations. We were really very confident in what we were doing and in the hardware and software supporting it.
Minghella says he starts directing a movie as he writes and writes with the camera on location. Is an even more radical bridging of roles being enabled by digital technology, where anybody with a robust system can be writer, camera man, director and editor?
Well, sure. Just look at somebody like Robert Rodriguez, who does exactly that. But that’s something that’s always been part of the industry. Look at Charlie Chaplin, that’s exactly what he did. It really comes down to where is your interest and focus. Certainly digital technologies facilitate that role expansion, but the lack of digital technologies never stopped anyone who was really interested in pursuing it.
Back in the late 60s, when Francis Coppola, George Lucas and I graduated from film school, we looked at the industry and saw that everything was compartmentalized. We didn’t like it. In film school you are forced by the nature of the school and how they teach to involve yourself in all the aspects of making a film. So we set up American Zoetrope to be a professional version of filmmaking the way we had made films at film school. Things hadn’t been digitized yet, but they were certainly becoming miniaturized, and we were energized by the impact of the integrated circuit and the transistor.
Film school was a change incubator for you, but “film” is viewed by proponents of digital acquisition as an endangered species.
It will drop away, I think. You can already see that happening. It didn’t in the case of “Cold Mountain.” We shot on film for many reasons, one being the fact that at one point we would have something like 13 cameras shooting simultaneously. It wouldn’t have been feasible in Romania to have 13 24p digital cameras shooting simultaneously.
But we did make a digital intermediate on this film. The entire film was scanned digitally at high resolution and a negative has been laser scanned out. So although we have a piece of film that is our negative, it’s actually been through a digital process, and all of the timing and color balance was done digitally.
Are new editors missing anything by learning on non-linear editing systems instead of older systems, or is that older editors waxing nostalgic?
I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which &emdash; in the right proportion &emdash; is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.
The other “missing” advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.
You push the technology, but you still use index cards to create a scene-board for a project. Will those ever be subsumed for you into a software visualization tool?
I actually tried a version of that on my previous film, “K-19.” But I went back to doing it by hand, with index cards, post-it notes and Sharpies because there seems to be something essential about the hand-craftedness of some things. Certainly it is true for me in this case. I love striking the right balance between hi-tech and lo-tech.
http://www.apple.com/pro/film/murch/index2.html