Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314046
with his latest movie, Coup 53, Walter edited the film and premixed the music in Adobe Premiere, working totally in the box. Asked about the new things coming in like rewind and punch-in, Walter remembered that, before that, there would always be a Ping Pong table on the stage so that the mixers had something to do when someone said, "Back to heads." Of course, he made mistakes with some premixes, but would bring in the sound effect on a separate track and mute the one in the premix. On THX 1138, George Lucas was not happy with the sound of the "White Limbo" dialogue, as it was recorded on a sound stage and had too much reverb. He had a primitive gate that would supposedly reduce the reverb, but of course, it didn't work. It obeyed Murch's Second Law of Technology which is: "Works best when you need it least. It doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it worse, smudges the paper in a sense." Recently, Walter was working on a project for William Kentridge about the creative process at his studio in South Africa, and he had too much reverb. He was editing in Premiere and found he had a 'dereverber' that worked incredibly well, thus breaking Murch's Second Law. So, finally, after 51 years, what Walter had hoped for has finally come to pass. All picture editing systems now are really picture editing and mixing systems. Ultimately, there will be one system for it all. Larry asked, "5.1 was new with Apocalypse Now. How do you feel about all the tracks and speakers you can now have with Dolby Atmos?" Walter responded, "The more tracks you have behind the viewer, the more it challenges the viewing experience." Walter then pointed out that if we end up in VR, which has no cuts, then there is no problem. If you have a heavily articulated back channel, it gets weird with an ordinarily edited scene. He cited the bedroom scene in Roma where you are constantly hearing the person behind you who is not on the screen. Personally, it gives Walter the shivers. He says there are some profound philosophical questions about this. There is the primacy of vision which is forward, and the ancillary sense of sound which is 360 degrees spherical. The theater plays some funny mind games on you when you try to bend that reality. In the movie Cold Mountain, there is a party scene where someone is playing the violin and moving around and other people are moving all over. All the dialogue is coming from the center, but the funny thing is you believe it is coming from where that person is situated on the screen. There is something weird going on in our brains that makes us assign location to dialogue based on visual cues. But with music it doesn't, so the violin was panned based on where the musician was in the shot. In something like Birdman where you have a continuous shot, then you can play with spherical sound. The trauma of the arrival of sound. Silent movies were just moving into a novelistic style where unintentional meaning was creeping into the structure of the film in a good way. In the beginning, film was very presentational just like the theater. That matured and was getting into a really interesting place by the late 1920's. And then sound came along and made it presentational again. Sound is the vehicle par excellence of how you get unintentional harmonic meaning into a film. It can be a kind of Greek chorus. Sound exploits this and bypasses the gatekeepers of consciousness, and audiences are affected by that without really knowing that they are being affected. They will ascribe their feelings to something visual. A third of the brain is assigned to visual processing and a 30th to sound, which means sound has no chance to compete. Picture is preeminent. But sound has this incredibly powerful ability to modulate what is being presented frontally by the camera. The more we can find ways to exploit that the better. When you are watching in a theater or over a home system, you are being hypnotized and jumping into the screen like Alice, Through the Looking Glass. You are in that world. Another way to look at it is that the movie is in your head and it is like a dream. Dreams and films suck us in so deeply that it's hard to pull out. So, we have to be very responsible about what we are doing. "With great power comes great responsibility." What an incredibly creative, thoughtful, and courageous individual Walter Murch is. A very insightful and instructive interview this was. –WALTER MURCH " BE BOLD, HAVE AN APPROACH, STICK TO IT, DO IT, AND THAT'S THE MIX. IF YOU GO IN WITH A CONCEPT BEHIND WHAT YOU ARE DOING, IT'S AS STRAIGHTFORWARD AS IT CAN BE."