Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/637797
31 Q1 2016 / CINEMONTAGE August 1977 — that the film would be finished by December. Although he doubted that such a quick turnaround was possible, even with four picture editors working at the same time, he told Coppola he felt the only hope of making the deadline with a coherent story was to reintroduce narration spoken by Willard. "John Milius' original script was written with narration, and the film was shot with that structure," Murch remembers. "But when I asked about it in August, Francis said, 'No, there won't be any narration. We dropped that idea.'" Taking matters into his own hands — or his own voice — Murch performed and recorded the jettisoned narration (which had not yet been re- written by Michael Herr) and laid it into the film. The results convinced Coppola. "It solved a number of problems that we were going to confront if we didn't have the narrative voice," Murch comments. "Willard is the eyes and ears through which you see this world, and as a largely passive lens; he is a silent passenger on the boat for most of the film. So, if you have a lead actor who doesn't do much and who doesn't say much, then there didn't seem, under the circumstances, to be any other expeditious way than the narrative voice to get into what he was thinking." The idea solved certain problems, but it only did so much to speed up post-production. December 1977 came and went, and the calendar read August 1978 when Murch began focusing on sound (on which work had been done by others concurrently). Coppola hoped for a revolutionary four-corner, or quadraphonic mix, he remembers, with split surrounds to fly the helicopters around the theatre. But Murch held that a center speaker was needed for the dialogue, for a total of five tracks. "And then Francis said, 'I also want people to feel the explosions rather than just hear them,'" he recalls. "So, I said, 'Okay, then we'll need six channels, because we'll need a channel for infrasonic sound that will go down below the threshold of hearing.' We called it six-track. It is now called 5.1 and is the basic standard audio format of the industry." Production dialogue and sound were scarce. "The briefing scene when Willard gets his mission is production dialogue, and once you get to the Kurtz compound, most of that is production dialogue," he remembers. In between, though, "From the time you're on the boat until the boat stops, I'm guessing 98 percent of it is ADR." But Murch embraced the chance to "replace everything." New helicopter sounds were recorded, and existing library munitions sounds that often dated from the Korean War or earlier were not going to cut it. "Francis wanted the sounds to be accurate, in high-fidelity stereo, and when somebody fired an AK-47, it should be an AK-47 with real bullets in it," Murch says. "We were able to get hold of these weapons and ammunition, and went to a remote location where we could shoot and do original recordings with all the right perspectives." Murch points to the battle on the Do Lung Bridge as the "bending point," after which the sound becomes less naturalistic. "It starts out with the normal sounds of a battle going on," he explains. "Then Willard gets off the boat and goes into the trenches and Lance [Sam Bottoms] comes with him, but Lance has dropped acid so, in a sense, we're hearing the world through Lance's ears." Surreal substitutions were made: for example, machine-gun fire became rivet-gun sounds. In the same scene, the soundscape is emptied with the emergence of a soldier called Roach (Herb Rice). "The idea behind Roach is that he echolocates like a bat; he can know exactly where somebody is by his voice or whatever sound he makes," Murch says, and the character uses his ability to pinpoint a Vietnamese soldier. "So, at that point, all of the sounds start to disappear one by one, even though the battle is still going on visually, and you start to hear the world selectively, the way Roach hears it." Viewers, he adds, must be in tune with the film by this point: "We've gotten the audience to a strange place where hopefully they're willing to accept seeing explosions and not hearing them." Such an achievement is no less unlikely than a production rife with struggles, and a post- production chock-full of challenges, resulting in a 153-minute masterpiece. But Murch feels the struggles were, in a sense, fitting. "That resonates with the subject matter," he says, "which is the difficult, difficult, anguished subject matter of American involvement in Vietnam." f Walter Murch mixing Apocalypse Now in 1978.