Walter Murch Quotes

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

I was involved in the color correction and the digital color correction. In an odd way, you end up making a film many times-the DVD, the archival record of a high-definition master, and so on.

The thing I realized about final cut is it's the power of the best cut. I didn't have final cut on 'Prisoners,' but what you saw is the best cut. 'Sicario' is a directors' cut. 'Arrival' is a directors' cut.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

[ Digital revolution ] only has allowed me to work faster, editing digitally, which I'm doing right now, a film on volcanoes. I can edit almost as fast as I'm thinking, editing with celluloid means always searching for this little reel of film, and number it, and scribble on it with some sort of pens, and gluing it together, and working on a flatbed. It's much, much slower.

The one place I've seen something really come together is in editing. Sometimes you can save pieces in a way that you're really shocked.

The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.

In the old days, you cut out a scene that might've been a really great scene, and no one was ever going to see it ever again. Now, with DVD, you can obviously... there's a lot of possibilities for scenes that are good scenes.

My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.

The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.

Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.

Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.

A scene gets cut a few frames here and there, but there's a cumulative effect to it, and then the music needs to be reworked. It's demanding, but when you see the improved cuts, it's always better.

Four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time.

A disk unbeknownst to the director can go to the producer in another city or in another office and that producer can edit behind the director's back much easier than in the old days. Since these dailies are now put on videotape, more kinds of people have access to dailies.

Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.

I cut 'Deer Hunter' myself.

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.

You first do the assembly cut, which is basically the cut that mirrors the script. You've got to start with that.

With the advanced editing technologies, it's not difficult to play double roles these days. It can be done easily.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'

I can access footage much quicker, yes. But in terms of living with a film and knowing what's right, digital doesn't do that for you.

Anybody with a good smart phone can shoot and edit a film. Distributing it is the hard part.

My first cut is always pretty similar to the final cut.