Walter Murch

2012/2013 Film Mentor

Published in 2011

Universally acknowledged as a master in his field, Walter Murch, 68, is revered for his work as a film editor and sound designer, a term that he coined. “I tend not to visualize but auralize, to think about sound in terms of space,” says Murch who has helped shape many of the iconic films of the last four decades.

The son of a painter, Murch showed interest in “the landscape of sound” from his childhood. He recalls how when his family bought a tape recorder, then a new consumer item, he would “hold the microphone out of the window, recording the sounds of New York”. His inextricable involvement with cinema was later cemented at the influential University of Southern California film school where he met future collaborator, director George Lucas, and other budding film notables.

Since 1969, when he began his career, Murch has worked with, among others, director Francis Ford Coppola on such cinematic milestones as The Godfather I, II and III, and Apocalypse Now, for which he won his first Academy Award in 1979; and with Anthony Minghella on the film The English Patient. He won an unprecedented double Academy Award in 1996 for this production – the only artist ever to win Oscars for both film editing and sound engineering – as well as a BAFTA. In 2003, he edited Minghella’s Cold Mountain. Murch has provided insights into his many technical innovations in his book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001), and in the 2007 documentary, Murch.

Walter Murch is “a genuine Renaissance man”, says prominent author Michael Ondaatje in his book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Ondaatje reveals how Murch’s interests encompass an amazingly broad range of subjects, from architecture to astronomy, music theory, literary translation, science and mathematics. Few in Hollywood can speak so authoritatively on as many topics.