David Koepp on Screenwriting and Walter Murch on Editing

Screenwriter David Koepp and film editor Walter Murch have both carved out legendary careers in film. David Koepp has written or co-written the screenplays for more than thirty films, including many Hollywood blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Spider-Man, Panic Room, Carlito’s Way, and Mission Impossible. He’s directed six films and released one novel. Walter Murch was part of American Zoetrope, the groundbreaking film production company founded in the late 1960s by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. His long collaboration with Coppola earned him his first Oscar nomination for sound editing on the 1974 classic, The Conversation, and an Oscar win for editing on Apocalypse Now. He also collaborated several times with Anthony Minghella, winning two Oscars for his work film editing and sound design for The English Patient. His most recent work is a documentary he co-wrote and edited, Coup 53, about the U.S.- and British effort to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from My Heart Radio. In filmmaking, there are
public roles like the actors and directors, and there are
critical behind the scenes roles filled by people who rarely
become household names. Among them screenwriters who provide dynamic material

(00:22):
to work with and editors who in the end shape
the film. You see. My guests today are two of
the most successful people in the film industry. Screenwriter David
Kepp and film editor Walter Merch have worked with legendary
directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Brian
de Palma, just to name a few. Walter Merch started

(00:46):
his career as a sound editor. He received his first
Oscar nomination for his work on the nineteen seventy four
classic The Conversation. He worked on Apocalypse Now, for which
he won his first Oscar, and he later picked up
two more Academy Awards for the English Patients, becoming the
first person to win for both sound mixing and editing

(01:08):
on the same film. But first, I'm talking to writer
and director David Kepp. He's written some of the biggest
blockbusters in movie history films like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones,
Spider Man, and Mission Impossible. He's also directed several of
the films he's written, including last year's You Should Have

(01:29):
Left with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. David kept says
he started writing because, as a boy, he found a
typewriter in his family's basement in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. He quickly
tapped into the human condition. I thought it would be
great in my room to have this typewriter on a
typewriter stand. And then I think I was probably ten

(01:51):
or eleven, and I thought I should write a story
because I had him. Now I had an office product.
So the next step was writing a story. So I
would write stories about some kid who didn't want to
go to camp, but his horrible parents made him go
to camp, and then something terrible happened to camp, and uh.
Then in high school I'd write stories about some teenager
who was misunderstood by young women and one of the

(02:14):
things that were a little close to the bone. I
just enjoyed it. I mean I had a lot of fun.
I remember in English class in high school, I had
a friend who hated writing, so I said, well, I'll
write your story. So I wrote him a story which
was sort of blagiarized from John and Mary, the Dustin
Hoffman movie, which I'd seen on TV a few nights before.
But his story won a prize, which really made me crazy.

(02:37):
So that was I started. I just I liked that
I didn't need anybody's permission. I could just go upstairs
and start typing. So I'm assuming you were a movie
buff as well while you're starting your writing career. Yeah, absolutely,
I love movies. Were you watching phonos when you were
a kid. Yeah, you watched what was on TV? It
was Channel four, six, twelve and the uh F Channel

(03:00):
eight teens, and so the ones I really remember vividly
were the uh F Channel eight teen ones because they
were the cheapest ones they could get. It was a
lot of Godzilla movies. I remember for years they ran
the Basil Rathbone Nigel Bruce Slock Holmes, and I was
watching one the other day, Terror by Night. There was
one during World War Two which bends with them in

(03:22):
a car in front of a rear projection of the
like the Washington Monument and stuff and talking about how
America is going to come into the war and save
democratic values. It still makes me kind of misty. But
I remember my mother telling me when I was about
ten that I needed to stay up late tonight because
there was a very special movie on TV and I
had to watch it with her, and it was Notorious

(03:43):
Hitchcock movie. And I it's a great movie, and even
at ten, I could appreciate it was a great movie.
But the concept of staying up till midnight on a
school night for a movie, I think kind of fused
this idea that movies were fun and you could get
away with stuff and have a good time. What do
you think it was that your mother wanted you to
stay up the midnight watching movies. She wanted a movie companion.

(04:04):
I think she and my dad were not getting along
very well. I was in the identical situation and my
dad was the movie goer. The very first movie that
I began that to do with my dad was Sorry,
Wrong Number, which to this day I have an annual
appointment with Burt mine Caster and Barbara Stammick and Ed

(04:24):
Bigley Senior. Sorry Wrong Number is one of my favorite
because I love a confined space thriller, and it also
contains the classic barbera stand mclin operator. Operator, I'm a
hopeless invalid, and I just likes the idea of describing
herself as hopeless. I love that actor. What was that

(04:44):
actor who plays the old man? And he says, I
can be reached the Bowery to one thousand, and then
she calls back said, no, we can't take no messages. Yeah, man,
what number am I calling? He says, the city Morgue. Man,
that's not a music queue. Don't know what now? Where
Where did you go to college? I went to several

(05:04):
I started at the University of Minnesota. I was born
in Wisconsin, but I didn't get into my first choice
college and they had the latest application deadline. It wasn't
a great plan. And then I transferred to went to
the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a few years,
which was great. I wanted to be an actor in
those days, and I did tons of theater. But over
the course of those couple of years, I realized writing

(05:26):
was the thing I wanted to do. Had you been
writing while you were in college or you and I
had a playwriting teacher who was directing me in Arsenic
and hold Lace at the time, and I asked him
how I was doing, and he started complimenting my my
play that I was writing, and I said, no, no, no,
I mean in the show. I I know what you mean,
Mr kapp I, and he encouraged me to get out.

(05:48):
He said, if you want to make movies, which I
did by then go west or go east. But we
don't really do them here. So I applied to u
c l A's Film School and got in there for
graduate school. No still undergrad. I stretched it out to
a healthy eleven years. Junior year was three of the
best years of my turn thirty in my film class
and was the focus when you were at UC on screenwriting. Yeah,

(06:10):
but then I knew that's I want to write scripts.
And whether it distinguished moms or whether they distinguished mentors
that come in guest teach or none of them. They
didn't then, I mean you'd get the occasional person coming
and showing you their movie and doing a Q and A.
But in terms of faculty, the guy like best was
a professor named Richard Walter who was there for probably

(06:32):
forty years, and he was very good and very imitatable
and very quotable, but he was also very brass tacks,
which was great because he would interrupt someone midstream when
talking about when they're trying to tell their idea, and
he'd say, do you know what kind of movies I like?
I like films that are not boring films and force

(06:53):
you into move it, move it. Things must happen early
and often, and that's how character revealed. And I like
that when you're there and you're in a prestigious program,
a teacher in a classic that what does he or
she have to offer you? There are two things. First,
you start taking yourself seriously, which if you're from a

(07:15):
small town in Wisconsin, is an important step because everyone
thinks you're, you know, an asshole for wanting to do
what you do or in Midwestern terms, making kind of
a production out of yourself. So to want to go
off and work in Hollywood is absurd. And when you
get to a place where people start to accept that
as the norm and most other people want to do

(07:36):
that too, it's a really important step. But the most
important thing I think I got out of u c
l A. Was relationships with other students, because everyone there
it's a kind of writing where you really need community
because especially because it's going to be so relentlessly collaborative
as your career goes on, if all goes well, And

(07:57):
to be surrounded by other people who want to write,
who want to do what you want to do, and
who are nowhere in their career so you don't have
to worry about jealousy is huge. And you learn from them,
and you see some who are better than you, and
you see ideally some who are worse than you, and
those were really important relationships. Remember Alexander Payne was he
was getting his masters when I was getting my undergrad

(08:18):
But we you know, y'all work on each other's films,
and you just kind of you can spot the winners
out of the gate. You can tell who's good. And
Alexander was always supremely confident and his stuff was really good.
There's a guy named Don Payne who since passed away,
who went on to write a lot of the Simpsons
in a number of films. Don and I were great friends.
But you find those people who will read your work

(08:38):
and be critical without devastating you, and those are essential relationships.
When you finished U c l A. What happens next?
I had an internship working for a guy who was
a distributor's rap in the US, and so if there's
a video distributor in Australia and they wanted horror to idols,

(09:00):
we would buy horror titles like Sorority House, Massacre three
and then get the deliverable elements to them in their
home country. A certain amount of porn, but you know,
a lot of slasher movies and a lot of stuff
like that. So I would go to film markets, which
was eye opening to see what they were like. I
actually went to can when I was twenty four years old.
He paid for it because we were picking up all

(09:22):
these titles for foreign distributors and it was the Can
Film Festival, but we weren't going to the festival. It
was just at the same time we were going to
the can Film Market, which is in the basement of
the Pale. It is truly a horror show. But you know,
I was making money to work in the movie business,
and again I learned an enormous amount because I I

(09:43):
saw a ton of movies and I read a lot
of scripts and I felt like I can do better
than this. And through that I met an Argentine director
named Martin Donovan, not the actor Martin Donovan and he
had an idea for a movie which we wrote together,
and then just sort of a point at ourselves producers
of and went out and raised money by hooker crook

(10:04):
and credit cards and made our first movie, which was
Apartment Zero. And then from there I started working. And
how much money was the budget of the film here
we call it was a million two, of which we'd
raised about five hundred thousand when we started shooting it was.
It was terribly planned, and I was twenty four years old,
so I had no idea what I was doing. You

(10:25):
didn't know how stupid it was what you were doing,
so you just kept going no. And I was also
for some reason we were comfortable lying to people. We
tricked Colin Firth and Hart Bochner into being in the film,
both of whom were you working actors at the time,
and assumed that we would be able to pay our bills.
And then we using that cast and a budget which
we turns out had were in no way able to meet.

(10:48):
We banked it with our c A Columbia home video
with some help from this guy was working for and
UH borrowed against the contract and and then there was
an unscrupulous real estate guy from the Man who Died
and it was really as a classic indie movie story.
But we got our movie done, and then when we

(11:08):
got to post and had no money to finish, I
managed to sell a script which became this movie Bad
Influence that Curtis Hansen directed, and so I just took
everything from that script and put it into finishing Apartment Zero.
And what was it like working with Donovan? What did
you learn in your first experience about that relationship between
the director and the writer. Martin was somebody who took

(11:30):
me seriously I think mentors because he was a mentor figure.
He told me I was good and valued the stuff
I wrote. He was fourteen years older than me, which
helped because I also took him seriously, and he had
directed one indie movie before, very low budget like fifty
sixty I think. And he also had a reverence for

(11:51):
old Hollywood, so we watched everything. I mean, the look
on his face when he would ask me if I
had seen a film like a Place in the Sun
and I'd say no, was one of joy. He wasn't
looking down on me for what a terrible hole in
your film vocabulary. It was what an exciting opportunity. We're
going to rent it now and watch it tonight, and

(12:13):
that kind of unbridled enthusiasm. You can't find any just everywhere,
So that was that was important. He took me very seriously,
and we wrote one or two other scripts together, another
one of which was made. But then I was feeling
more comfortable writing on my own and Altarphew points were
wildly different when you worked with him when the film
was being made. What was your initial experience with someone

(12:35):
shooting your material? Because he was also the writer we
wrote it together. He was more collegial about it. He was,
but it was an unusual experience also because I was
also the producer with him, and even at that age,
was far more realistic about what we had and what
we didn't have. And Martin would do things like come
up with a tango scene in the street and call

(12:57):
all his friends on the way to the set that
day and then one of shoot at that night, and
I would have to say maybe one or two answers
in the background. Absolutely, I think no, there would be
a hundred of them, would be there will be elephants. Yeah,
I remember. I was horribly spoiled. Colin Firth, who was
probably twenty eight at the time and was just getting

(13:18):
some renown in England, came to me on one of
the first nights and there was a line he wanted
to change and he felt that the thing he wanted
to say, but that I had at the beginning. He
thought it would be easier at the end. And what
I mind terribly if if he moved that a line
to the end of the thing, And I said, no,
that'd be great, go ahead, And I sort of assumed

(13:38):
that's how it would always be in Hollywood. A request,
I have a request, I'd like to fill out a
form No. After the Martin Donovic experience, what was next? Well,
this bad influence was the script I had written on
my own. How was Hanson different from Donovan? Curtis was
far more tethered in what can really be accomplished, what

(13:59):
can be done? Martin is a brilliant but impractical dreamer,
and Curtis it had been in Hollywood for a very
long time. So we went and I rewrote the whole
script with him in his garage office, and it was
a tutorial specifically about screenwriting. I felt like I knew
a lot about writing, but about screenwriting for movies that

(14:21):
are about to go get shot. That's where I learned
a ton. For example, there was a scene in Bad
Influence where Roblow comes to be at a bad guy
and we're worried about James Spader and James Spader's brother
played by Christian Clementson, and we're going to Christian Clemenson's
apartment and to make us worried, you know, I had
a scene with Rob Blows two pages long. He was

(14:42):
menacing somebody on the street and then he goes into
the building and Curtis said, I'd rather lose track of him,
and also, I don't have time to shoot that. There's
a fence and it's got vertical spiky bars in it,
and as we panned down, as we tracked down the
line of vertical spiky bars, we see that one of
them is missing and he pushed is in slightly the
implication in the viewer's mind being somebody took the scary

(15:04):
spiky bar out. And it was just brilliant screenwriting. It
used an image to convey menace instead of a two
page dialogue scene, which is again like the old Billy
Wilder person of if you use the visual to show something,
the audience will love you forever because they draw the
conclusion in their own mind and their participants in your
movie instead of just watching screenwriter and director David Kepp.

(15:29):
In the annals of great film partnerships, few have been
as long lasting and celebrated as Martin Scorsese's with his
editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She's worked on every movie of his
since Raging Bull. She told me their collaboration begins when
she watches the daily footage. He wants me to look

(15:49):
at it cold and tell him if it works. So
that is my part of my job. So I tell
him what I think. He tells me what he thinks
them from those incredibly rich where actions of him. I
then begin to create selection. Then I do the first
cut before he comes in, when he's through shooting, and
then from that point on we do all the rest
of the twelve different edits of the movie together, very

(16:14):
twelve different edits of the movie. That's what we prefer
to do. If we can hear more of my conversation
with film a Schoonmaker at Here's the Thing dot Org.
After the break, David kept talks about a time he
disagreed with Steven Spielberg over a scene in the sequel
to Jurassic Park. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's

(16:47):
the thing. David kept as quick to admit he got
very lucky early in his career. A turning point came
when his script for a film he thought would be
a small one caught a big name director as I
Death Becomes Her a script I'd written with Martin that
we had imagined would be another indie movie, maybe a

(17:08):
five million dollar budget this time. But I was starting
to get some notice at the time for bad influence,
and so I managed to sell it to Universal. And
I remember Casey Silver, who was the head of Universal.
Universal thought it was sort of a lark and it
was this strange black comedy that maybe they'd make or
maybe they wouldn't, but it barely cost anything. And I
remember Casey Silver, who was a great supporter of mine,

(17:31):
who was the head of production at the time, called
me one day and said, so I sent your script
to a few directors and I said, oh good, and
he had to go and he said, Bob's a mechis
wants to direct it. And he sounded he sounded disappointed
because Bob at the time for Universal had just finished
the Back to the Future trilogy. No doubt they wanted

(17:52):
something a little more surefire commercial out of him, but
he took an interest in this bizarre black comedy which
then he cast with In an Inch of Its Life
with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis and
made the delightfully bizarre movie he made, and then I
was sort of off and running. Then that got Spielberg's attention,
who wanted to meet and read some of the other

(18:14):
things I've done for Universal, because I was writing for
them at the time and was looking for somebody to
help him with the Jurassic Park. It's a loathsome story
mine from twenty four to nine years old. Really, it's
a miracle I have any friends at all. Sad It's
it's tough to tell because it went so riotously well

(18:34):
for me, and it's just not emblematic of what you
need to do really in the movie business. You gotta
hang around and keep writing and keep writing and keep writing.
I like to think those days came from me later,
because you can't all go like that all the time,
and it didn't. When you're working with the director who's
a big director, and they say to you, I'm gonna
cut the first two pages whatever their edict is, and

(18:56):
then I'm talking about you earlier in your career. You
just differ. What do you use it? And do you
kind of push back? I would push back and I
would invariably lose. I remember one of the first things
I asked Bob was what do we do when we disagree?
And he said, one of we talk about it endlessly,
and one of us will persuade the other through logic,

(19:19):
which sounds good, and I'm absolutely sure that he intended
that to be the case, but that's not the case.
A director will and must do what they see. And
so I think that if you can get in their
head enough to create doubt about something that you think
is a mistake, did you do that? Did you did
you succeed it that? From time to time I would try,

(19:39):
and I would occasionally succeed, but not often. Now it went,
it went very well. I liked our collaboration on death
becomes or our sensibilities were a little different his, perhaps
broader and more visual mind, a bit drier. There's a
scene in which in an emergency room, when Sydney Pollock
comes in and has to tell her she's dead, and

(19:59):
I think that that's the tone I would have liked
for the whole movie. It's a sort of masterpiece of dry,
understated comedy. But Bob had different ideas and was thinking
more in terms of the emerging CG and how to
use it, and that's fine. The only one that really
kind of bothered me and I could never get over.
I felt there was a note that caused our structure
to partially collapse in a later draft to meet Movies

(20:23):
are structure, and that structural idea, to me, was sort
of central to making the whole thing work. But in
general it was great, and I was working with big,
accomplished to Hollywood movie stars at the peak of their
crafts as the writer, at what point did you discover
that you had to process the notes of the star
as well? What movie bad influence? Because Rob Lowe, who

(20:48):
was very hot at the time, was attached to play
the lead, and I thought that was a mistake because
he's a sympathetical lead who we have to imagine it
doesn't do very well with women, and I didn't see
anybody believing that. But there was a sort of seductive
bad guy character, and I felt he'd be much better
off playing Nobody really agreed with me, so I got

(21:09):
robbed to have lunch with me. I remember talking about
Donna Reid and from Here to Eternity and saying, you've
never done this, they won't see it coming. Of course
you should be the bad guy, and he agreed, and
so I managed to turn things around a little bit.
So I saw, also, though, the importance of getting the

(21:30):
star on your side, because they're the ones who have
to do it, and I really have. I really felt
like my high school and college acting was has been
beneficial to me my whole career, because you're the one
who has to do it. You're the one who's doesn't
want to look stupid. You're the one who doesn't want
to look fat in these clothes, and I can't run
in these shoes, and those are really valid points. I've

(21:51):
been frustrated by actor's notes sometimes because because their difficult
or I don't agree with it or whatever. But a
really good actor always comes like their character's lawyer. They're
sort of just passionately different. Well, my client, my client
simply wouldn't do that, and I get it. You're their
advocate for that character, and they must see it from

(22:14):
that character's point of view. You have to juggle everybody's.
But when you come two, the Spielberg experience, and of
course Jurassic Park was a novel. Yeah, it was a
Creton novel. They tried a couple of different versions of
the script. They tried one with Crichton, one with one
or two other writers, and it wasn't working out. But

(22:37):
Stephen had some very clear ideas about how to make
these things real. So he wanted someone to commit and
start over, and you shared credit with Yes. The problem
with Stephen is, you know, when I was thirteen years old,
Jaws came out and I had to ride my bike
to the Lake Theater and Milwaukee to watch it because
my parents wouldn't let me go. So from the years
when I was thirteen till I would say twenty was

(22:59):
Jaws Close and Owners, Raiders of the Lost rk et.
These are your formative, sponge like years. So for a
writer of my generation, it's Spielberg's it. So now to
write for him and to disagree with him and to
offer critical assessments of his ideas was really tough, and
I'm he was used to it, so I remember in

(23:20):
our first couple of meetings he went out of his
way to say things like, you know, well, when I'm
working with a peer like yourself, what I It was
obvious he was trying to tell me to relax. All
I had going for me was my opinions and if
I was going to come in and just pair it
his a certain amount of that. Sure, sure everybody likes it,
but you don't want a newtered collaborator. You want somebody

(23:40):
to come in who's going to have some ideas to
contribute and possibly resist some of yours that might not
be good. How did it go? It went fine. I
think it took me a few movies I've written for
his that he directed, and I think it took me
a few movies to get more into my stride on that.
There was one kind of clarifying moment was in the
second movie, A Lost World. There was a bit where

(24:03):
Jeff Goldman's adopted daughter as a gymnast, and Stephen wanted
a sequence later in the movie where she spins around
some bars and kicks a velociraptor and makes it fall over.
And I never liked it. I just I thought the
idea of the little girl kicking the velociraptor was bad
for her character and bad certainly bad for the velociraptor's character.
So I would just not write it and not write

(24:24):
it and not write it, hoping it would just go away.
You know. One day, the double golden rod pages had
gone in or something. We were shooting, and he said, hey,
I know you forgot again to do the velociraptor thing
on the bars. You gotta write that up because we're
when we shoot that, we're gonna blah blah blah blah blah.
And I said, well, Steven, I don't want to write that.
I don't think it's gonna work. I'm afraid people will

(24:45):
laugh at it. It was as straightforward and negative about
it as I could possibly be. And he paused and
he said, oh, no, you other. No you shouldn't, no, no, no, no,
don't write absolutely, if you feel that strong, you should
not write it when I shoot it. What I'm gonna
do is I'm going to bring her right. And I
realized what you have to get about directors is they

(25:08):
must do what they see. You can't bend them to
your will. But what you've worked with so many great
really legendary directors, And I'm wondering, like, when you work
with Spielberg, Among his many gifts, what's the gift that
impressed you the most about him as a director? There's
as a director and as a storyteller. As a director,

(25:29):
his ability to compose on the fly. I've never ever
seen anything like it. As a storyteller. What I most
appreciate about Stephen is there's a real joyfulness and he
has no contempt for the audience. He is the person
in the audience with popcorn. So in your filmography, from
one legendary director to the next, you go from Crichton's

(25:52):
World of Dinosaurs to Machina was a Puerto Weecan crime
boss in New York. And I'll never forget the getting
a shot of that film, a great opening shot. He's
on the Guerney, the overhead shot that film with Brian Dipoma.
What was the Dipoma experience. Curlyto's Way was the first
of three movies Brian and I would do. And again, yes,

(26:16):
very very hands on, but Brian wants you to do
the writing. He's not there to do it himself, or
he do it himself. He's probably written about half the
movies he's directed, or more so, he is certainly there
for your viewpoint and wants to listen to you and
would like you to be right. What I found Brian
and Stephen both had in common. If there was a

(26:36):
shot they wanted to do or a sequence they wanted
to get to, and they saw it very clearly, and
they told it to me. They were really happy to
let me figure out how on earth is the story're
gonna accommodate this? How is that going to end up
in this movie? And I was happy with that because
then I got to go away and do the work.
You usually don't want someone to try to figure out
your problems for you. Tell me what the problem is,
tell me what the challenges Brian was There's just a

(26:59):
great sense of comradeship. You know you're really in it.
Brian's a lot of laughs. He's a very funny guy, clever.
He's very clever, and he I think probably of all
the directors I've ever worked with, Brian is the one
who listens the most. That doesn't mean he's going to
go along with whatever you have to say, but he's
genuinely listening when you're talking and processing and enjoys the debate,

(27:24):
and we'll tell you if you're wrong or why he
thinks you're wrong. What was the hardest one for you
to write? I did an Indiana Jones movie, and it
was just the weight of expectation of twenty years history,
thirty years of cultural expectation. And you know, everybody who's
seen those movies and loves those movies has a feeling
about what it ought to be. Steven's feelings about what

(27:45):
it ought to be, George lucas Is feelings which are
not always the same Harrison's. It was just it was
a crushing load of things to try to satisfy. It
would have been far easier to write the heartbreaking story
my parents divorce. Let's talk about directing. Whim May you
decide to take the ultimate leap? I think I should
direct the script. Actually I knew that writing is what

(28:08):
I love to do the most, is what gives me
the most satisfaction. Directing is what you do when you
have something that you would like to see the way
it is in your head, and for better or worse,
you have a far better chance of seeing it the
way it is in your head than you do. Working
with even a talented director. That doesn't mean it will
be better, but it means it will be yours, and
the mistakes that are made are yours. And I really

(28:29):
most wanted the chance to edit and to work directly
with actors. As a screenwriter, you're censoring yourself with actors
because you don't want to undercut the director. It's a
sort of sacred relationship they have and you don't want
to get in the middle of that. So you offer
your insights, but you can't say everything you'd like to say.
And when you started directing, that later on. But when

(28:49):
you began, what was your shortcoming? What was the thing
you needed the most work on. I remember a director
friend of mine, who is far too blunt but I
love him for it, occasionally said, when he saw my
first cut of it, he said, you shot your script.
I said, yeah, did you laprt? I love that you

(29:10):
didn't interpret your script. My god, you shot the script.
It's so you He said, no, he said, you didn't
interpret it. You shot it. Literally, everything everywhere of your
script is there. And that's great if that's what was
your intention, but it doesn't have you didn't take the
step away from writing and into directing. It because they're different,

(29:33):
and I didn't know for a couple of movies. Are
you going to direct another movie you're directing against soon?
I hope so I got you know, I got a
lot of writing to do at the moment. I just
finished another book and I have a few things, so
I would like to yet. I am your biggest fan.
I mean the breadth of your work, that the distinctive
styles of films, Carlado mission, all of them. Thanks for
doing this pleasure, David Kepp. His most recent work is

(29:59):
a film he wrote in erected You Should Have Left,
starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. It came out last year.
Walter Merch is a legendary film and sound editor. He
was part of the early days of American Zootrope, the
film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

(30:21):
He is well known for his long partnership with Coppola
and later with the late Anthony Mingela. Walter Merch's most
recent project is a documentary he wrote and edited called
Kup fifty three, about a US and British led effort
to overthrow the Iranian government in nine. I met the

(30:43):
director Tuggy on Morani when I was editing another documentary,
Particle Fever, about the search for the Higgs boson at
the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. We hit it off
because Tuggy graduated in physics from Nottingham University and this
was particle physics. We just kept up a relationship and

(31:04):
I never thought i'd work on it. But I was
editing for Brad Bird on his film Tomorrow End, and
that came to an end, and I was at loose ends,
and my wife and Toggy put their heads together and said,
what Walter needs is to work on a little documentary
for six months. And it sounded good. It still is good,

(31:26):
but the six months has turned into six years. I
watched the film and it seems that almost the beginning
is like a preface. You linger with that guy, that's Taggy,
that's the director, Taggy Armarni, and you kind of stay
with him for quite a bit of time. It's about
half an hour, I mean half an hour in a
film comedy turny, but but but you with him, it's

(31:47):
almost like the film becomes a completely different film and
it takes off into the case if you will, well,
we were just following the structure of Psycho, which does
a similar trick. You know, you're with Marion Crane for
thirty five minutes and then she's gotten rid of dead
and you follow the rest of the story. I'm going

(32:08):
to quote you on that Psycho was the template for
fifty three. If Hitchcock could do it, so could we.
But it evolved organically. The film took off really from
the discovery of this transcript of the m I six agent,
and if we have the transcript, there must be tapes
or there must be a film that goes with it.

(32:30):
And it was the search for those missing ingredients that
we never found, but we found contradictory evidence. Some people
said they don't exist, some people say they do exist.
So the question that was a trail that we followed
for about fifteen minutes actually of searching for them, and
then at that point we said, we've reached the end

(32:52):
of the trail and we're going to ask Rathe Fines
to walk over them. I love that For those who
don't see it, Raith Fine creates this character, this real
this real person, and he inhabits that character. And what
a coup no pun intended for you to have Rafe
Finds part in your film. He's such a wonderful actor.

(33:13):
I met Rafe when we were doing English Patient back
in the middle nineties, and we kept up over the years,
and we came to this fork in the road, which is,
we have the transcript, but how are we going to
turn it into cinema, And well, let's get an actor
to read the lines. Why don't we got Ray Finds

(33:34):
to be the actor, and then why don't we stage
it in the very same room at the Savoy Hotel,
And which all of these other interviews were done in
the mid eighties, which revealed the essence of what had
happened in this coup, which was a British American co production,
so to speak, and which successfully unfortunately deposed this name

(34:00):
democracy in Iran and spoiled for it. Ever since, history
is the wiser for what happened back then. Now to
wind it back in the origin story, you grew up
in New York and when you went to Hopkins, you
were going to go into into a scientific field, correctly,
oceanography and geology. Yeah, my interest in film didn't really

(34:23):
evolve until a couple of years later, and that dovetailed
with a teenage obsession which I've had with tape recording
and the manipulation of that tape, cutting it up into
little pieces is basically a simple kind of filming. So
that was where I kind of returned to my roots

(34:46):
in a sense that the passions that you have when
you're ten or eleven years old or somehow more fundamentally
who you are than before or after, because you know,
you know thing about the world, but you're not yet
infected with peer pressure in quite the same filtering. Yes,

(35:07):
you're less filtered. Yeah, Now when you're there at Hopkins,
you meet Deschanel when you're there, correct, and you guys
decided to head off together. He's a year younger than me,
so yeah. Matthew Robbins and I who I met at Hopkins.
We went off to USC Cinema as a graduate students,
and Caleb phoned us up a couple of months later

(35:29):
and said, how is it out there? And we said
it's great, come on out, and he did. He followed
us and immediately became known as a great cameraman. There
was something about his his knees that allowed him to
move with a camera with a kind of steadicam camera

(35:49):
before Steadicam was with the Human Steadicam. So you're out
there and you're at USC for two years, you're in
the graduate program, and what's the first thing you want
to do when you're out there, Like you're at USC
in school for what you know? That's the lecture that
they give on the first day of school is we
know you all want to become directors, but we're going

(36:10):
to smash that dream immediately. You're going to have to
do everything and it's only at the end that you
will discover where your real talents lie. And even if
you've become a director, having experienced all these other crafts,
you'll know what it takes to be a good sound recorders.

(36:32):
When you finish at USC, what are you saying to yourself?
So I want to go do what I'm married about
to have a kid, and you just try to support job. Yeah,
So when you leave there and you've got to get
a job, what's your first job sweeping floors at Encyclopedia

(36:53):
Britannica Films. And I graduated there from sweeping floors to
editing one of their dotmentary films, and then I was
out of work and you trying to pick up gigs.
It's sort of the gig economy. Can you think a
d R lines? Yeah, I can do that, and then
I got all of it. You'd studied that you at

(37:14):
at USC. Yeah, you had that that background from us.
You know, you had to do everything so exactly whatever
they asked you to do, you would say yes, even
if even if you didn't know how to do it.
You said yes, I can do that, and then you
learn how to do it, and you meet Lucas before Coppola. Correct, well,
I met George. You knew Lucas in school. From school, Yeah,

(37:36):
Francis was a legend. He was four years older than
us at U C. L A. And he'd done this
hat trick, which is he not only got a job
directing a real film, but he handed it in for
his master's thesis. So the fact that somebody from film
school actually directed a film. Who who? Somebody who had

(37:59):
no connection with the film industry. Francis came out of
the blue, and he was an inspiration to us and
George and I at school had been up for a
scholarship at Warner Brothers. George one naturally, because even back
then he was George Lucas and he wanted to be

(38:20):
an animation you know, he founded what later on became Pixar,
which his connection. But he arrived the day they shut
down the animation studio at Warner Brothers. So he just
wandered around and he saw somebody directing a film on
the lot. One person. The guy had a beard, George
had a beard. So beards connect with each other. And

(38:43):
it was Francis understand each other, Yeah, they understand each other,
and it was Francis and Francis said, Okay, George, come
up with a one good idea every day and I'll
shoot it. And George did. This was on the film
Finean's Rainbow, Fineans Ring. So George and Francis bonded and

(39:04):
one thing led to another, and I got a call
from George in early nineteen sixty nine saying could I
cut the sound for the film that Francis had just directed,
The rain People. And that started my relationship with Francis,
which continues to this day. Then, assuming that once you
go to northern California and we'll get into the American

(39:28):
Zoo trope and Francis or a bit there, what was
the impetus state for you to move there? For you
to relocate there. Why did you do that again? George
and Francis they had were both they were both living
up there. Yeah, well they had been. They had shot
the rain People and ended up shooting the last four
weeks in Ogelona, Nebraska, operating out of an old Tom

(39:50):
McCann's shoe store that had gone out of business. And
at the end of it, they thought, wait a minute,
we've been making a motion picture out of an old
shoe store in the Aska. We don't have to be
in Los Angeles. We can be anywhere, you know, youthful idealism,
and that's when Francis decided to set up a studio

(40:11):
in San Francisco, which became trup Trump. What was it
about Coppola? You won an oscar for cutting his film?
What was it about him? You think was his gift?
The quote I love from him is when he was
shooting Cotton Club and the reporter asked him. They were

(40:32):
on location and things weren't going well, and the reporter said, well,
you're the director, why don't you just make it happen?
And he said, you misunderstand what a director of a
film is. The director of a film is the ringmaster.
Of a circus that is inventing itself. So there's this
collaborative aspect to it that Francis holds everything together at

(40:58):
the same time, and it's always veering into chaos, but
chaos can be very productive if you can control it.
I mean. An example of his directorial essence, I think
is something that happened almost on the first day of
shooting The Godfather. And he had made a pact with
himself and with all of the actors that there was

(41:20):
to be very little motion of the hands with the Italians,
that he wanted things to be very sober and business like.
And he was shooting the baker coming to ask for
permission for his daughter to marry the prisoner of war
that was working in the bakery, shooting over Marlon Brando's shoulder,

(41:43):
and okay, take one, and the baker starts giving his
speech and the hands come up and the hands are
doing this incredible dance, and Francis later said his heart
sank because this is exactly what he didn't want. This
is like an alman for the whole film was going
to be things he didn't want. So what do you

(42:03):
do in that case? At the end of the take
he said, cut very good. In fact, the performance was
fine except for the hands. So he said Tom, meaning
Tom Hagen, Robert Duval, Tom, you would have already given
we need to do it again because I made a mistake.
Francis said, we're coming in in the middle of this scene,

(42:25):
and Tom Hagen would have already given you a glass
of brandy because he knows you would be nervous. So
Robert Duval came over and filled up a little glass
of brandy right to the brim, put it in the
actor's hands, and then said, that's okay action. So you know,
I'm gonna remember that the hands are moving, but you

(42:48):
can't spill the brandy. But they're they're not the over
gestural problem that happened with take one, So Francis said,
it's my fault, and so the actor. The performance on
the second take was even better because now the actor
was going to save Francis from francis mistake. So that's
the take that's in the movie. Oh my God. Oscar

(43:11):
winning sound and film editor Walter Merch. If you're enjoying
this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow.
Here's the thing on the I Heart radio app Apple
podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Walter Merch talks about Francis Ford Coppola's controlled chaos style

(43:32):
of filmmaking. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing.
In the early years of American zoo Trope, Walter Merch

(43:56):
was often juggling various projects between founders George Lucas and
Francis Ford Coppola. We were making Tight while Francis was
shooting The Godfather, and when we finished d h X,
we took it to con It played on the kind
of the anti festival there, and then I came back

(44:16):
to work on the sound of the post production sound
of The Godfather, the mix the sound effects in the mix.
Did you kind of have a sense when you were
doing that, because when you're doing the sound, you're given
a final cut of the film to mix the sound
and the film is locked correctly. No, it was. It
was evolving as we were working on it. That's part
of the Zootrope aesthetic is that the sound influences the editing,

(44:39):
and the editing influences the sound. Is that common? Is
that ordinary? No? Certainly not back then, but it's part
of this controlled chaos idea that it's risky, but we
felt it was worth the risk. Well, I want to
get to the controlled chaos, and we talked about apocalypse.
But what I want to also ask you is you're
the first person to win an Oscar for a film

(44:59):
cut on an Avid correct. Yes, and you are one
of the only people to be nominated and or win
Oscars on multiple platforms. I think you've been nominated and
you've won Academy Awards on like four different iterations of
editing equipment. Correct right, Yes, true. Films are edited now

(45:19):
so much quicker than they were forty years ago. Do
you feel that something's lost as a result of that.
I think the amount of time has remained essentially the same.
What's changed is that as you edit it, you can
investigate lots of different ways. But the distance from the
end of shooting too, when the films are in the theaters,

(45:41):
that's pretty constant. That it's about a year from the
beginning of shooting to the film in the theater, whether
you're editing on a digital platform or not. If you
really want to edit fast, if that's the only goal, yes,
you can do it faster now using digital tool, But
that's not the only requirement. We want to make a

(46:03):
good film, and to make a good film, you have
to take the time, and that's the creative time is
the determinament on this Now. I just want to have
a quick glance at Apocalypse when he first contacted you, like,
how did you get involved in that film? How would
you describe because Apocalypse is always presented even from his
wife's documentary, eleanor that it was this chaotic experience. What

(46:27):
is your recollection of the making of Apocalypse? It was it?
Like for you? It was crazy. I was editing the
film Julia in London and I got a call from
Francis can you fly to the Philippines to discuss the
final mix? Sure, so a trip was arranged over the
weekend to fly from London to Manila and then to

(46:49):
the location. And people were coming from all over the world. Tomita,
who was going to do the music for the film,
was coming from Japan, and Richard Begs Richie Marks were
coming from San Francisco. So it was a big meeting
that was planned. But that was right after Marty Sheen
had his heart attack. So we all arrived and everything

(47:12):
was in this wonderful chaos, you know, but we had
the meeting. I mean, this is another example of Francis's determination.
His main actor has had a heart attack and he
is now hosting a meeting to discuss the technicalities of
a mix that won't happen for an ultimately for another
two years. That was where the idea of inventing a

(47:35):
totally new format for this film was born. How long
have they been shooting when you showed up almost a year?
Are they done shooting or they're getting close to being done?
There are three months away from the end of shooting,
which is the normal schedule for film. His three months
there in the final thing that that says it all.

(47:56):
We're in the final three months of shooting, two and
fifty six days of shooting. Had you been looking at
footage prior to that? There was a typhoon, speaking of
chaos in the summer of seventies six. Francis had been
shooting for perhaps four months, and the typhoon destroyed all
the sets, so production was shut down. Francis came back

(48:18):
to San Francisco and we had a meeting. He showed
me what he had shot up until then, and he said,
is there anything missing, And I thought, well, there's a
scene missing I think, which is it would be good
to have a scene where the boat does what it's

(48:39):
supposed to do as it goes up river. This is
a patrol boat that is supposed to stop contraband material
from getting down river. So let's write a scene where
the boat does a police action and something goes bad
and people get killed, and they kill the family in
the boat. Right, And he said, okay, right, that scene
and we'll do it. So I sat down and wrote

(49:01):
the Sampan massacre scene, and the Francis took it back
to the Philippines and you know, obviously changed it and
actors do what actors do. But essentially, the idea of
that scene was something that occurred to me from reading
and looking at the material of things that have been
shot up to that point. Now you cut the film,
you edited the film. Well, I mean, that's another story.

(49:24):
I was hired just to do the sound because when
I joined the film it was August seventy seven, and
the idea was somehow improbably that the film would be
in the theaters by Christmas, And you know what, did
I know, maybe maybe it's possible, but it was pretty
clear to me at that point that this was not

(49:47):
going to happen. And that's when I joined the editorial team.
There were two editors working on the film at that time.
I became the third editor on the film. Now, when
have there been moments where you fought for a cut
and you were right either to lift out or preserve something,

(50:07):
and you fought for a cut and the director you
were wrong and they were right. Before I answered that question,
we were doing eight final a d R with Marlon
Brando on The Godfather and we got about halfway through
the film and Francis said, well, I gotta go now,
so you guys continue. So I was whatever, I was,

(50:30):
twenty six years old, and here I am in the
dark alone with Marlon Brando supposedly directing him in a
d R. And they're changing reels and in the dark,
I hear this voice that says, people say I mumble.
I thought, what am I going to say to Marlon
Brando about that? I said, yes, that's true. People do

(50:51):
say that you mumble. And he said, well they're right.
I do mumble, and I'll tell you why. Because when
we shoot the films, I don't know what these scenes
are going to be in the film or out of
the film. I don't know what order the scenes are
going to be in. So when I'm doing the scenes,
I don't move my lips very much so that if
it comes to it, we can change the dialogue, I

(51:13):
can change my performance and nobody I never thought of that.
Oh my god, in my mind, you couldn't think about
it in terms of what drove the story. It was
all about behavior and and and performance. Correct, Yeah, yeah,
I have to say at that point in the film
there were two editors, and I was editing the first

(51:36):
half of the film up to and including the Sampan massacre,
and Richie Marks was handling everything after that, so I
was an observer to what they were doing, but I
didn't know all of the ins and outs of that.
I mean, the famous should we cut this scene in

(51:56):
that film is the French plantation scene, which was a
huge restored for the Redux, A hugely huge operation, the
very expensive, very detailed set, lots of characters, and as
we were editing the film, the scene shrink and its
strength and its strength until I think in the end,

(52:18):
just before it completely disappeared. There were maybe two or
three shots from it. It was like a kind of
a mist of a scene. It was just some images
and you didn't know what to make of them, and
then finally it disappeared completely. We put it back in
Apocalypse Redus. In fact, putting that scene back was the
whole reason for doing the reducts the French Canal Plus

(52:41):
people wanted a DVD extra because Christian Marcon, the actor
in that scene, had just died and they wanted to
see him. And then as these things happened, one thing
led to another, and it became this huge operation of
rehabilitating an umber of scenes that had been cut out.
But the scene essentially comes too late in the film

(53:07):
for you to know how to take it digest it.
So you directed one film, returned to OZ and it
was a disappointing experience for you from what I read.
What was your feeling about directing again after that experience? No,
I mean after it was finished. You know, there's inevitably
a period of recovery on any film, and then I

(53:28):
tried to get a couple of other projects off the ground.
So you wanted to direct again after? Yeah? But no,
I have four kids, and there's the old joke, you know,
how do you spell directing? W A I T I
n G that when you're directing trying to get something
off the ground, there's a lot of downtime unless you're
completely established. Director Returned to Oz was a financial failure

(53:53):
and critically extremely mixed results. It's a wonderful film, by
the way, it just didn't happen. I directed one film,
and I had the resources to make a wonderful film.
I had a great script, had a great cast. What
I learned about directing was that patients you need to
help see everything. You're You're being asked about everything, and

(54:14):
for me, the patients to stand there all day long,
because when you're an actor, you go back to your
trailer and you go read a magazine. And with the director,
you can't hide in your trailer. You've got to be
there and you've got to answer the questions and you're
in charge, so to speak. And I found I didn't
have the patients to direct other actors to tell the
cinematographer no, no, put the camera here. I wanted here.

(54:37):
And I just didn't have the patients to negotiate with
all those people, you know what I mean. Wonderful quote
from Warren Beauty who also is an actor director, and
he said, the key to acting is to be in
control of being out of control. The key to directing
is to be out of control of being in control.
And that's the thing that drives you crazy when you

(54:59):
go in front of the camera and then go behind
the camera. Is the alternating between you know, searing heat
on the one side and ice on the other. So
you also have to be in the moment, which is
what's you're shooting right now, but you also have to
live in the past, meaning taking to generation everything that

(55:19):
you've shot up to now, and you have to live
in the future, which is, what are we going to
do tomorrow? What are we gonna do next week? So
it's a highly uncomfortable state of being unless you're completely
adapted to it, I think, And that's why you become
a director. When you're a combat age, which is to say,
you know, twenty years old, then it kind of becomes

(55:42):
part of who you are. That wasn't the case where
I was. I was forty when I directed returned to
OZ and in a sense I knew too much. I
was already to set in my ways a certain thing,
and I was I had to learn how to undo
some of those assumptions. I'm assuming you have some thoughts
about how the COVID has affected the way we shoot

(56:04):
and exhibit films as well. Does that trouble you? Well
that that's actually it helped us in a weird way
with KU fifty three because we had a great premiere
of the film at Tell You Rode and London, but
no distributor would pick it up. It's there's some kind
of third rail aspect of the film that makes distributors
I don't want it's still unseld today. You haven't seld

(56:26):
it yet. No, no, So we're distributing it ourselves, and
we're doing it through v o D and we're doing
it in a cooperation with Arthouse Theater. So so so
where would people go to see the film? How would
they see the film? You go to KU fifty three
dot com and say what country are you in? You know,
United States, UK, Ireland or Canada at the present moment,

(56:51):
and then select a theater and you click on that theater.
It's twelve bucks is the ticket? We split fifty fifty
And it's how that's how it works. But without COVID,
it wouldn't have gotten the momentum that it got because
of all the closing of the theaters and thank god,
you know, thank god you benefited from that. Yeah, in

(57:13):
a weird way, we benefited from it. How would you
say the methodology by which you choose which films you're
going to do? How has that changed over the years.
It's three things, and it's always remained the same. It's
the script. I like a script that I can connect with,
but that moves me out of my comfort zone because

(57:34):
I don't want to just keep doing the same thing
over and over again. Are there the resources to pull
this off? And who am I going to be working with?
You know, as an editor, you are in a room
with the director for the better part of a year ultimately,
so it's an intense thing and you have to get along.
So those are the three categories. If all three of

(57:57):
those are in place, then oh it's rare that you
get all three cleanly. You You usually have to make
an educated guess. I've got two out of three. Okay,
I'll make a bet. The film Tomorrow Land I was
working with Brad Bird, and they obviously had the resources
because it was a hundred and eighty million dollar film.

(58:18):
Or something with Disney, But I never got to read
the script before we started shooting. He was working on
the script and finally I was on location in Vancouver
two weeks before shooting, and finally the script arrived. So
you can never tell exactly how things are going to
work out. Is it safe to say that to the
extent that any one of the characters you've mixed that

(58:41):
you are? That character is the little boy who's cutting
the tape together? Is Hackman in the conversation? Is that you? Yeah?
I think that probably would you know. That's ultimately why
Francis asked me to edit the film. He said, it's
a film about a sound man, and you're a sound
man and you've edited films. So no, that was my
first editing job on a feature film because of that

(59:06):
feeling of identity. Listen, I'm a great admirer of yours.
You you've made a lot of great movies. You've made
a lot of great movies, and you've been a part
of movie history. You know, it's really exciting, and thank
you so much for doing this with us, and good
luck with the film. My pleasure. Thank you. Oscar winning
sound and film editor Walter Merch my thanks to him

(59:28):
and to screenwriter director David Kepp. I'm Alec Baldwin and
this is here's the thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Carrie donohue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Thanks for listening. That's if trying to come