The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film, by Michael Ondaatje

How a mathematician figured out Hollywood

Michael Ondaatje met Walter Murch on the set of The English Patient. Murch was editing the film. Ondaatje was so struck by his personality and methods that he decided to write a book about him.

Murch has edited some of Hollywood's most famous films, including Apocalypse Now, the Godfather trilogy, American Graffiti and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as well as a score of cult movies. Ondaatje chose to write about Murch through transcripts of five conversations, because Murch speaks in an extraordinary way. He has developed his own way of discussing film, using analogies that range from Beethoven to particle physics, via architecture and painting.

The Conversations is a beautifully put-together object. It looks like a coffee-table book, with its illustrations, photographs, collaged pages of Murch's work-notes and facsimiles of screenplays. However, the images are far surpassed by the fascinating nature of the conversations themselves. Murch and Ondaatje explore the creative processes involved in film-editing, demonstrating that directors are not the sole creative forces.

Murch may not be famous outside Hollywood, but inside the film industry he is something of a hero. Ondaatje has interspersed his conversations with accounts of Murch's importance in Hollywood by such figures as George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

The book also explores the relationship between film-editing and writing, which means Ondaatje offers us a unique insight into his own methods. It becomes clear that Murch's descriptions of his editing offer Ondaatje new ways of understanding his own work as a novelist.

Murch convincingly presents himself as both scientist and artist; he is a physicist and a mathematician of cinema. He suggests that we are in the pre-history of cinema, and that, as in music, we will eventually develop a system of notation for film. Murch sees it as his job to uncover the underlying mathematics of cinema: "For instance: 2.5 – an audience can process only two and a half thematic elements at any moment; 14 – a sustained action scene averages out to 14 new camera positions a minute". His mathematical theories prove brilliantly eccentric reading.

Murch is famous for his innovations in the use of sound. He talks engagingly about sound's importance, and how he developed new ways of imagining sound as metaphorical within a scene. Like Andy Warhol, Murch records everything. He has a library of sounds, which he mixes into films. He even has a collection of winds, including Egyptian desert winds, forest winds and coastal breezes.

Walter Murch has managed to combine technological and engineering know-how with artistic inventiveness. This book, like the editor himself, is a bit of an oddball. It will greatly appeal to buffs as it offers a real insight into how some of our most iconic films were made. It will also appeal to the general reader because Murch's voice, which completely overshadows Ondaatje's, is so peculiarly engaging that it won't matter if you haven't seen his movies or care how they were made. You will still want to read on.