"... the horror, the horror ..."

One of the classic films of our time, Apocalypse Now was revised by Francis Ford Coppola for a theatrical release last, August, and will hit DVD on November 20, 2001, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The new version, called Apocalypse Now Redux, was edited and mixed by Walter Murch, who has worked with Coppola on many projects in a variety of capacities. For the original Apocalypse, Murch was one of four editors on the film, the lead re-recording mixer, and sound designer. He was nominated for best editing and won an Oscar® award for Best Sound.

I originally began to interview Murch in July, 2001 for Avid Technology. At the time we spoke, Murch was working on editing K-19: The Widowmaker, an action film directed by Kathryn Bigelow with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. He was about to leave Toronto, where the shoot had just wrapped, and fly to Los Angeles for the main work of post-production. We discussed how he became involved in the Apocalypse Now Redux project, the process of revising the film, the specifics of how he added new material, and some of the technical work it took to create a quality master.

Murch and Coppola have had a relationship going back to the late sixties, when Murch did sound montage for The Rain People. Murch worked as editor, sound montagist, and sound re-recordist on The Conversation and the Godfather trilogy, and on many non-Coppola films, including American Graffiti, Julia, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Crumb, Ghost, House of Cards, The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Murch is also one of our best theorists on editing and audio for film, which you know if you read his book on editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and his article on audio for film, "Volume: Bed of Sound." Reaching beyond the vast and complicated world of post-production, he co-wrote and directed the feature film Return to Oz in 1985.

Launching the Redux Project

When Apocalypse Now was made in the late seventies, it was considered financially risky to release a film over two and a half hours long. Coppola had invested a huge amount of his own money in the film, and he wanted some hope of getting it back. So he cut scenes from the film that were in the script and shot, bringing in the film at just under two and a half hours.

"All of the cuts that were made back in 1979 were done with Francis' approval," Murch explained. "They were made under some duress, not only because of the financial considerations but also because the film dealt with issues that were, and still are, very tender for the American psyche."

Around five years ago, Coppola and Canal Plus, the French company that originally released the film in Europe, started thinking about adding back one of the major sequences that was left out of the 1979 film and releasing this new version on DVD. They approached Murch to work on it, but at the time he wasn't available.

Moreover, he had misgivings about altering such a classic film. "I just wasn't ready to tackle it; I had worked on the original for two years, and I knew how much work it represented. Also, I had theoretical reservations about going back and changing films. They are what they are when they enter the bloodstream of the culture. Let them be. I felt it was a little like uncorking the bottles of a particular vintage and changing the wine."

In the interim, he reworked Orson Welles' 1958 Touch of Evil, another film that had achieved classic status. Touch of Evil had been taken away from Welles by the studio during post-production. Universal made numerous changes, most notably adding titles to the landmark opening shot and using title music by Henry Mancini instead of an audio montage that Welles had intended. Welles hated the results. In 1998, Murch revised the film, guided by a 58-page memo that Welles wrote immediately after he saw what the studio had done to his film.

The Welles project emboldened Murch to tackle Apocalypse Now, so by the time Murch's and Coppola's schedules lined up in early 2000, Murch was ready. "And once I was back in the world of working on Apocalypse Now," Murch said, "it felt as if 22 years had vanished and I was back in the original mindset." And if Murch wanted to recall something about the original process, he could rely on the advice of three people who had, as he said, "a sort of tribal knowledge of the making of the film": Michael Kirchberger, an assistant editor on the original film and sound mix supervisor for Apocalypse Now Redux (ANR), George Berndt, an associate editor in 1977 and the ADR supervisor for ANR, and of course Francis Coppola.

As noted earlier, Coppola originally intended simply to add one sequence to the film. "But then we thought," Murch said, "if we were going back into the jungle, so to speak, why not open everything up and see if there was anything else to be done?" In the end, the project evolved into a full-scale renovation in which 49 minutes of the original footage was reinstated. Murch added, "Now, as far as Francis is concerned, this is Apocalypse Now. He doesn't deny the film that was made in 1979, but in terms of his own emotional response to it, this film is much more what he originally intended."

Reconstituting the Story

The process for revising Apocalypse Now began with Murch going through the original lined shooting script, identifying the scenes that had not made it to the final cut. For each of these scenes, he would make a list of the relevant material and then assistants Sean Cullen and Murch's son Walter went to Coppola's estate in Napa Valley, where the dailies and work print of the whole film were still in storage. They pulled the relevant daily rolls, and brought them to Murch in San Francisco where they were screened for the first time in over twenty years. Although the image had faded, Murch could still tell what the tonalities were, and he could use the footage to identify focus or other potential image problems.

Murch's assistants also undid all of the splices in lifts (scenes that had been edited but then at a later point "lifted" from the movie) so they could reconstitute the rolls of 35mm dailies to their original state. Murch said, "We did that so we could start from a clean slate, rather than try to deal with footage that was cut together a certain way back in the seventies."

By following the structure of the original script, Murch didn't have to go through all 1.2 million feet of the original footage. "We did not put in everything that was shot for Apocalypse Now, by any stretch of the imagination," he said. "And we didn't rework the audio of the original parts of the film, except for performing some rather tricky re-weaving of the soundtracks between the old version and the new areas."

Murch realizes that the alterations could have thrown off the film's overall balance, but he believes they avoided that problem by re-instituting the original balance of the screenplay. "I don't want to minimize the job that we did," he said, "but we were not trying to stuff 10 pounds of flour in a 5-pound bag, which naturally risks distorting the original premise. We were doing just the opposite, really. We were letting the story loose, letting it be more what it wanted to be in the first place."

As originally intended, the film now includes more politics: the added French plantation scene focuses squarely on France's involvement in Indochina 15 years before America's. There's humor: Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) smiles! At least twice! There's sex and romance: on the way up-river Willard and two members of the boat crew have sexual encounters. While the story and characters are now more complicated, Murch said, "at the same time the dramatic arc of the film is easier to perceive. So even though the film is longer, it seems shorter."