Walter Murch
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Walter Murch (born 1943) is an Academy award winning film editor/sound mixer. He started editing and mixing sound with Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People. From there, he worked on George Lucas's THX-1138, American Graffiti and Coppola's The Godfather before editing picture and mixing sound on Coppola's The Conversation, for which he received an Academy Award nomination in sound. Murch also mixed the sound for Coppola's The Godfather Part II which was released in 1974, the same year as The Conversation. In 1980, he won an Oscar for sound in Apocalypse Now as well as an Academy nomination for picture editing on the same film. While working on Apocalypse Now, Walter coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues helped to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. In 1997, Murch won two more Oscars for his work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient, one in sound and the other in picture editing. He has directed one film, Return to Oz.
He is known to prefer editing while standing up. In 2003, Murch edited the Anthony Minghella film Cold Mountain on Apple's sub-$1000 Final Cut Pro software using off the shelf G4's. This was a leap for such a big budgeted film, where expensive Avid systems are usually the standard non-linear editing (NLE) tool. He received an Academy Award nomination for his editing of "Cold Mountain" and his efforts on the film were documented in Charles Koppelman's 2004 book Behind the Seen.
He has written one book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001), and was the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversations (2002).
External links
- IMDB page (http://imdb.com/name/nm0004555/)
- Walter Murch on Final Cut Pro and Cold Mountain (http://www.apple.com/pro/film/murch/)
- Filmsound.org (http://www.filmsound.org/murch/murch.htm)
- Transom Review (http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200504.review.murch.html)