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Walter Murch - Filming THX 1138 (31/320)

1,908 views · Published 13 September 2017 · 2:53 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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Walter Scott Murch (b. 1943) is widely recognised as one of the leading authorities in the field of film editing, as well as one of the few film editors equally active in both picture and sound. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2016]
 
TRANSCRIPT: We moved to San Francisco and I began... I was the sound person for American Zoetrope in the early years. After '[The] Rain People', we did in fact get the go-ahead to make 'THX 1138' and George and I worked together on the screenplay because I had been part of the team that had written the original treatment of it. And that was a great opportunity as somebody writing a screenplay who is ultimately going to be doing the sound for the film. I don't know that that's ever been repeated. It's certainly not common. So somebody writing the screenplay is also somebody who is thinking deeply about the ultimate nature of the sound of the film and 'THX' was a classic example of something where we were putting together a vision of an alien future world based on things that we were photographing now, in selective areas around San Francisco.

How were we going to make it into an alien world? Well, through judicious use of production design. There were no really visual effects in that film, to speak of, but through sound. So that with... with an intensely creative use of sound, we could leverage the film up to the place where we wanted it to be which was a vision of some imagined future. And that process took a good... Probably it took us about a year and a half to shoot the film and do everything. It was a... There were just three of us working on the film: myself and George and Marcia Lucas, George's wife at the time, and we were working out of a little house in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco, and it was exactly the kind of challenges that we as film students could... If we had tried to imagine a possible paradise for us, as film students, rather than the kind of terrifying prospects that were seemingly on offer for us, what happened was as good as it could possibly be which is writing an original screenplay, shooting it for not very much money and then doing all of these ground-breaking, to us, creative things with the photographic approach and also, in my case particularly, with the sound.

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