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Walter Murch - 'Touch of Evil': Ten pages of script in one shot (190/320)

555 views · Published 8 September 2017 · 2:24 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Film & Animation

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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: Anyway, there are these master shots, and there's a shot in the middle of the film. 12 minutes, 10 minutes long, I think the whole... Certainly eight minutes long of a scene in a house that moved from one room to the other, and there were walls in the apartment that had to be removed by the scene crew. When the camera was here, they would remove the wall, and they would put the wall back. Very complicated, and yet not flashy in any way. It's... You don't notice that there has not been an edit in eight minutes. It doesn't call attention to itself the way the other films with long shots might. It was a way, again, of... This was one of the first shots that they did in the film, and it was a way of Orson Welles getting the studio off his back: 'I'm going to cover ten pages of script in a single shot. Watch this.' So it's visually not flashy, but it's flashy in terms of: 'Look how much I can do, how quickly I can do it. I still have my chops as a director.' But later in the film, in the final chase, it's really a masterpiece of classic editing. Parallel cutting beautifully organised so that your eye is exactly where it needs to be at the moment of the cut, so that on the incoming shot there is a focus of attention at that same place that carries you to somewhere else in the frame. And then there's a cut, and you... There's a moment, a place of attention. Then the next shot that takes you further. So it's a beautifully fluid and rhythmic construction of Quinlan and Menzies walking and talking. We know that Menzies has a bug on him and he's recording Orson Welles's Quinlan. He's working for Charlton Heston at this point. Heston is tracking them with a recorder, so it's actually very modern technology, about circa 1957, radio transmission of a hidden microphone.

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