I recently bought a copy of The Conversations, a collection of interviews Michael Ondaatje conducted with the film editor Walter Murch. Although I haven't had time to properly reread it, I have written up some of the most potent quotes that I found compelling on the first reading. Any new gems I'll add as I go along.
As a writer I have found that the last two years of any book I work on are given over to its editing. I may have spent four or five years writing in the dark, but now I have to discover the shape of the object I have been struggling to make, its true organic shape, that figure in the carpet. I have made two documentary films, and my fictional works tend to follow this sturctural process: shooting or writing everything for a number of months or years, then shaping the content into a new form, till it is almost a newly discovered story. I move things around till they become sharp and clear, till they are in the right location. And it is at this stage that I discover the work's true voice and structure. When I edited my first film documatnary I knew that this was where the art came in. When I watched Walter Much at work during my peripheral involvement with the film of The English Patient, I know that this was the stage of filmmaking that was closest to the act of writing.
Michael Ondaatje, p.xviii
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances of happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Walter Murch, p.9
There are some writers who have a plan before they sit down for those years of writing a book - they have a concept or plot that's very certain. These are good writers, who know exactly how the story will ened. I seem to have none of those asssurances. I'm much more uncertain, insecure almost in the way I'm continually being fed and diverted by the possibilities from the world around me - chance anecdotes overheard, the texture within a rumour - as much as by what my research reveals. For those four or five years, I collect such things, and they fall into a form or a shape or a situation I have established...the final stages of the war in Italy, the preparation for death by a gun-fighter...As I said, I don't have too much of a governor at work. So it's similar to what you say about the first pass at editing a film. When writing I reject nothing. I am much looser about that, much more accepting at that early stage.
I do this till I have a complete but rough first draft, by which time I've essentially discovered the story. I then put on a different hat - and I start eliminating the wrong notes, the repetitions, the trails that go nowhere. I start merging and tightening the work...at this stage three scenes can become one. I take this process as far as I can. There are numerous drafts...Eventually I try it out on my peers and my editor, and I try not to be too defensive about the work. I don't always agree with them, but their responses and notes are an essential stage for me. The only way I can get that democratic, communal sense is to be not so sure about what I have done. But it is also important that I don't show them the work until that stage is reached, until I've taken it as far as I can go. I don't want their influence to come too early in the process after my discovery of the story and the form.
And until the last days I always know that this isn't the final draft. The whole tone can be changed or a problem solved by a small structural shift.
Michael Ondaatje, p.38
Some years ago I was reading an article by Donald Richie, about the difference between Eastern and Western film, or art. He was distinguishing between Eisenstein and, say, Kurosawa, and how they work, and how when Eisenstein edits he builds the scene, while Kurosawa erases and removes. The scene is revealed in a Kurosawa film, whereas in Eisenstein or in the Western tradition you're building a scene. Richie points out that the master shot - the shot that shows us the choreography of the whole scene - is traditionally the essential Western setup, the base, whereas in Japanese film, you can pick a small fragment of the corner of a table and that particular fragment can be used to suggest the whole scene.
Michael Ondaatje, p.107
O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's - 'I write to discover the next room of my fate.' In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.
M: Somebody once asked W.H. Auden, 'Is it true that you can write only what you know?' And he said, 'Yes it is But you don't know what you know until you write it.' Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
p. 128
The analogy I came up with [to describe editing] was with the image of a room illuminated by a bare blue lightbulb. Let's say the intention is to have 'blueness' in this room, so when you walk in you see a bulb casting a blue light. And you think, This is the source of the blue, the source of all blueness. On the other hand, the lightbulb is so intense, so unshaded, that you squint. It's a harsh light. It's blue, but it's so much what it is that you have to shield yourself from it.
There are frequently scenes that are the metaphorical equivalent of that bulb. The scene is making the point so directly that you have to mentally squint. And when you think, What would happen if we got rid of that blue lightbulb, you wonder, But then where will the blue come from? Let's take it out and see. That's always the key: Let's just take it out and find out what happens.
So you unscrew the lightbulb...there are other sources of light in the room. And once that glaring source of light is gone, your eyes open up. The wonderful thing about vision is that when something is too intense, your irises close down to protect against it - as when you look at the sun. But when there is less light, your eye opens up and makes more of the light that is there.
So now that the blue light is gone and the light is more even you begin to see things that are authentically blue on their own account. Whereas before, you attributed their blueness to the bulb. And the blue that remains interacts with other colours in more interesting ways rather than just being an intense blue tonality.
That's probably as far as you can go with the analogy, but it happens often in films. You wind up taking out the very thing that you thought was the sole source of an idea. And when you take it out, you see that not only is the idea still present, it's more organically related to everything else.
In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the one thing that is never talked about is the reason, the real resaon, that Raskolnikov killed the landlady. If Dostoevsky actually explained why he killed her, everything else would be minimised and it would not be as interesting and complex. It reminds me of something my father said when people spoke about his paintings. He related it to a comment Wallace Stevens made: that the poem is not about anything at all, the poem is what it is. It's not there to illustrate a point.
Walter Murch, p.141
M: These are characters [those of the films he's worked on] played in a minor key, I'm interested in the minor key. They come at your sideways, whereas major-key characters come at your directly -
O: As in Spartacus.
M: Yes. I guess I am drawn to stories where you have to get under the skin of rather unlikely and sometimes unlikeable characters.
p. 173
When I was working on The English Patient one thing I did not want to read during research was great desert writers. I intentionally didn't read Thessinger or Doughty or Lawrence. I was mostly reading essays full of data about the surface of the earth at the Royal Georgraphical Society. Articles discussing sand dune formations, the depth of certain wells that could be relied upon during a trek.
Michael Ondaatje, p. 204
After working on my first long book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I needed to turn away from words, from my own brain's vocabulary. So I made a documentary film. I've done that a couple of times - worked in film or theatre or dance - so I would eventually come back to literature with a refreshed sense of language. A new voice.
Michael Ondaatje, p.215
Francis [Coppola] is a practitioner of and is fascinated by the human and technical process of making the film. George [Lucas], in comparison, is somebody who has a complete vision of the film in his head. For him, the problem becomes how to get that vision, practically, onto the screen, in as unadulterated a form as possible.
Both approaches involve a process. But the most important disctinction is whether you allow the process to become an active collaborator in the making of the film, or use it as a machine and try and restrict its contributions. [...] Any variation from it is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. The other approach - Francis's, for example - is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in the filmmmaker's mind when he began.
Walter Murch, pp. 216-217
There's that wonderful line of Rilke's, 'The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.' Recognising that all our achievements are doomed, in one sense - the earth will be consumed by the sun in a billion years or so - but in another sense the purpose of our journey is to go father each time. So you're trying things out in every film you make, with the potential of failure. I think we're always failing, in Rilke's sense - we know there's more potential that we haven't realised. But because we're trying, we develop more and more talent, or muscles, or strategies to improve, each time.
Every film has lessons to teach us - if we receive those lessons in the right way.
Walter Murch, p. 307
And there's always something I remember in a previous book that I was not able to get right. That's what I somehow carry with me into the next work - I'll have to deal with that the next time. There was a moment in In the Skin of a Lion that I couldn't quite get - to do with the death of Ambrose Small and his strange solitude during his last days. Now I can look back and see that much of Almasy's situation in The English Patient came from that 'lack' in the earlier book.
Michael Ondaatje, p.309
Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 11:04AM