Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing from My Heart Radio. In filmmaking, there are
Speaker 1: public roles like the actors and directors, and there are
Speaker 1: critical behind the scenes roles filled by people who rarely
Speaker 1: become household names. Among them screenwriters who provide dynamic material
Speaker 1: to work with and editors who in the end shape
Speaker 1: the film. You see. My guests today are two of
Speaker 1: the most successful people in the film industry. Screenwriter David
Speaker 1: Kepp and film editor Walter Merch have worked with legendary
Speaker 1: directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Brian
Speaker 1: de Palma, just to name a few. Walter Merch started
Speaker 1: his career as a sound editor. He received his first
Speaker 1: Oscar nomination for his work on the nineteen seventy four
Speaker 1: classic The Conversation. He worked on Apocalypse Now, for which
Speaker 1: he won his first Oscar, and he later picked up
Speaker 1: two more Academy Awards for the English Patients, becoming the
Speaker 1: first person to win for both sound mixing and editing
Speaker 1: on the same film. But first, I'm talking to writer
Speaker 1: and director David Kepp. He's written some of the biggest
Speaker 1: blockbusters in movie history films like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones,
Speaker 1: Spider Man, and Mission Impossible. He's also directed several of
Speaker 1: the films he's written, including last year's You Should Have
Speaker 1: Left with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. David kept says
Speaker 1: he started writing because, as a boy, he found a
Speaker 1: typewriter in his family's basement in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. He quickly
Speaker 1: tapped into the human condition. I thought it would be
Speaker 1: great in my room to have this typewriter on a
Speaker 1: typewriter stand. And then I think I was probably ten
Speaker 1: or eleven, and I thought I should write a story
Speaker 1: because I had him. Now I had an office product.
Speaker 1: So the next step was writing a story. So I
Speaker 1: would write stories about some kid who didn't want to
Speaker 1: go to camp, but his horrible parents made him go
Speaker 1: to camp, and then something terrible happened to camp, and uh.
Speaker 1: Then in high school I'd write stories about some teenager
Speaker 1: who was misunderstood by young women and one of the
Speaker 1: things that were a little close to the bone. I
Speaker 1: just enjoyed it. I mean I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: I remember in English class in high school, I had
Speaker 1: a friend who hated writing, so I said, well, I'll
Speaker 1: write your story. So I wrote him a story which
Speaker 1: was sort of blagiarized from John and Mary, the Dustin
Speaker 1: Hoffman movie, which I'd seen on TV a few nights before.
Speaker 1: But his story won a prize, which really made me crazy.
Speaker 1: So that was I started. I just I liked that
Speaker 1: I didn't need anybody's permission. I could just go upstairs
Speaker 1: and start typing. So I'm assuming you were a movie
Speaker 1: buff as well while you're starting your writing career. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I love movies. Were you watching phonos when you were
Speaker 1: a kid. Yeah, you watched what was on TV? It
Speaker 1: was Channel four, six, twelve and the uh F Channel
Speaker 1: eight teens, and so the ones I really remember vividly
Speaker 1: were the uh F Channel eight teen ones because they
Speaker 1: were the cheapest ones they could get. It was a
Speaker 1: lot of Godzilla movies. I remember for years they ran
Speaker 1: the Basil Rathbone Nigel Bruce Slock Holmes, and I was
Speaker 1: watching one the other day, Terror by Night. There was
Speaker 1: one during World War Two which bends with them in
Speaker 1: a car in front of a rear projection of the
Speaker 1: like the Washington Monument and stuff and talking about how
Speaker 1: America is going to come into the war and save
Speaker 1: democratic values. It still makes me kind of misty. But
Speaker 1: I remember my mother telling me when I was about
Speaker 1: ten that I needed to stay up late tonight because
Speaker 1: there was a very special movie on TV and I
Speaker 1: had to watch it with her, and it was Notorious
Speaker 1: Hitchcock movie. And I it's a great movie, and even
Speaker 1: at ten, I could appreciate it was a great movie.
Speaker 1: But the concept of staying up till midnight on a
Speaker 1: school night for a movie, I think kind of fused
Speaker 1: this idea that movies were fun and you could get
Speaker 1: away with stuff and have a good time. What do
Speaker 1: you think it was that your mother wanted you to
Speaker 1: stay up the midnight watching movies. She wanted a movie companion.
Speaker 1: I think she and my dad were not getting along
Speaker 1: very well. I was in the identical situation and my
Speaker 1: dad was the movie goer. The very first movie that
Speaker 1: I began that to do with my dad was Sorry,
Speaker 1: Wrong Number, which to this day I have an annual
Speaker 1: appointment with Burt mine Caster and Barbara Stammick and Ed
Speaker 1: Bigley Senior. Sorry Wrong Number is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: because I love a confined space thriller, and it also
Speaker 1: contains the classic barbera stand mclin operator. Operator, I'm a
Speaker 1: hopeless invalid, and I just likes the idea of describing
Speaker 1: herself as hopeless. I love that actor. What was that
Speaker 1: actor who plays the old man? And he says, I
Speaker 1: can be reached the Bowery to one thousand, and then
Speaker 1: she calls back said, no, we can't take no messages. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: what number am I calling? He says, the city Morgue. Man,
Speaker 1: that's not a music queue. Don't know what now? Where
Speaker 1: Where did you go to college? I went to several
Speaker 1: I started at the University of Minnesota. I was born
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, but I didn't get into my first choice
Speaker 1: college and they had the latest application deadline. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a great plan. And then I transferred to went to
Speaker 1: the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a few years,
Speaker 1: which was great. I wanted to be an actor in
Speaker 1: those days, and I did tons of theater. But over
Speaker 1: the course of those couple of years, I realized writing
Speaker 1: was the thing I wanted to do. Had you been
Speaker 1: writing while you were in college or you and I
Speaker 1: had a playwriting teacher who was directing me in Arsenic
Speaker 1: and hold Lace at the time, and I asked him
Speaker 1: how I was doing, and he started complimenting my my
Speaker 1: play that I was writing, and I said, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I mean in the show. I I know what you mean,
Speaker 1: Mr kapp I, and he encouraged me to get out.
Speaker 1: He said, if you want to make movies, which I
Speaker 1: did by then go west or go east. But we
Speaker 1: don't really do them here. So I applied to u
Speaker 1: c l A's Film School and got in there for
Speaker 1: graduate school. No still undergrad. I stretched it out to
Speaker 1: a healthy eleven years. Junior year was three of the
Speaker 1: best years of my turn thirty in my film class
Speaker 1: and was the focus when you were at UC on screenwriting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then I knew that's I want to write scripts.
Speaker 1: And whether it distinguished moms or whether they distinguished mentors
Speaker 1: that come in guest teach or none of them. They
Speaker 1: didn't then, I mean you'd get the occasional person coming
Speaker 1: and showing you their movie and doing a Q and A.
Speaker 1: But in terms of faculty, the guy like best was
Speaker 1: a professor named Richard Walter who was there for probably
Speaker 1: forty years, and he was very good and very imitatable
Speaker 1: and very quotable, but he was also very brass tacks,
Speaker 1: which was great because he would interrupt someone midstream when
Speaker 1: talking about when they're trying to tell their idea, and
Speaker 1: he'd say, do you know what kind of movies I like?
Speaker 1: I like films that are not boring films and force
Speaker 1: you into move it, move it. Things must happen early
Speaker 1: and often, and that's how character revealed. And I like
Speaker 1: that when you're there and you're in a prestigious program,
Speaker 1: a teacher in a classic that what does he or
Speaker 1: she have to offer you? There are two things. First,
Speaker 1: you start taking yourself seriously, which if you're from a
Speaker 1: small town in Wisconsin, is an important step because everyone
Speaker 1: thinks you're, you know, an asshole for wanting to do
Speaker 1: what you do or in Midwestern terms, making kind of
Speaker 1: a production out of yourself. So to want to go
Speaker 1: off and work in Hollywood is absurd. And when you
Speaker 1: get to a place where people start to accept that
Speaker 1: as the norm and most other people want to do
Speaker 1: that too, it's a really important step. But the most
Speaker 1: important thing I think I got out of u c
Speaker 1: l A. Was relationships with other students, because everyone there
Speaker 1: it's a kind of writing where you really need community
Speaker 1: because especially because it's going to be so relentlessly collaborative
Speaker 1: as your career goes on, if all goes well, And
Speaker 1: to be surrounded by other people who want to write,
Speaker 1: who want to do what you want to do, and
Speaker 1: who are nowhere in their career so you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about jealousy is huge. And you learn from them,
Speaker 1: and you see some who are better than you, and
Speaker 1: you see ideally some who are worse than you, and
Speaker 1: those were really important relationships. Remember Alexander Payne was he
Speaker 1: was getting his masters when I was getting my undergrad
Speaker 1: But we you know, y'all work on each other's films,
Speaker 1: and you just kind of you can spot the winners
Speaker 1: out of the gate. You can tell who's good. And
Speaker 1: Alexander was always supremely confident and his stuff was really good.
Speaker 1: There's a guy named Don Payne who since passed away,
Speaker 1: who went on to write a lot of the Simpsons
Speaker 1: in a number of films. Don and I were great friends.
Speaker 1: But you find those people who will read your work
Speaker 1: and be critical without devastating you, and those are essential relationships.
Speaker 1: When you finished U c l A. What happens next?
Speaker 1: I had an internship working for a guy who was
Speaker 1: a distributor's rap in the US, and so if there's
Speaker 1: a video distributor in Australia and they wanted horror to idols,
Speaker 1: we would buy horror titles like Sorority House, Massacre three
Speaker 1: and then get the deliverable elements to them in their
Speaker 1: home country. A certain amount of porn, but you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of slasher movies and a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: like that. So I would go to film markets, which
Speaker 1: was eye opening to see what they were like. I
Speaker 1: actually went to can when I was twenty four years old.
Speaker 1: He paid for it because we were picking up all
Speaker 1: these titles for foreign distributors and it was the Can
Speaker 1: Film Festival, but we weren't going to the festival. It
Speaker 1: was just at the same time we were going to
Speaker 1: the can Film Market, which is in the basement of
Speaker 1: the Pale. It is truly a horror show. But you know,
Speaker 1: I was making money to work in the movie business,
Speaker 1: and again I learned an enormous amount because I I
Speaker 1: saw a ton of movies and I read a lot
Speaker 1: of scripts and I felt like I can do better
Speaker 1: than this. And through that I met an Argentine director
Speaker 1: named Martin Donovan, not the actor Martin Donovan and he
Speaker 1: had an idea for a movie which we wrote together,
Speaker 1: and then just sort of a point at ourselves producers
Speaker 1: of and went out and raised money by hooker crook
Speaker 1: and credit cards and made our first movie, which was
Speaker 1: Apartment Zero. And then from there I started working. And
Speaker 1: how much money was the budget of the film here
Speaker 1: we call it was a million two, of which we'd
Speaker 1: raised about five hundred thousand when we started shooting it was.
Speaker 1: It was terribly planned, and I was twenty four years old,
Speaker 1: so I had no idea what I was doing. You
Speaker 1: didn't know how stupid it was what you were doing,
Speaker 1: so you just kept going no. And I was also
Speaker 1: for some reason we were comfortable lying to people. We
Speaker 1: tricked Colin Firth and Hart Bochner into being in the film,
Speaker 1: both of whom were you working actors at the time,
Speaker 1: and assumed that we would be able to pay our bills.
Speaker 1: And then we using that cast and a budget which
Speaker 1: we turns out had were in no way able to meet.
Speaker 1: We banked it with our c A Columbia home video
Speaker 1: with some help from this guy was working for and
Speaker 1: UH borrowed against the contract and and then there was
Speaker 1: an unscrupulous real estate guy from the Man who Died
Speaker 1: and it was really as a classic indie movie story.
Speaker 1: But we got our movie done, and then when we
Speaker 1: got to post and had no money to finish, I
Speaker 1: managed to sell a script which became this movie Bad
Speaker 1: Influence that Curtis Hansen directed, and so I just took
Speaker 1: everything from that script and put it into finishing Apartment Zero.
Speaker 1: And what was it like working with Donovan? What did
Speaker 1: you learn in your first experience about that relationship between
Speaker 1: the director and the writer. Martin was somebody who took
Speaker 1: me seriously I think mentors because he was a mentor figure.
Speaker 1: He told me I was good and valued the stuff
Speaker 1: I wrote. He was fourteen years older than me, which
Speaker 1: helped because I also took him seriously, and he had
Speaker 1: directed one indie movie before, very low budget like fifty
Speaker 1: sixty I think. And he also had a reverence for
Speaker 1: old Hollywood, so we watched everything. I mean, the look
Speaker 1: on his face when he would ask me if I
Speaker 1: had seen a film like a Place in the Sun
Speaker 1: and I'd say no, was one of joy. He wasn't
Speaker 1: looking down on me for what a terrible hole in
Speaker 1: your film vocabulary. It was what an exciting opportunity. We're
Speaker 1: going to rent it now and watch it tonight, and
Speaker 1: that kind of unbridled enthusiasm. You can't find any just everywhere,
Speaker 1: So that was that was important. He took me very seriously,
Speaker 1: and we wrote one or two other scripts together, another
Speaker 1: one of which was made. But then I was feeling
Speaker 1: more comfortable writing on my own and Altarphew points were
Speaker 1: wildly different when you worked with him when the film
Speaker 1: was being made. What was your initial experience with someone
Speaker 1: shooting your material? Because he was also the writer we
Speaker 1: wrote it together. He was more collegial about it. He was,
Speaker 1: but it was an unusual experience also because I was
Speaker 1: also the producer with him, and even at that age,
Speaker 1: was far more realistic about what we had and what
Speaker 1: we didn't have. And Martin would do things like come
Speaker 1: up with a tango scene in the street and call
Speaker 1: all his friends on the way to the set that
Speaker 1: day and then one of shoot at that night, and
Speaker 1: I would have to say maybe one or two answers
Speaker 1: in the background. Absolutely, I think no, there would be
Speaker 1: a hundred of them, would be there will be elephants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember. I was horribly spoiled. Colin Firth, who was
Speaker 1: probably twenty eight at the time and was just getting
Speaker 1: some renown in England, came to me on one of
Speaker 1: the first nights and there was a line he wanted
Speaker 1: to change and he felt that the thing he wanted
Speaker 1: to say, but that I had at the beginning. He
Speaker 1: thought it would be easier at the end. And what
Speaker 1: I mind terribly if if he moved that a line
Speaker 1: to the end of the thing, And I said, no,
Speaker 1: that'd be great, go ahead, And I sort of assumed
Speaker 1: that's how it would always be in Hollywood. A request,
Speaker 1: I have a request, I'd like to fill out a
Speaker 1: form No. After the Martin Donovic experience, what was next? Well,
Speaker 1: this bad influence was the script I had written on
Speaker 1: my own. How was Hanson different from Donovan? Curtis was
Speaker 1: far more tethered in what can really be accomplished, what
Speaker 1: can be done? Martin is a brilliant but impractical dreamer,
Speaker 1: and Curtis it had been in Hollywood for a very
Speaker 1: long time. So we went and I rewrote the whole
Speaker 1: script with him in his garage office, and it was
Speaker 1: a tutorial specifically about screenwriting. I felt like I knew
Speaker 1: a lot about writing, but about screenwriting for movies that
Speaker 1: are about to go get shot. That's where I learned
Speaker 1: a ton. For example, there was a scene in Bad
Speaker 1: Influence where Roblow comes to be at a bad guy
Speaker 1: and we're worried about James Spader and James Spader's brother
Speaker 1: played by Christian Clementson, and we're going to Christian Clemenson's
Speaker 1: apartment and to make us worried, you know, I had
Speaker 1: a scene with Rob Blows two pages long. He was
Speaker 1: menacing somebody on the street and then he goes into
Speaker 1: the building and Curtis said, I'd rather lose track of him,
Speaker 1: and also, I don't have time to shoot that. There's
Speaker 1: a fence and it's got vertical spiky bars in it,
Speaker 1: and as we panned down, as we tracked down the
Speaker 1: line of vertical spiky bars, we see that one of
Speaker 1: them is missing and he pushed is in slightly the
Speaker 1: implication in the viewer's mind being somebody took the scary
Speaker 1: spiky bar out. And it was just brilliant screenwriting. It
Speaker 1: used an image to convey menace instead of a two
Speaker 1: page dialogue scene, which is again like the old Billy
Speaker 1: Wilder person of if you use the visual to show something,
Speaker 1: the audience will love you forever because they draw the
Speaker 1: conclusion in their own mind and their participants in your
Speaker 1: movie instead of just watching screenwriter and director David Kepp.
Speaker 1: In the annals of great film partnerships, few have been
Speaker 1: as long lasting and celebrated as Martin Scorsese's with his
Speaker 1: editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She's worked on every movie of his
Speaker 1: since Raging Bull. She told me their collaboration begins when
Speaker 1: she watches the daily footage. He wants me to look
Speaker 1: at it cold and tell him if it works. So
Speaker 1: that is my part of my job. So I tell
Speaker 1: him what I think. He tells me what he thinks
Speaker 1: them from those incredibly rich where actions of him. I
Speaker 1: then begin to create selection. Then I do the first
Speaker 1: cut before he comes in, when he's through shooting, and
Speaker 1: then from that point on we do all the rest
Speaker 1: of the twelve different edits of the movie together, very
Speaker 1: twelve different edits of the movie. That's what we prefer
Speaker 1: to do. If we can hear more of my conversation
Speaker 1: with film a Schoonmaker at Here's the Thing dot Org.
Speaker 1: After the break, David kept talks about a time he
Speaker 1: disagreed with Steven Spielberg over a scene in the sequel
Speaker 1: to Jurassic Park. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's
Speaker 1: the thing. David kept as quick to admit he got
Speaker 1: very lucky early in his career. A turning point came
Speaker 1: when his script for a film he thought would be
Speaker 1: a small one caught a big name director as I
Speaker 1: Death Becomes Her a script I'd written with Martin that
Speaker 1: we had imagined would be another indie movie, maybe a
Speaker 1: five million dollar budget this time. But I was starting
Speaker 1: to get some notice at the time for bad influence,
Speaker 1: and so I managed to sell it to Universal. And
Speaker 1: I remember Casey Silver, who was the head of Universal.
Speaker 1: Universal thought it was sort of a lark and it
Speaker 1: was this strange black comedy that maybe they'd make or
Speaker 1: maybe they wouldn't, but it barely cost anything. And I
Speaker 1: remember Casey Silver, who was a great supporter of mine,
Speaker 1: who was the head of production at the time, called
Speaker 1: me one day and said, so I sent your script
Speaker 1: to a few directors and I said, oh good, and
Speaker 1: he had to go and he said, Bob's a mechis
Speaker 1: wants to direct it. And he sounded he sounded disappointed
Speaker 1: because Bob at the time for Universal had just finished
Speaker 1: the Back to the Future trilogy. No doubt they wanted
Speaker 1: something a little more surefire commercial out of him, but
Speaker 1: he took an interest in this bizarre black comedy which
Speaker 1: then he cast with In an Inch of Its Life
Speaker 1: with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis and
Speaker 1: made the delightfully bizarre movie he made, and then I
Speaker 1: was sort of off and running. Then that got Spielberg's attention,
Speaker 1: who wanted to meet and read some of the other
Speaker 1: things I've done for Universal, because I was writing for
Speaker 1: them at the time and was looking for somebody to
Speaker 1: help him with the Jurassic Park. It's a loathsome story
Speaker 1: mine from twenty four to nine years old. Really, it's
Speaker 1: a miracle I have any friends at all. Sad It's
Speaker 1: it's tough to tell because it went so riotously well
Speaker 1: for me, and it's just not emblematic of what you
Speaker 1: need to do really in the movie business. You gotta
Speaker 1: hang around and keep writing and keep writing and keep writing.
Speaker 1: I like to think those days came from me later,
Speaker 1: because you can't all go like that all the time,
Speaker 1: and it didn't. When you're working with the director who's
Speaker 1: a big director, and they say to you, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: cut the first two pages whatever their edict is, and
Speaker 1: then I'm talking about you earlier in your career. You
Speaker 1: just differ. What do you use it? And do you
Speaker 1: kind of push back? I would push back and I
Speaker 1: would invariably lose. I remember one of the first things
Speaker 1: I asked Bob was what do we do when we disagree?
Speaker 1: And he said, one of we talk about it endlessly,
Speaker 1: and one of us will persuade the other through logic,
Speaker 1: which sounds good, and I'm absolutely sure that he intended
Speaker 1: that to be the case, but that's not the case.
Speaker 1: A director will and must do what they see. And
Speaker 1: so I think that if you can get in their
Speaker 1: head enough to create doubt about something that you think
Speaker 1: is a mistake, did you do that? Did you did
Speaker 1: you succeed it that? From time to time I would try,
Speaker 1: and I would occasionally succeed, but not often. Now it went,
Speaker 1: it went very well. I liked our collaboration on death
Speaker 1: becomes or our sensibilities were a little different his, perhaps
Speaker 1: broader and more visual mind, a bit drier. There's a
Speaker 1: scene in which in an emergency room, when Sydney Pollock
Speaker 1: comes in and has to tell her she's dead, and
Speaker 1: I think that that's the tone I would have liked
Speaker 1: for the whole movie. It's a sort of masterpiece of dry,
Speaker 1: understated comedy. But Bob had different ideas and was thinking
Speaker 1: more in terms of the emerging CG and how to
Speaker 1: use it, and that's fine. The only one that really
Speaker 1: kind of bothered me and I could never get over.
Speaker 1: I felt there was a note that caused our structure
Speaker 1: to partially collapse in a later draft to meet Movies
Speaker 1: are structure, and that structural idea, to me, was sort
Speaker 1: of central to making the whole thing work. But in
Speaker 1: general it was great, and I was working with big,
Speaker 1: accomplished to Hollywood movie stars at the peak of their
Speaker 1: crafts as the writer, at what point did you discover
Speaker 1: that you had to process the notes of the star
Speaker 1: as well? What movie bad influence? Because Rob Lowe, who
Speaker 1: was very hot at the time, was attached to play
Speaker 1: the lead, and I thought that was a mistake because
Speaker 1: he's a sympathetical lead who we have to imagine it
Speaker 1: doesn't do very well with women, and I didn't see
Speaker 1: anybody believing that. But there was a sort of seductive
Speaker 1: bad guy character, and I felt he'd be much better
Speaker 1: off playing Nobody really agreed with me, so I got
Speaker 1: robbed to have lunch with me. I remember talking about
Speaker 1: Donna Reid and from Here to Eternity and saying, you've
Speaker 1: never done this, they won't see it coming. Of course
Speaker 1: you should be the bad guy, and he agreed, and
Speaker 1: so I managed to turn things around a little bit.
Speaker 1: So I saw, also, though, the importance of getting the
Speaker 1: star on your side, because they're the ones who have
Speaker 1: to do it, and I really have. I really felt
Speaker 1: like my high school and college acting was has been
Speaker 1: beneficial to me my whole career, because you're the one
Speaker 1: who has to do it. You're the one who's doesn't
Speaker 1: want to look stupid. You're the one who doesn't want
Speaker 1: to look fat in these clothes, and I can't run
Speaker 1: in these shoes, and those are really valid points. I've
Speaker 1: been frustrated by actor's notes sometimes because because their difficult
Speaker 1: or I don't agree with it or whatever. But a
Speaker 1: really good actor always comes like their character's lawyer. They're
Speaker 1: sort of just passionately different. Well, my client, my client
Speaker 1: simply wouldn't do that, and I get it. You're their
Speaker 1: advocate for that character, and they must see it from
Speaker 1: that character's point of view. You have to juggle everybody's.
Speaker 1: But when you come two, the Spielberg experience, and of
Speaker 1: course Jurassic Park was a novel. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: Creton novel. They tried a couple of different versions of
Speaker 1: the script. They tried one with Crichton, one with one
Speaker 1: or two other writers, and it wasn't working out. But
Speaker 1: Stephen had some very clear ideas about how to make
Speaker 1: these things real. So he wanted someone to commit and
Speaker 1: start over, and you shared credit with Yes. The problem
Speaker 1: with Stephen is, you know, when I was thirteen years old,
Speaker 1: Jaws came out and I had to ride my bike
Speaker 1: to the Lake Theater and Milwaukee to watch it because
Speaker 1: my parents wouldn't let me go. So from the years
Speaker 1: when I was thirteen till I would say twenty was
Speaker 1: Jaws Close and Owners, Raiders of the Lost rk et.
Speaker 1: These are your formative, sponge like years. So for a
Speaker 1: writer of my generation, it's Spielberg's it. So now to
Speaker 1: write for him and to disagree with him and to
Speaker 1: offer critical assessments of his ideas was really tough, and
Speaker 1: I'm he was used to it, so I remember in
Speaker 1: our first couple of meetings he went out of his
Speaker 1: way to say things like, you know, well, when I'm
Speaker 1: working with a peer like yourself, what I It was
Speaker 1: obvious he was trying to tell me to relax. All
Speaker 1: I had going for me was my opinions and if
Speaker 1: I was going to come in and just pair it
Speaker 1: his a certain amount of that. Sure, sure everybody likes it,
Speaker 1: but you don't want a newtered collaborator. You want somebody
Speaker 1: to come in who's going to have some ideas to
Speaker 1: contribute and possibly resist some of yours that might not
Speaker 1: be good. How did it go? It went fine. I
Speaker 1: think it took me a few movies I've written for
Speaker 1: his that he directed, and I think it took me
Speaker 1: a few movies to get more into my stride on that.
Speaker 1: There was one kind of clarifying moment was in the
Speaker 1: second movie, A Lost World. There was a bit where
Speaker 1: Jeff Goldman's adopted daughter as a gymnast, and Stephen wanted
Speaker 1: a sequence later in the movie where she spins around
Speaker 1: some bars and kicks a velociraptor and makes it fall over.
Speaker 1: And I never liked it. I just I thought the
Speaker 1: idea of the little girl kicking the velociraptor was bad
Speaker 1: for her character and bad certainly bad for the velociraptor's character.
Speaker 1: So I would just not write it and not write
Speaker 1: it and not write it, hoping it would just go away.
Speaker 1: You know. One day, the double golden rod pages had
Speaker 1: gone in or something. We were shooting, and he said, hey,
Speaker 1: I know you forgot again to do the velociraptor thing
Speaker 1: on the bars. You gotta write that up because we're
Speaker 1: when we shoot that, we're gonna blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, Steven, I don't want to write that.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's gonna work. I'm afraid people will
Speaker 1: laugh at it. It was as straightforward and negative about
Speaker 1: it as I could possibly be. And he paused and
Speaker 1: he said, oh, no, you other. No you shouldn't, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: don't write absolutely, if you feel that strong, you should
Speaker 1: not write it when I shoot it. What I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do is I'm going to bring her right. And I
Speaker 1: realized what you have to get about directors is they
Speaker 1: must do what they see. You can't bend them to
Speaker 1: your will. But what you've worked with so many great
Speaker 1: really legendary directors, And I'm wondering, like, when you work
Speaker 1: with Spielberg, Among his many gifts, what's the gift that
Speaker 1: impressed you the most about him as a director? There's
Speaker 1: as a director and as a storyteller. As a director,
Speaker 1: his ability to compose on the fly. I've never ever
Speaker 1: seen anything like it. As a storyteller. What I most
Speaker 1: appreciate about Stephen is there's a real joyfulness and he
Speaker 1: has no contempt for the audience. He is the person
Speaker 1: in the audience with popcorn. So in your filmography, from
Speaker 1: one legendary director to the next, you go from Crichton's
Speaker 1: World of Dinosaurs to Machina was a Puerto Weecan crime
Speaker 1: boss in New York. And I'll never forget the getting
Speaker 1: a shot of that film, a great opening shot. He's
Speaker 1: on the Guerney, the overhead shot that film with Brian Dipoma.
Speaker 1: What was the Dipoma experience. Curlyto's Way was the first
Speaker 1: of three movies Brian and I would do. And again, yes,
Speaker 1: very very hands on, but Brian wants you to do
Speaker 1: the writing. He's not there to do it himself, or
Speaker 1: he do it himself. He's probably written about half the
Speaker 1: movies he's directed, or more so, he is certainly there
Speaker 1: for your viewpoint and wants to listen to you and
Speaker 1: would like you to be right. What I found Brian
Speaker 1: and Stephen both had in common. If there was a
Speaker 1: shot they wanted to do or a sequence they wanted
Speaker 1: to get to, and they saw it very clearly, and
Speaker 1: they told it to me. They were really happy to
Speaker 1: let me figure out how on earth is the story're
Speaker 1: gonna accommodate this? How is that going to end up
Speaker 1: in this movie? And I was happy with that because
Speaker 1: then I got to go away and do the work.
Speaker 1: You usually don't want someone to try to figure out
Speaker 1: your problems for you. Tell me what the problem is,
Speaker 1: tell me what the challenges Brian was There's just a
Speaker 1: great sense of comradeship. You know you're really in it.
Speaker 1: Brian's a lot of laughs. He's a very funny guy, clever.
Speaker 1: He's very clever, and he I think probably of all
Speaker 1: the directors I've ever worked with, Brian is the one
Speaker 1: who listens the most. That doesn't mean he's going to
Speaker 1: go along with whatever you have to say, but he's
Speaker 1: genuinely listening when you're talking and processing and enjoys the debate,
Speaker 1: and we'll tell you if you're wrong or why he
Speaker 1: thinks you're wrong. What was the hardest one for you
Speaker 1: to write? I did an Indiana Jones movie, and it
Speaker 1: was just the weight of expectation of twenty years history,
Speaker 1: thirty years of cultural expectation. And you know, everybody who's
Speaker 1: seen those movies and loves those movies has a feeling
Speaker 1: about what it ought to be. Steven's feelings about what
Speaker 1: it ought to be, George lucas Is feelings which are
Speaker 1: not always the same Harrison's. It was just it was
Speaker 1: a crushing load of things to try to satisfy. It
Speaker 1: would have been far easier to write the heartbreaking story
Speaker 1: my parents divorce. Let's talk about directing. Whim May you
Speaker 1: decide to take the ultimate leap? I think I should
Speaker 1: direct the script. Actually I knew that writing is what
Speaker 1: I love to do the most, is what gives me
Speaker 1: the most satisfaction. Directing is what you do when you
Speaker 1: have something that you would like to see the way
Speaker 1: it is in your head, and for better or worse,
Speaker 1: you have a far better chance of seeing it the
Speaker 1: way it is in your head than you do. Working
Speaker 1: with even a talented director. That doesn't mean it will
Speaker 1: be better, but it means it will be yours, and
Speaker 1: the mistakes that are made are yours. And I really
Speaker 1: most wanted the chance to edit and to work directly
Speaker 1: with actors. As a screenwriter, you're censoring yourself with actors
Speaker 1: because you don't want to undercut the director. It's a
Speaker 1: sort of sacred relationship they have and you don't want
Speaker 1: to get in the middle of that. So you offer
Speaker 1: your insights, but you can't say everything you'd like to say.
Speaker 1: And when you started directing, that later on. But when
Speaker 1: you began, what was your shortcoming? What was the thing
Speaker 1: you needed the most work on. I remember a director
Speaker 1: friend of mine, who is far too blunt but I
Speaker 1: love him for it, occasionally said, when he saw my
Speaker 1: first cut of it, he said, you shot your script.
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, did you laprt? I love that you
Speaker 1: didn't interpret your script. My god, you shot the script.
Speaker 1: It's so you He said, no, he said, you didn't
Speaker 1: interpret it. You shot it. Literally, everything everywhere of your
Speaker 1: script is there. And that's great if that's what was
Speaker 1: your intention, but it doesn't have you didn't take the
Speaker 1: step away from writing and into directing. It because they're different,
Speaker 1: and I didn't know for a couple of movies. Are
Speaker 1: you going to direct another movie you're directing against soon?
Speaker 1: I hope so I got you know, I got a
Speaker 1: lot of writing to do at the moment. I just
Speaker 1: finished another book and I have a few things, so
Speaker 1: I would like to yet. I am your biggest fan.
Speaker 1: I mean the breadth of your work, that the distinctive
Speaker 1: styles of films, Carlado mission, all of them. Thanks for
Speaker 1: doing this pleasure, David Kepp. His most recent work is
Speaker 1: a film he wrote in erected You Should Have Left,
Speaker 1: starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. It came out last year.
Speaker 1: Walter Merch is a legendary film and sound editor. He
Speaker 1: was part of the early days of American Zootrope, the
Speaker 1: film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
Speaker 1: He is well known for his long partnership with Coppola
Speaker 1: and later with the late Anthony Mingela. Walter Merch's most
Speaker 1: recent project is a documentary he wrote and edited called
Speaker 1: Kup fifty three, about a US and British led effort
Speaker 1: to overthrow the Iranian government in nine. I met the
Speaker 1: director Tuggy on Morani when I was editing another documentary,
Speaker 1: Particle Fever, about the search for the Higgs boson at
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. We hit it off
Speaker 1: because Tuggy graduated in physics from Nottingham University and this
Speaker 1: was particle physics. We just kept up a relationship and
Speaker 1: I never thought i'd work on it. But I was
Speaker 1: editing for Brad Bird on his film Tomorrow End, and
Speaker 1: that came to an end, and I was at loose ends,
Speaker 1: and my wife and Toggy put their heads together and said,
Speaker 1: what Walter needs is to work on a little documentary
Speaker 1: for six months. And it sounded good. It still is good,
Speaker 1: but the six months has turned into six years. I
Speaker 1: watched the film and it seems that almost the beginning
Speaker 1: is like a preface. You linger with that guy, that's Taggy,
Speaker 1: that's the director, Taggy Armarni, and you kind of stay
Speaker 1: with him for quite a bit of time. It's about
Speaker 1: half an hour, I mean half an hour in a
Speaker 1: film comedy turny, but but but you with him, it's
Speaker 1: almost like the film becomes a completely different film and
Speaker 1: it takes off into the case if you will, well,
Speaker 1: we were just following the structure of Psycho, which does
Speaker 1: a similar trick. You know, you're with Marion Crane for
Speaker 1: thirty five minutes and then she's gotten rid of dead
Speaker 1: and you follow the rest of the story. I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote you on that Psycho was the template for
Speaker 1: fifty three. If Hitchcock could do it, so could we.
Speaker 1: But it evolved organically. The film took off really from
Speaker 1: the discovery of this transcript of the m I six agent,
Speaker 1: and if we have the transcript, there must be tapes
Speaker 1: or there must be a film that goes with it.
Speaker 1: And it was the search for those missing ingredients that
Speaker 1: we never found, but we found contradictory evidence. Some people
Speaker 1: said they don't exist, some people say they do exist.
Speaker 1: So the question that was a trail that we followed
Speaker 1: for about fifteen minutes actually of searching for them, and
Speaker 1: then at that point we said, we've reached the end
Speaker 1: of the trail and we're going to ask Rathe Fines
Speaker 1: to walk over them. I love that For those who
Speaker 1: don't see it, Raith Fine creates this character, this real
Speaker 1: this real person, and he inhabits that character. And what
Speaker 1: a coup no pun intended for you to have Rafe
Speaker 1: Finds part in your film. He's such a wonderful actor.
Speaker 1: I met Rafe when we were doing English Patient back
Speaker 1: in the middle nineties, and we kept up over the years,
Speaker 1: and we came to this fork in the road, which is,
Speaker 1: we have the transcript, but how are we going to
Speaker 1: turn it into cinema, And well, let's get an actor
Speaker 1: to read the lines. Why don't we got Ray Finds
Speaker 1: to be the actor, and then why don't we stage
Speaker 1: it in the very same room at the Savoy Hotel,
Speaker 1: And which all of these other interviews were done in
Speaker 1: the mid eighties, which revealed the essence of what had
Speaker 1: happened in this coup, which was a British American co production,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and which successfully unfortunately deposed this name
Speaker 1: democracy in Iran and spoiled for it. Ever since, history
Speaker 1: is the wiser for what happened back then. Now to
Speaker 1: wind it back in the origin story, you grew up
Speaker 1: in New York and when you went to Hopkins, you
Speaker 1: were going to go into into a scientific field, correctly,
Speaker 1: oceanography and geology. Yeah, my interest in film didn't really
Speaker 1: evolve until a couple of years later, and that dovetailed
Speaker 1: with a teenage obsession which I've had with tape recording
Speaker 1: and the manipulation of that tape, cutting it up into
Speaker 1: little pieces is basically a simple kind of filming. So
Speaker 1: that was where I kind of returned to my roots
Speaker 1: in a sense that the passions that you have when
Speaker 1: you're ten or eleven years old or somehow more fundamentally
Speaker 1: who you are than before or after, because you know,
Speaker 1: you know thing about the world, but you're not yet
Speaker 1: infected with peer pressure in quite the same filtering. Yes,
Speaker 1: you're less filtered. Yeah, Now when you're there at Hopkins,
Speaker 1: you meet Deschanel when you're there, correct, and you guys
Speaker 1: decided to head off together. He's a year younger than me,
Speaker 1: so yeah. Matthew Robbins and I who I met at Hopkins.
Speaker 1: We went off to USC Cinema as a graduate students,
Speaker 1: and Caleb phoned us up a couple of months later
Speaker 1: and said, how is it out there? And we said
Speaker 1: it's great, come on out, and he did. He followed
Speaker 1: us and immediately became known as a great cameraman. There
Speaker 1: was something about his his knees that allowed him to
Speaker 1: move with a camera with a kind of steadicam camera
Speaker 1: before Steadicam was with the Human Steadicam. So you're out
Speaker 1: there and you're at USC for two years, you're in
Speaker 1: the graduate program, and what's the first thing you want
Speaker 1: to do when you're out there, Like you're at USC
Speaker 1: in school for what you know? That's the lecture that
Speaker 1: they give on the first day of school is we
Speaker 1: know you all want to become directors, but we're going
Speaker 1: to smash that dream immediately. You're going to have to
Speaker 1: do everything and it's only at the end that you
Speaker 1: will discover where your real talents lie. And even if
Speaker 1: you've become a director, having experienced all these other crafts,
Speaker 1: you'll know what it takes to be a good sound recorders.
Speaker 1: When you finish at USC, what are you saying to yourself?
Speaker 1: So I want to go do what I'm married about
Speaker 1: to have a kid, and you just try to support job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So when you leave there and you've got to get
Speaker 1: a job, what's your first job sweeping floors at Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: Britannica Films. And I graduated there from sweeping floors to
Speaker 1: editing one of their dotmentary films, and then I was
Speaker 1: out of work and you trying to pick up gigs.
Speaker 1: It's sort of the gig economy. Can you think a
Speaker 1: d R lines? Yeah, I can do that, and then
Speaker 1: I got all of it. You'd studied that you at
Speaker 1: at USC. Yeah, you had that that background from us.
Speaker 1: You know, you had to do everything so exactly whatever
Speaker 1: they asked you to do, you would say yes, even
Speaker 1: if even if you didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 1: You said yes, I can do that, and then you
Speaker 1: learn how to do it, and you meet Lucas before Coppola. Correct, well,
Speaker 1: I met George. You knew Lucas in school. From school, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Francis was a legend. He was four years older than
Speaker 1: us at U C. L A. And he'd done this
Speaker 1: hat trick, which is he not only got a job
Speaker 1: directing a real film, but he handed it in for
Speaker 1: his master's thesis. So the fact that somebody from film
Speaker 1: school actually directed a film. Who who? Somebody who had
Speaker 1: no connection with the film industry. Francis came out of
Speaker 1: the blue, and he was an inspiration to us and
Speaker 1: George and I at school had been up for a
Speaker 1: scholarship at Warner Brothers. George one naturally, because even back
Speaker 1: then he was George Lucas and he wanted to be
Speaker 1: an animation you know, he founded what later on became Pixar,
Speaker 1: which his connection. But he arrived the day they shut
Speaker 1: down the animation studio at Warner Brothers. So he just
Speaker 1: wandered around and he saw somebody directing a film on
Speaker 1: the lot. One person. The guy had a beard, George
Speaker 1: had a beard. So beards connect with each other. And
Speaker 1: it was Francis understand each other, Yeah, they understand each other,
Speaker 1: and it was Francis and Francis said, Okay, George, come
Speaker 1: up with a one good idea every day and I'll
Speaker 1: shoot it. And George did. This was on the film
Speaker 1: Finean's Rainbow, Fineans Ring. So George and Francis bonded and
Speaker 1: one thing led to another, and I got a call
Speaker 1: from George in early nineteen sixty nine saying could I
Speaker 1: cut the sound for the film that Francis had just directed,
Speaker 1: The rain People. And that started my relationship with Francis,
Speaker 1: which continues to this day. Then, assuming that once you
Speaker 1: go to northern California and we'll get into the American
Speaker 1: Zoo trope and Francis or a bit there, what was
Speaker 1: the impetus state for you to move there? For you
Speaker 1: to relocate there. Why did you do that again? George
Speaker 1: and Francis they had were both they were both living
Speaker 1: up there. Yeah, well they had been. They had shot
Speaker 1: the rain People and ended up shooting the last four
Speaker 1: weeks in Ogelona, Nebraska, operating out of an old Tom
Speaker 1: McCann's shoe store that had gone out of business. And
Speaker 1: at the end of it, they thought, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: we've been making a motion picture out of an old
Speaker 1: shoe store in the Aska. We don't have to be
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. We can be anywhere, you know, youthful idealism,
Speaker 1: and that's when Francis decided to set up a studio
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, which became trup Trump. What was it
Speaker 1: about Coppola? You won an oscar for cutting his film?
Speaker 1: What was it about him? You think was his gift?
Speaker 1: The quote I love from him is when he was
Speaker 1: shooting Cotton Club and the reporter asked him. They were
Speaker 1: on location and things weren't going well, and the reporter said, well,
Speaker 1: you're the director, why don't you just make it happen?
Speaker 1: And he said, you misunderstand what a director of a
Speaker 1: film is. The director of a film is the ringmaster.
Speaker 1: Of a circus that is inventing itself. So there's this
Speaker 1: collaborative aspect to it that Francis holds everything together at
Speaker 1: the same time, and it's always veering into chaos, but
Speaker 1: chaos can be very productive if you can control it.
Speaker 1: I mean. An example of his directorial essence, I think
Speaker 1: is something that happened almost on the first day of
Speaker 1: shooting The Godfather. And he had made a pact with
Speaker 1: himself and with all of the actors that there was
Speaker 1: to be very little motion of the hands with the Italians,
Speaker 1: that he wanted things to be very sober and business like.
Speaker 1: And he was shooting the baker coming to ask for
Speaker 1: permission for his daughter to marry the prisoner of war
Speaker 1: that was working in the bakery, shooting over Marlon Brando's shoulder,
Speaker 1: and okay, take one, and the baker starts giving his
Speaker 1: speech and the hands come up and the hands are
Speaker 1: doing this incredible dance, and Francis later said his heart
Speaker 1: sank because this is exactly what he didn't want. This
Speaker 1: is like an alman for the whole film was going
Speaker 1: to be things he didn't want. So what do you
Speaker 1: do in that case? At the end of the take
Speaker 1: he said, cut very good. In fact, the performance was
Speaker 1: fine except for the hands. So he said Tom, meaning
Speaker 1: Tom Hagen, Robert Duval, Tom, you would have already given
Speaker 1: we need to do it again because I made a mistake.
Speaker 1: Francis said, we're coming in in the middle of this scene,
Speaker 1: and Tom Hagen would have already given you a glass
Speaker 1: of brandy because he knows you would be nervous. So
Speaker 1: Robert Duval came over and filled up a little glass
Speaker 1: of brandy right to the brim, put it in the
Speaker 1: actor's hands, and then said, that's okay action. So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna remember that the hands are moving, but you
Speaker 1: can't spill the brandy. But they're they're not the over
Speaker 1: gestural problem that happened with take one, So Francis said,
Speaker 1: it's my fault, and so the actor. The performance on
Speaker 1: the second take was even better because now the actor
Speaker 1: was going to save Francis from francis mistake. So that's
Speaker 1: the take that's in the movie. Oh my God. Oscar
Speaker 1: winning sound and film editor Walter Merch. If you're enjoying
Speaker 1: this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing on the I Heart radio app Apple
Speaker 1: podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Speaker 1: Walter Merch talks about Francis Ford Coppola's controlled chaos style
Speaker 1: of filmmaking. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing.
Speaker 1: In the early years of American zoo Trope, Walter Merch
Speaker 1: was often juggling various projects between founders George Lucas and
Speaker 1: Francis Ford Coppola. We were making Tight while Francis was
Speaker 1: shooting The Godfather, and when we finished d h X,
Speaker 1: we took it to con It played on the kind
Speaker 1: of the anti festival there, and then I came back
Speaker 1: to work on the sound of the post production sound
Speaker 1: of The Godfather, the mix the sound effects in the mix.
Speaker 1: Did you kind of have a sense when you were
Speaker 1: doing that, because when you're doing the sound, you're given
Speaker 1: a final cut of the film to mix the sound
Speaker 1: and the film is locked correctly. No, it was. It
Speaker 1: was evolving as we were working on it. That's part
Speaker 1: of the Zootrope aesthetic is that the sound influences the editing,
Speaker 1: and the editing influences the sound. Is that common? Is
Speaker 1: that ordinary? No? Certainly not back then, but it's part
Speaker 1: of this controlled chaos idea that it's risky, but we
Speaker 1: felt it was worth the risk. Well, I want to
Speaker 1: get to the controlled chaos, and we talked about apocalypse.
Speaker 1: But what I want to also ask you is you're
Speaker 1: the first person to win an Oscar for a film
Speaker 1: cut on an Avid correct. Yes, and you are one
Speaker 1: of the only people to be nominated and or win
Speaker 1: Oscars on multiple platforms. I think you've been nominated and
Speaker 1: you've won Academy Awards on like four different iterations of
Speaker 1: editing equipment. Correct right, Yes, true. Films are edited now
Speaker 1: so much quicker than they were forty years ago. Do
Speaker 1: you feel that something's lost as a result of that.
Speaker 1: I think the amount of time has remained essentially the same.
Speaker 1: What's changed is that as you edit it, you can
Speaker 1: investigate lots of different ways. But the distance from the
Speaker 1: end of shooting too, when the films are in the theaters,
Speaker 1: that's pretty constant. That it's about a year from the
Speaker 1: beginning of shooting to the film in the theater, whether
Speaker 1: you're editing on a digital platform or not. If you
Speaker 1: really want to edit fast, if that's the only goal, yes,
Speaker 1: you can do it faster now using digital tool, But
Speaker 1: that's not the only requirement. We want to make a
Speaker 1: good film, and to make a good film, you have
Speaker 1: to take the time, and that's the creative time is
Speaker 1: the determinament on this Now. I just want to have
Speaker 1: a quick glance at Apocalypse when he first contacted you, like,
Speaker 1: how did you get involved in that film? How would
Speaker 1: you describe because Apocalypse is always presented even from his
Speaker 1: wife's documentary, eleanor that it was this chaotic experience. What
Speaker 1: is your recollection of the making of Apocalypse? It was it?
Speaker 1: Like for you? It was crazy. I was editing the
Speaker 1: film Julia in London and I got a call from
Speaker 1: Francis can you fly to the Philippines to discuss the
Speaker 1: final mix? Sure, so a trip was arranged over the
Speaker 1: weekend to fly from London to Manila and then to
Speaker 1: the location. And people were coming from all over the world. Tomita,
Speaker 1: who was going to do the music for the film,
Speaker 1: was coming from Japan, and Richard Begs Richie Marks were
Speaker 1: coming from San Francisco. So it was a big meeting
Speaker 1: that was planned. But that was right after Marty Sheen
Speaker 1: had his heart attack. So we all arrived and everything
Speaker 1: was in this wonderful chaos, you know, but we had
Speaker 1: the meeting. I mean, this is another example of Francis's determination.
Speaker 1: His main actor has had a heart attack and he
Speaker 1: is now hosting a meeting to discuss the technicalities of
Speaker 1: a mix that won't happen for an ultimately for another
Speaker 1: two years. That was where the idea of inventing a
Speaker 1: totally new format for this film was born. How long
Speaker 1: have they been shooting when you showed up almost a year?
Speaker 1: Are they done shooting or they're getting close to being done?
Speaker 1: There are three months away from the end of shooting,
Speaker 1: which is the normal schedule for film. His three months
Speaker 1: there in the final thing that that says it all.
Speaker 1: We're in the final three months of shooting, two and
Speaker 1: fifty six days of shooting. Had you been looking at
Speaker 1: footage prior to that? There was a typhoon, speaking of
Speaker 1: chaos in the summer of seventies six. Francis had been
Speaker 1: shooting for perhaps four months, and the typhoon destroyed all
Speaker 1: the sets, so production was shut down. Francis came back
Speaker 1: to San Francisco and we had a meeting. He showed
Speaker 1: me what he had shot up until then, and he said,
Speaker 1: is there anything missing, And I thought, well, there's a
Speaker 1: scene missing I think, which is it would be good
Speaker 1: to have a scene where the boat does what it's
Speaker 1: supposed to do as it goes up river. This is
Speaker 1: a patrol boat that is supposed to stop contraband material
Speaker 1: from getting down river. So let's write a scene where
Speaker 1: the boat does a police action and something goes bad
Speaker 1: and people get killed, and they kill the family in
Speaker 1: the boat. Right, And he said, okay, right, that scene
Speaker 1: and we'll do it. So I sat down and wrote
Speaker 1: the Sampan massacre scene, and the Francis took it back
Speaker 1: to the Philippines and you know, obviously changed it and
Speaker 1: actors do what actors do. But essentially, the idea of
Speaker 1: that scene was something that occurred to me from reading
Speaker 1: and looking at the material of things that have been
Speaker 1: shot up to that point. Now you cut the film,
Speaker 1: you edited the film. Well, I mean, that's another story.
Speaker 1: I was hired just to do the sound because when
Speaker 1: I joined the film it was August seventy seven, and
Speaker 1: the idea was somehow improbably that the film would be
Speaker 1: in the theaters by Christmas, And you know what, did
Speaker 1: I know, maybe maybe it's possible, but it was pretty
Speaker 1: clear to me at that point that this was not
Speaker 1: going to happen. And that's when I joined the editorial team.
Speaker 1: There were two editors working on the film at that time.
Speaker 1: I became the third editor on the film. Now, when
Speaker 1: have there been moments where you fought for a cut
Speaker 1: and you were right either to lift out or preserve something,
Speaker 1: and you fought for a cut and the director you
Speaker 1: were wrong and they were right. Before I answered that question,
Speaker 1: we were doing eight final a d R with Marlon
Speaker 1: Brando on The Godfather and we got about halfway through
Speaker 1: the film and Francis said, well, I gotta go now,
Speaker 1: so you guys continue. So I was whatever, I was,
Speaker 1: twenty six years old, and here I am in the
Speaker 1: dark alone with Marlon Brando supposedly directing him in a
Speaker 1: d R. And they're changing reels and in the dark,
Speaker 1: I hear this voice that says, people say I mumble.
Speaker 1: I thought, what am I going to say to Marlon
Speaker 1: Brando about that? I said, yes, that's true. People do
Speaker 1: say that you mumble. And he said, well they're right.
Speaker 1: I do mumble, and I'll tell you why. Because when
Speaker 1: we shoot the films, I don't know what these scenes
Speaker 1: are going to be in the film or out of
Speaker 1: the film. I don't know what order the scenes are
Speaker 1: going to be in. So when I'm doing the scenes,
Speaker 1: I don't move my lips very much so that if
Speaker 1: it comes to it, we can change the dialogue, I
Speaker 1: can change my performance and nobody I never thought of that.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, in my mind, you couldn't think about
Speaker 1: it in terms of what drove the story. It was
Speaker 1: all about behavior and and and performance. Correct, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to say at that point in the film
Speaker 1: there were two editors, and I was editing the first
Speaker 1: half of the film up to and including the Sampan massacre,
Speaker 1: and Richie Marks was handling everything after that, so I
Speaker 1: was an observer to what they were doing, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know all of the ins and outs of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, the famous should we cut this scene in
Speaker 1: that film is the French plantation scene, which was a
Speaker 1: huge restored for the Redux, A hugely huge operation, the
Speaker 1: very expensive, very detailed set, lots of characters, and as
Speaker 1: we were editing the film, the scene shrink and its
Speaker 1: strength and its strength until I think in the end,
Speaker 1: just before it completely disappeared. There were maybe two or
Speaker 1: three shots from it. It was like a kind of
Speaker 1: a mist of a scene. It was just some images
Speaker 1: and you didn't know what to make of them, and
Speaker 1: then finally it disappeared completely. We put it back in
Speaker 1: Apocalypse Redus. In fact, putting that scene back was the
Speaker 1: whole reason for doing the reducts the French Canal Plus
Speaker 1: people wanted a DVD extra because Christian Marcon, the actor
Speaker 1: in that scene, had just died and they wanted to
Speaker 1: see him. And then as these things happened, one thing
Speaker 1: led to another, and it became this huge operation of
Speaker 1: rehabilitating an umber of scenes that had been cut out.
Speaker 1: But the scene essentially comes too late in the film
Speaker 1: for you to know how to take it digest it.
Speaker 1: So you directed one film, returned to OZ and it
Speaker 1: was a disappointing experience for you from what I read.
Speaker 1: What was your feeling about directing again after that experience? No,
Speaker 1: I mean after it was finished. You know, there's inevitably
Speaker 1: a period of recovery on any film, and then I
Speaker 1: tried to get a couple of other projects off the ground.
Speaker 1: So you wanted to direct again after? Yeah? But no,
Speaker 1: I have four kids, and there's the old joke, you know,
Speaker 1: how do you spell directing? W A I T I
Speaker 1: n G that when you're directing trying to get something
Speaker 1: off the ground, there's a lot of downtime unless you're
Speaker 1: completely established. Director Returned to Oz was a financial failure
Speaker 1: and critically extremely mixed results. It's a wonderful film, by
Speaker 1: the way, it just didn't happen. I directed one film,
Speaker 1: and I had the resources to make a wonderful film.
Speaker 1: I had a great script, had a great cast. What
Speaker 1: I learned about directing was that patients you need to
Speaker 1: help see everything. You're You're being asked about everything, and
Speaker 1: for me, the patients to stand there all day long,
Speaker 1: because when you're an actor, you go back to your
Speaker 1: trailer and you go read a magazine. And with the director,
Speaker 1: you can't hide in your trailer. You've got to be
Speaker 1: there and you've got to answer the questions and you're
Speaker 1: in charge, so to speak. And I found I didn't
Speaker 1: have the patients to direct other actors to tell the
Speaker 1: cinematographer no, no, put the camera here. I wanted here.
Speaker 1: And I just didn't have the patients to negotiate with
Speaker 1: all those people, you know what I mean. Wonderful quote
Speaker 1: from Warren Beauty who also is an actor director, and
Speaker 1: he said, the key to acting is to be in
Speaker 1: control of being out of control. The key to directing
Speaker 1: is to be out of control of being in control.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that drives you crazy when you
Speaker 1: go in front of the camera and then go behind
Speaker 1: the camera. Is the alternating between you know, searing heat
Speaker 1: on the one side and ice on the other. So
Speaker 1: you also have to be in the moment, which is
Speaker 1: what's you're shooting right now, but you also have to
Speaker 1: live in the past, meaning taking to generation everything that
Speaker 1: you've shot up to now, and you have to live
Speaker 1: in the future, which is, what are we going to
Speaker 1: do tomorrow? What are we gonna do next week? So
Speaker 1: it's a highly uncomfortable state of being unless you're completely
Speaker 1: adapted to it, I think, And that's why you become
Speaker 1: a director. When you're a combat age, which is to say,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty years old, then it kind of becomes
Speaker 1: part of who you are. That wasn't the case where
Speaker 1: I was. I was forty when I directed returned to
Speaker 1: OZ and in a sense I knew too much. I
Speaker 1: was already to set in my ways a certain thing,
Speaker 1: and I was I had to learn how to undo
Speaker 1: some of those assumptions. I'm assuming you have some thoughts
Speaker 1: about how the COVID has affected the way we shoot
Speaker 1: and exhibit films as well. Does that trouble you? Well
Speaker 1: that that's actually it helped us in a weird way
Speaker 1: with KU fifty three because we had a great premiere
Speaker 1: of the film at Tell You Rode and London, but
Speaker 1: no distributor would pick it up. It's there's some kind
Speaker 1: of third rail aspect of the film that makes distributors
Speaker 1: I don't want it's still unseld today. You haven't seld
Speaker 1: it yet. No, no, So we're distributing it ourselves, and
Speaker 1: we're doing it through v o D and we're doing
Speaker 1: it in a cooperation with Arthouse Theater. So so so
Speaker 1: where would people go to see the film? How would
Speaker 1: they see the film? You go to KU fifty three
Speaker 1: dot com and say what country are you in? You know,
Speaker 1: United States, UK, Ireland or Canada at the present moment,
Speaker 1: and then select a theater and you click on that theater.
Speaker 1: It's twelve bucks is the ticket? We split fifty fifty
Speaker 1: And it's how that's how it works. But without COVID,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have gotten the momentum that it got because
Speaker 1: of all the closing of the theaters and thank god,
Speaker 1: you know, thank god you benefited from that. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: a weird way, we benefited from it. How would you
Speaker 1: say the methodology by which you choose which films you're
Speaker 1: going to do? How has that changed over the years.
Speaker 1: It's three things, and it's always remained the same. It's
Speaker 1: the script. I like a script that I can connect with,
Speaker 1: but that moves me out of my comfort zone because
Speaker 1: I don't want to just keep doing the same thing
Speaker 1: over and over again. Are there the resources to pull
Speaker 1: this off? And who am I going to be working with?
Speaker 1: You know, as an editor, you are in a room
Speaker 1: with the director for the better part of a year ultimately,
Speaker 1: so it's an intense thing and you have to get along.
Speaker 1: So those are the three categories. If all three of
Speaker 1: those are in place, then oh it's rare that you
Speaker 1: get all three cleanly. You You usually have to make
Speaker 1: an educated guess. I've got two out of three. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll make a bet. The film Tomorrow Land I was
Speaker 1: working with Brad Bird, and they obviously had the resources
Speaker 1: because it was a hundred and eighty million dollar film.
Speaker 1: Or something with Disney, But I never got to read
Speaker 1: the script before we started shooting. He was working on
Speaker 1: the script and finally I was on location in Vancouver
Speaker 1: two weeks before shooting, and finally the script arrived. So
Speaker 1: you can never tell exactly how things are going to
Speaker 1: work out. Is it safe to say that to the
Speaker 1: extent that any one of the characters you've mixed that
Speaker 1: you are? That character is the little boy who's cutting
Speaker 1: the tape together? Is Hackman in the conversation? Is that you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think that probably would you know. That's ultimately why
Speaker 1: Francis asked me to edit the film. He said, it's
Speaker 1: a film about a sound man, and you're a sound
Speaker 1: man and you've edited films. So no, that was my
Speaker 1: first editing job on a feature film because of that
Speaker 1: feeling of identity. Listen, I'm a great admirer of yours.
Speaker 1: You you've made a lot of great movies. You've made
Speaker 1: a lot of great movies, and you've been a part
Speaker 1: of movie history. You know, it's really exciting, and thank
Speaker 1: you so much for doing this with us, and good
Speaker 1: luck with the film. My pleasure. Thank you. Oscar winning
Speaker 1: sound and film editor Walter Merch my thanks to him
Speaker 1: and to screenwriter director David Kepp. I'm Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: this is here's the thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Speaker 1: Carrie donohue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. That's if trying to come