Walter Murch interviews Anne V. Coates. Anne V. Coates has edited 48 films in as many years. Her first love was horses; as a girl, she thought she'd be a race-horse trainer. As a teenager, an introduction to classic literature on film, such as "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights," changed her mind. She took a job with a small non-union house, Religious Films, which led to her joining the union and working as a second assistant at Pinewood Studios. A generation after Coates began her career, Walter Murch graduated from the USC School of Cinema-Television along with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Murch and Coates sat down together recently to talk about their careers, editing styles and philosophies, directors they have worked with and the future of editing.
Walter Murch: When editing started out in the early years of the century, the larger portion of editors were women, and it was with the coming of sound that men proportionately began to be more involved in editing. Anne V. M: Maybe they didn't smoke as much. C: No. Index. MPSE Awards 2011: Walter Murch, Career Achievement Award Recipient + George Lucas + Randy Thom. The Heliocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch. [Image: Inside the Pantheon; via]. Through both film editing and sound design, Walter Murch has worked literally behind the scenes of Hollywood to give shape and structure to the films we see. In the process, he's won three Academy Awards; he's directed his own feature-length film, the creatively subversive Return to Oz; and he's worked with some of the greatest directors of modern times, including Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, on some of their greatest films, from The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now to The Conversation and THX-1138.But it is due only in part to Murch's stellar career in film that I wanted to talk to him for BLDGBLOG.
As it happens, Murch's interests go far beyond the reach of cinema, encompassing architecture, astronomy, music theory, and mathematics – among an almost impossibly broad range of other subjects. I spent a lot of time trying to discover those key sounds that bring universes along with them. [Image: Exterior view of the Pantheon].
Behind the Scenes with Film Editor Walter Murch.