‘I spent 12 hours a day for 16 months with Gene Hackman – but never met him': The Conversation's Walter Murch pays tribute

The Guardian

28-02-2025

I never formally met Gene Hackman. I glimpsed him once, in November 1972, when he bounded upstairs to the offices of American Zoetrope in San Francisco, but I didn't recognise him until he told the receptionist that he was here to see Mona Skager.
Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation was about to start shooting in two weeks, and Mona was Francis's associate producer. I was to be the film's editor. That brief and solitary glimpse of Gene in real life was counterbalanced by 16 months of daily screen contact with Harry Caul, the character brought to life by Hackman.
This was my first job as editor of a feature film, and I was in alternating states of excitement and terror. Previously, I had edited some commercials, a couple of short documentaries and one educational film. I had also done the sound design for The Rain People and The Godfather, Coppola's two previous feature films, as well as the sound design for George Lucas's feature THX 1138.
But editing The Conversation was a big turn up the spiral for me, which explained the excitement. The terror was induced by the fact that this was the next film by the director who had just transfixed the world with The Godfather. If The Conversation failed, for whatever reason, much of the blame would fall on the shoulders of this young and inexperienced editor.
The relationship between actors and film editors is a classic case of asymmetry: editors stare at actors 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes more, and we microscopically study their every move, flinch, blink, gesture and inflection. We become actor-anthropologists, students of this strange tribe, and we inhale their rhythms which become second nature to us, and then translate them into the editing style and pacing of the film.
In a certain sense, we know this narrow spectrum of an actor better than anyone – perhaps in some cases better than the actors themselves. If we later meet them in person, this asymmetry really makes itself felt; they frequently have no idea who we are, other than appendages of the director, but we have all that secret and microscopic knowledge: how they prefer to turn left rather than right, their characteristic way of hesitating before opening a door, how often they blink …
There were many times, often at 3am in the morning, when Harry would push a button on his tape recorder, stopping it, and so closely did I identify with him that I would be amazed to find my KEM editing machine still running, having not obeyed Harry's command.
During one session, another all-nighter, I finally noticed that very close to where I would decide to make a cut, Harry would blink. Was I controlling Harry, or was he controlling me? This confusion was ultimately resolved: the cut is a blink, and this realisation, triggered by Gene's performance, became one of the foundational ideas of my book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, first published in 1992.
So in a very real sense, the integrity of Hackman's performance provided the metronomic spine which supported and guided me, often without my knowing it, to find the correct pacing for each scene, and then the right structure of the collection of those scenes in the finished film. I shudder to think what would have happened if Harry had been performed by someone else.
So I was hit hard by the news of Gene's death for all kinds of reasons – I am a huge fan of his work across five decades of American cinema – but particularly because of the guidance and inspiration he gave me implicitly during the editing of The Conversation. I never had the opportunity to thank him personally for helping me to become the film-maker that I am today. So I do that now: 'Thank you, Gene.'