The genius behind the sound of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now

Times

06-05-2025

Shut your eyes at the movies and what do you hear? The whop-whop-whop of choppers at the start of Apocalypse Now? The mosquito that bedevils Barton Fink in his hotel room like a Stuka bomber? The piercing, metal scream from an overhead train that Michael Corleone hears before he murders Sollozzo and McCluskey in a Bronx restaurant in The Godfather? If so then you are enjoying the work of Walter Murch, the three-time Oscar-winning editor and sound designer.
A rakish man with jug ears (of course Hollywood's most famous sound man has the ears of Mickey Mouse), Murch was nicknamed 'Walter Boing-Boing' as a boy because he would often talk in sound effects, like his favourite cartoon character. Unusually he works as a film editor and sound designer — jobs not generally performed by the same person — and it has bequeathed a rich and celebrated career, which he has mined in a series of intelligent, erudite and inquisitive books.
The oblique, unnoticed aspect of sound is what makes it the stealth art. If you had to boil down Murch's philosophy to one statement it would be this: 'If you leave certain things incomplete, to just the right degree, most of the audience will complete those ideas for you. The artistry in every department is to know what can be left out.'
For the 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley Murch and the director Anthony Minghella opted not to show the film's climactic murder, instead relaying the sound of it while we observe Ripley's face reflected in the mirror door of his closet. For The Godfather a cork popping anticipates a gunshot. After 175 tracks of five-speaker surround sound in Apocalypse Now, the compound of Kurtz is noticeable for its eerie silence.
There's more than a touch of the Vulcan intellectual to Murch. At a drinks party he is the man next to the punch bowl talking about his theories about 'squishy ping-pong balls of air', or Shakespearean iambic pentameter as a rhythmic model for knowing where an editor should make a cut in a scene.
It takes a special type of person to willingly confine themselves to a tiny room where they watch and listen to the same thing over and over again. 'This textbook definition of brainwashing pretty accurately describes the daily experience of a film editor,' Murch writes near the end of his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, a mosaic of observations on his career.
Released from the self-imposed prison of the editing booth, Murch bursts with intelligent chatter, mixing reminiscence and practical tips with metaphysics and neuroscience. Over the course of the book the art of editing is compared to grafting trees, translating books, being part of a jazz quintet, conducting an orchestra, changing gears in a car, bowing a violin, brain surgery, taking off in an aircraft and building a Lego model.
Such limber, left-field thinking is presumably a boon in the editing booth, where images flare with unseen resonance when placed next to one another, and sounds strike chords several scenes distant. Murch points out that we hear before we see: four and a half months after conception we are alive to the song of our mother's voice, the swash of her breathing, the timpani of her heart, long before we can see a thing.
It's perhaps an early example of acousmêtre — a narrative device by which a character is introduced solely through their voice, like the Wizard of Oz or Colonel Kurtz, although we should be lucky he wasn't called 'Colonel Leighley', which is what Marlon Brando insisted his character be called throughout the shooting, before finally reading the book and being persuaded that Kurtz was the way to go. Murch had to overdub all the scenes where his character was mentioned. The horror, the horror.
Much of this material has appeared before. The Leighley-not-Kurtz story, along with an account of Murch's pioneering use of quintaphonic sound on Apocalypse Now — now standard, but then revolutionary, allowing the audience to hear the helicopters go round in circles — came up in The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje's book of interviews with Murch. Readers of that book will already know why Murch stands, like a short-order cook, while editing (increased blood flood to the brain), or why we are blind for the 120ms required to move our eyeballs, a fact of great use to magicians, masters of the three-card monte and film editors. With sprocketed celluloid — the film with the familiar perforations on either side — you spend half of a two-hour movie in darkness, a fact obscured by the brain's Ram cache, which helpfully fills in the missing parts.
At one point in the new book Murch points out that the shooting ratio of Apocalypse Now — that is, the ratio of shot footage to used footage — was 95:1. For Mad Max: Fury Road (not one of his) it was an astonishing 240:1. Murch's literary ratio, at this point in his career, is closer to Hitchcock's economical 3:1. Every inch of the bison has been used at one point or another.
Readers new to Murch will still want to start with The Conversations, his and Ondaatje's magisterial deep dive into the braiding of intellect, intuition and emotion that informs the editor's art. Suddenly Something Clicked is more like the director's cut of that book and Murch's In the Blink of an Eye is a prismatic reordering of material that delights the superfan not the newbie.