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George Lucas beard bonding with Francis Ford Coppola

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THX 11384 EB
Walter Murch Film-maker
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Matthew and I had been working on a screenplay for a student film about a man trapped in an underground civilisation and you only learn that it's underground at the end, when the hatch opens up and you realise that he'd been living in a kind of submarine world. And... but then we got interested in something else, another fascinating project, and put that project on the backburner. And George had linked up with the Navy and the US Navy was sending people to USC film to learn audio-visual techniques. They had a lot of money compared to us. They had a lot of film; they were allowed to shoot in colour film. We were only allowed to shoot in black and white. Their budgets were an order of magnitude, larger than ours and he somehow linked up with them and they were not particularly creative. They wanted to learn how to operate the camera. So they needed to shoot something.

And so George at one point knocked on the door and said, 'Are you guys going to do that film about the guy trapped underground? Can I have it?' 'Okay, sure.' So we gave him the outline for that and he made a film, a wonderful film based on that called THX 11384 EB, was the original title, and it won all kinds of student awards.

Born in 1943 in New York City, Murch graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. His career stretches back to 1969 and includes work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient. He has been referred to as 'the most respected film editor and sound designer in modern cinema.' In a career that spans over 40 years, Murch is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola, beginning in 1969 with The Rain People. After working with George Lucas on THX 1138 (1971), which he co-wrote, and American Graffiti (1973), Murch returned to Coppola in 1974 for The Conversation, resulting in his first Academy Award nomination. Murch's pioneering achievements were acknowledged by Coppola in his follow-up film, the 1979 Palme d'Or winner Apocalypse Now, for which Murch was granted, in what is seen as a film-history first, the screen credit 'Sound Designer.' Murch has been nominated for nine Academy Awards and has won three, for best sound on Apocalypse Now (for which he and his collaborators devised the now-standard 5.1 sound format), and achieving an unprecedented double when he won both Best Film Editing and Best Sound for his work on The English Patient. Murch’s contributions to film reconstruction include 2001's Apocalypse Now: Redux and the 1998 re-edit of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. He is also the director and co-writer of Return to Oz (1985). In 1995, Murch published a book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, in which he urges editors to prioritise emotion.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: THX 11384 EB, George Lucas

Duration: 1 minute, 44 seconds

Date story recorded: April 2016

Date story went live: 01 March 2017