Walter Murch - How sound can intensify performance (77/320)

To listen to more of Walter Murch’s stories, go to the playlist: • Walter Murch (Film-maker)
Walter Scott Murch (b. 1943) is widely recognised as one of the leading authorities in the field of film editing, as well as one of the few film editors equally active in both picture and sound. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2016]
TRANSCRIPT: There was a wonderful interview with a mafia person who was in hiding talking about this scene, this was Sammy the Bull Gravano, who killed 19 people. He said that sound convinced him that Mario Puzo was in the mafia because: 'that's exactly how I felt when I killed my first person.' It's just a sound effect. It's not in the book, first of all, it's a sound effect in the movie, and it's put in by this kid who grew up in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, had nothing to do with the Bronx and didn't' know the mafia at all. I was just trying to solve an aesthetic problem of how de we help the audience in this scene where there is no music and a lot of the dialogue is in Italian.
But it was one of those lessons for me that you could do this kind of thing and, I don't mean this in a bad way, you can get away with it. The audience doesn't say, 'What's that terrible sound? Why are we hearing that?' It makes Al Pacino, who gave a wonderful performance there if you look at his eyes, but it intensifies that. And I think most people don't even hear that sound; they don't register it really. What they register is Michael. And so the sound kind of goes into the visual and the performance of Michael and intensifies it. So it was, on many levels, a lesson for me about what to do and how to do it. Not that I would repeat that same thing, but just the idea of metaphoric sound became very present in my mind at that point.