By Barry Goch

Walter Murch, ACE, is a giant of the film industry. Among his audio and editing credits are such films as The Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now, Ghost, The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. In addition to his sound and editing credits, he is also a writer, director, industry thought leader and technology pioneer — he famously became an early adopter and evangelist for Apple’s Final Cut Pro while editing Cold Mountain back in 2003. His book, “In the Blink of an Eye,” is required reading for any editor.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Murch about the documentary Coup 53, which he edited and co-wrote with Iranian director Taghi Amirani. In an interesting twist, the man who spent his career behind the camera became an on-camera participant in this Cold War-era thriller about geopolitics, assasinations and the 1953 coup that removed the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

In Coup 53, Murch and Amirani take on the roles of filmmaking detectives looking for the missing interview footage of MI6 agent Norman Darbyshire.

You actually appear in the documentary, which is a bit non-traditional. How did that come about?
This is an unscripted documentary, so there was nothing to begin with other than some archive footage that we had from YouTube, along with some interviews already shot. It was maybe 40 or 50 hours of material. Ultimately, we had 10 times that amount of material — 532 hours.

Taghi Amirani

I got my first glimpse of how the structure would be when I was looking at one of the sections that Taghi had shot. He had included himself in the footage while talking to Malcolm Byrne, who’s the head of research at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. The footage shows Taghi in front of a file cabinet looking at about 250 pages — that one drawer was all that existed from the CIA about the coup — and he says to Malcolm, “The whole history of my country would have been different if it wasn’t for this drawer.”

The way he said it, and the fact that he said it, told me that Taghi had to be in this movie, which was obviously not the original plan. He struggled with that for a while because this is a very divisive story. There are 17 different groups out there. All of them have a different opinion about this history. But Taghi knows the Iranian side of the story because of where he was born. And he knows the British side because he moved there in 1975.

Once Taghi was in the film, because elements of the story deal with missing film, that automatically brought the editor into the story because I’m the one manipulating this stuff.

Was it weird editing footage that you were in? 
Not weird… it’s just pixels.

Ralph Fiennes as Norman Darbyshire

Tell me about casting an actor to play a historical character. How did that come about?
Well, we had the transcript of the Norman Darbyshire interview as you see it in the film —Taghi discovered this in the basement of Mosaddegh’s grandson in Paris. We were then hoping to find the Norman Darbyshire interview footage from which this transcript was made, but of all of the people interviewed, only the Darbyshire interview was missing from the BFI archives. (Darbyshire was originally interviewed for a program on the BBC called End of Empire, but his footage is not in the final version. So, where is it?)

So we had this document, but no visual to back it up. Initially, we thought we’ll get an actor to read these lines, and we’ll look at the transcript as we hear the voice. But Taghi suggested photographing the actor at our recording studio reading these lines, just to give us a visual something. Then the question was, who are we going to get? I had met Ralph Fiennes on The English Patient and suggested him. Taghi loved the idea, so instead of photographing him, we decided to shoot it as if it’s an interview at The Savoy Hotel in London, where all of these other interviews in the film were shot. It took off from there. He gave us three hours one afternoon in October of 2018, so everything that you see of Ralph Fiennes as Darbyshire was shot in that little window of time.

How did the inclusion of this newly shot interview change the outcome of the final film?
We followed many different paths to get to where we finally ended up. The first assembly of all that material was almost eight and a half hours long. It was a Netflix six-part series, so we thought about that for a while, but we didn’t have the money or the time to make a six-part series. It eventually focused itself on Norman Darbyshire and his presence — and particularly the presence of Ralph Fiennes being Darbyshire. That magnetically helped us condense eight hours down into two hours.

How did you come up with the watercolor treatment for the re-enactments?
It was a suggestion from Taghi’s brother, Amir, who is also a filmmaker. He gave us some examples of what we call an oil painting technique … an oil painting rotoscope animation. The coup happened in 1953 when there were no easily available movie cameras, particularly in Iran, so we had no coverage of the final stages of the coup. When coups happen today, everyone will be photographing the events with their smartphones. So in this case, we had to decide: stay on the talking heads, describing all these events they witnessed, or find some way to visualize those events. We decided to do both, with the “oil paint” animation indicating the memories of Mossadegh’s bodyguard at the climax of the film.

Oil painting rotoscope animation technique

So this idea of a slightly smeared version of reality presented itself, and we eventually found Martyn Pick, an animator who specializes in this. It’s a digital technique that simulates oil. We gave him stock footage and shot fragments of things to take an image and turn it into an oil painting and then smear it around. This technique says it’s an impression of the person’s memory doing the speaking. So the audience is allowed to peer into this guy’s brain as he recalls these events.

Let’s talk about your editing techniques and using Adobe Premiere.
I believe there needs to be multiple editing systems for people to choose from, each competing with the other to make the process better. When this project came along, I thought I’d try Premiere, and it worked out very well.

Adobe was evolving the product over our five years in post, and they have a very aggressive involvement with pros. So Adobe is used to dealing with very finicky professionals who want very specific things, and they know that they have to satisfy those things. They would offer new versions of Premiere every six months or so, and we would upgrade as they went along. When we started, they were not yet fluid in having multiple editors working off all of the same material. You could do it, but it was very clunky. By the time we’d finished the project, it was great. There were some teething issues along the way, but I stuck with it.

Walter Murch

I know you had a lot of footage and had to get it down to two hours. Can you talk about that?
There were 532 hours of material, which is a record for me, and it kept coming in right until the final moment — new interviews, new archive finds — with things that would upheave our structure. When we were mixing the film, we still didn’t know what Darbyshire (the MI6 agent in charge of the operation) looked like. Then we got his photograph from his daughter, whom we were finally able to contact, and then we had to recut the picture to accommodate this.

Any editing moments from the film that you found most challenging?
Challenging is another word for interesting. The slamming boxes section toward the end — showing all the operations that the US/CIA was involved with after the Iran coup of ‘53. Taghi and I got this idea and then had to figure out how to symbolize it with the names on the boxes, getting the boxes themselves, etc. Then we had to cut it all together “musically,” like a drum roll with a visual cymbal clash at the end — the wide view of the room with all the boxes is the cymbal clash.

Any shortcuts you would like to share?
I used Quickeys as a macro to supplement the keystroke shortcuts in Premiere, but that is now disabled because of the switch to the Catalina operating system. Also, I have a modification to FileMaker Pro, which allows a quick generation of a continuity list using disabled clips in the top video layer, each of which is labelled with the scene that is “below” it in the timeline. Exporting the metadata from this video track to FileMaker and then using this customized program within FileMaker generates a continuity with frame-accurate lengths … in TC, minutes, feet/frames or whatever you want. I’ve been using this for about 10 years — on Final Cut and Media Composer and now Premiere.

Walter Murch and Taghi Amirani

Finally, what advice do you have for people starting out in the industry?
You can shoot a film yourself on your camera phone in 4K. You can edit it yourself and post it on YouTube. Maybe you get 10 million hits and phone calls from all of the major studios asking you to come and direct.

The problem is that it’s open for millions of people. So that’s the challenge: You have a great opening to put stuff together in imaginative ways and show it to the world, but you’ve got lots of competition. It’s a bit like dancing too. You can only learn so much from reading a book about dancing. You have to dance, you have to get out there and do it. The idea of being able to practice editing on film was just … we couldn’t afford it. But it’s readily available to you now. Now you can do it. You can shoot stuff for yourself. And so you can get better and better at doing this, but only with the expense of your time; that’s basically all it is.

Barry Goch is senior finishing artist at The Foundation Post in Burbank, California.