Walter Murch: The Art and
Editing Behind the Coup 53 Doc

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.

Murch edited and co-wrote the documentary Coup 53 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, assassinations and the 1953 coup that removed the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In the film, Murch and Amirani take on the roles of filmmaking detectives looking for the missing interview footage of MI6 agent Norman Darbyshire.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Murch about editing and his work on Coup 53.

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.

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, 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, 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 told me that Taghi had to be in this movie, which was obviously not the original plan.

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