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: When I start any new film now, and I look at the people in the film, I watch how they blink. I pay attention to that, and I kind of get in the groove. And then one of the things as an exercise that I do is get that character on screen and then I try to hit the stop button just ahead of where they blink, so the frame before they blink. Can I do that? And I can. You know it's like playing a musical instrument, you get good at it. That's a way I have of tuning my reactions to the reactions which are unconscious, but the unconscious reactions of this actor to his character. Parenthetically what I would say is never, never, never use the blink as the frame on which to cut. You had to do it yourself; you have to come to that decision. Actually making a cut while somebody is blinking is a terrible thing that you don't want to do. It just... it looks like how it feels to you when you get a piece of dust in your eye. You know, you're kind of like, 'No, I don't want that.'
So there is something going on there and would say my understanding of it is about at the level of the way an acupuncturist understands where to put the needles. I don't fully... the acupuncturist doesn't fully understand in Western medicine terms what's happening, but there's no doubt that it works under certain circumstances. And I would say this is sort of a similar thing. Anyway, that was... that's been with me as a concept for the last, you know, now 40 plus years. And the book that I wrote, 'In the Blink of an Eye', is where you would meet that concept written down.