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Walter Murch has been honored by both British and American Motion Picture
Academies for his picture editing and sound mixing. In 1997, Murch received
an unprecedented double Oscar for both film editing and sound mixing on
The English Patient (Anthony Minghella), as well as that year’s British
Academy Award for best editing. Seventeen years earlier, he had received an
Oscar for best sound for Apocalypse Now ( F. Coppola), as well as British and
American Academy nominations for his picture editing. He also won a double
British Academy Award in 1975 for his film editing and sound mixing on The
Conversation (F. Coppola), was nominated by both academies in 1978 for best
film editing for Julia ( F. Zinnemann), and in 1991 received two nominations
for best film editing from the American Academy for the films Ghost ( J.
Zucker) and The Godfather Part III (F. Coppola).
Among Murch’s other credits are: picture editing for The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (P. Kaufman), Romeo is Bleeding (P. Medak), First Knight
(J. Zucker), The Talented Mr. Ripley (A. Minghella), and K-19: The
Widowmaker (K. Bigelow).
His most recent credit is for Cold Mountain (Anthony Minghella) for which
he received an Academy Nomination for Editing, and British Academy
Nominations for Editing and Sound Mixing. He is currently working on Jarhead for
director Sam Mendes. The film, from the novel by Anthony Swofford, will be released
in November 2005.
He has also been involved in film restoration, notably Orson Welles’s Touch of
Evil (1998), Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), and Thomas
Edison’s Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894).
Murch was also sound effects supervisor for The Godfather (F. Coppola), and
responsible for sound montage and re-recording on American Graffiti (G.
Lucas), The Godfather Part II (F. Coppola), and Crumb (T. Zweigoff), as well
as being re-recording mixer on all of the films for which he has also been
picture editor.
Murch directed and co-wrote the film Return to Oz, released by Disney in
1985.
Between films, he pursues interests in the science of human perception,
cosmology and the history of science. Since 1995, he has been working on a
reinterpretation of the Titius-Bode Law of planetary spacing, based on data
from the Voyager Probe, the Hubble telescope, and recent discoveries of exoplanets
orbiting distant stars.
He has also translated into English a number of previously untranslated works
by the Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte.
Murch has written one book on film editing, “In
the Blink of an Eye”
(2001) and been the subject of two recent books:
Michael Ondaatje’s “The
Conversations” (2002)
and Charles Koppelman’s “Behind
the Seen” (2004).
FilmSound – Walter Murch Articles & Interviews:
www.filmsound.org/murch/murch.htm
Time Magazine – An Article about Jean Shepherd:
www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/
0,9565,168458,00.html
Film Freak Central – A Conversation w/ Walter Murch:
www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wminterview.htm
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