Is the future of creativity really at risk—or are we just repeating history?
In this episode, I’m joined by Walter Murch, Hollywood filmmaking legend and multi-Oscar winner whose career spans over six decades of technological change. We explore how we got here, where we might be going, and how to make sense of this evolving “normal.” Walter shares a powerful perspective on why creative disruption is cyclical, what remains constant in storytelling, and how to adapt without losing your footing in the age of AI.
Walter Murch (ACE, MPSE) is an American film editor, director, writer, sound designer, and author. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing), he has been referred to by Roger Ebert as “the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema.”
Walter’s Book: In The Blink Of An Eye
Zack Arnold: The reason I'm really excited to speak with you today is actually because you've been a longtime educator and author. For those that are thinking, "I would love to go out and get an advanced degree in filmmaking," before enrolling in an institution, welcome to your master's class on storytelling and editing: In the Blink of an Eye, The Conversations, and Behind the Scene, which, as you can see, I've just basically all but destroyed over the years with Post-its and notes and scribblings in the margins. Needless to say, it is one of the honors of my entire career, both as an editor and a podcaster, to have you with us today. Walter, thank you so much for being here.
Walter Murch: Thank you. And just to complete the trilogy, this is the new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, which has just been published here in the United Kingdom and will be published in the United States and Canada mid-July.
Zack Arnold: I'm so glad you brought that up because that's literally where I was going to go next. While you're writing about something clicking, I would say a lot of things are not clicking right now in the industry. Everybody right now is screaming into an echo chamber about the death of creativity as we know it. While people are screaming into this echo chamber talking about the emergence of artificial intelligence, you recently came out with a documentary about editing film with the Moviola, of all things. The reason I love that is that you and I both focus on the things that stay the same and not being terrified of all the things that are changing.
Here's where I want to start today's conversation. I actually want to start it at the end—not at the end of our industry as we know it, but at the end of the Epilogue of Behind the Scene. To set the stage, it was September 1965. It was your first day of graduate school at USC, and it says the theaters were closing across the country, television networks were waging a war of attrition against the studios, and the corporate vultures were circling. Boy, all of that sounds familiar right now. You told the story that on the first day of school, you were told by the head of the USC camera department, "Get out now. There is no work, and next year there's going to be even less. I don't even know why all of you are here. Go do something sensible. You can still get your tuition back." As you said, many took it to heart, and they quit film school to become real estate agents, lawyers, and businessmen. Sounds kind of eerily familiar to what's going on right now, does it not?
Walter Murch: Absolutely. Everything goes in waves, and that was certainly one of a number of waves that have happened. 1965 was, I think, the bottom of Hollywood production. Fewer films were made in Hollywood in 1965 than ever previously. Teachers like Jean Peterson, who was head of the camera department, had gone into the industry in the mid-1940s, which was the peak. For their experience, it was a 20-year slide, and they didn't see the bottom of it.
Those of us who were at the school, who stuck it out and stayed on because we didn't have any alternative and we just loved movies—we wanted to make movies, and who knows what the future would bring—we were all in our early 20s. We did see a revival on the other side of the 60s into the 70s and on. There was another bump in the road at the end of the glory days of independent film, at the end of the 90s. And now we're experiencing something else, which is triggered by who knows what: artificial intelligence, streaming, and the re-examination of what it is that we experience when we go see a motion picture.
Zack Arnold: The line that you said in reference to having heard this speech on your first day of class, I think if there is one thing that everybody here should print out, laminate, put as a Post-it note on your computer, or put as a poster above your desk, you said the following: "If the whole house is crumbling down, we might as well do something." I feel like so many people are sitting and waiting, "What's going to happen next? I'm so afraid of what the future brings." And you said when you're going through hell, let's just keep going. Let's figure out how to do something with this.
One of the words that is being thrown around so easily nowadays that often perturbs me is this idea of things being "unprecedented." For anybody that understands history and follows history in any sense of the word, I would argue that very few, if any, things right now are unprecedented. The only thing I believe is unprecedented is the speed at which everything is converging at the exact same time: the speed of artificial intelligence and changing technologies; the speed at which we communicate with our devices; the speed and the modalities in which we consume our entertainment. All of that's happening at the same time at speeds that we can't comprehend. But none of them, individually, I would argue, is unprecedented. Do you feel the same way, having been through multiple of these changes over the years?
Walter Murch: Yeah. In every cloud has a silver lining. We were lucky, our generation, in that technically, cinema and filmmaking was in a relatively stable period and had been since the end of the 1930s. The way Godfather was shown to theaters in 1972 with an optical track in monophonic sound was basically the same as Gone with the Wind. So we were able, even though things were changing outside, to technically get our feet on a relatively stable platform. The digital future, which we saw coming in the late 60s, didn't really hit until the mid-80s and certainly took over in the mid-90s. My career in film has been split 50/50; in the six decades I've been doing it, three decades were mechanical and three decades have been digital. So, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. That was one of the advantages, is that we moved into a relatively stable period.
Zack Arnold: There's a term that I've heard used—I'm not sure if I've seen you use it or write about it—but I've heard this term used by many people that went through this transition from film to digital. They call it the "digital bloodbath," where there was this massive transition in the modes in which we were making films. So what are some of the things that you can recount from that period where everybody was working on film, and essentially it was the idea of, "We have to embrace progress"? What are some of the things that you saw from other colleagues and how people either transitioned through this massive period of uncertainty—those that succeeded and those that did not?
Walter Murch: To put it in context, 1968 was the summer where I met Francis Coppola for the first time, and he and George Lucas came over to the place I was working on Seward Street in Hollywood, editing commercials. They said, "Walter, let's go up the street and look, there's a new digital editing system." So we walked a couple of blocks north on Seward to the CMX laboratories, and there it was. It was black and white; they couldn't handle color yet, and they could only handle five minutes of rushes at a time. The hard drive machine looked like a washing machine. We came out of that and thought, "This is the future. It'll be here in five years." Improbable as it sounds, we actually thought we could lasso the CMX system and edit The Godfather on that system somehow, and I worked out a workflow for it. Of course, Paramount blew that away. There was no chance they were going to go down that road.
But I was, charitably called, an early adopter kind of person, so my antennae were definitely out anticipating what was happening on the digital front. When we were making The Conversation in 1972-73, Harry Caul, the Gene Hackman character, was able to take a recording that had music in the foreground, and he could erase the foreground music and hear the dialogue in the background of that shot. I knew enough to know that there was no way you could do that analog; it must be digital. So I said Harry Caul must be a genius who has somehow invented digital sound recording before it was ever practical. Of course, a couple of years ago, we're able to do that exactly now. There was that new Beatles song that was released, where the guitar track was erased and we could hear John Lennon singing in the background.
There were two breakthroughs in 1995 which really changed the landscape. You could now have more than one workstation reading from the set of drives. Up to that point, as crude as it seems, the editor would work during the day, and then there would be a night shift where the assistant would come in and work all night. Once you could have two or three workstations, that changed the nature of it. We also had efficiencies in drives in ‘95 that allowed you to put the entire workprint of a feature film online at the same time. Before that, on Godfather III, for instance, which we were editing with a VHS-based system, you could only edit the first half. If you wanted to steal something from the second half and use it in the first, it got very complicated.
That was a watershed, and after that, it was inevitable that everyone would take to it. But there was about a 10-year period that I dubbed the "gas-electric period," where we shot on film, we edited digitally, but then we conformed the 35-millimeter workprint using the EDL from the Avid or whatever system we were using. You basically had two crews working simultaneously. Christopher Nolan is still doing this. Here we are, entering the second generation of the 21st century, and he still shoots on film and conforms film. That era changed in basically 2005. The output of the Avid was up to 720 lines, and that's good enough to preview, which kind of blew the legs off of the need to conform the workprint. Whereas on English Patient and Talented Mr. Ripley and also Cold Mountain, which was 2002-2003, we conformed the workprint.
It was a shakeout, in some ways, similar to the shakeout that happened with the coming of sound. There are these moments where you get what you wished for, and yet it's a big, complicated thing to navigate how that is going to work, technically and artistically. Sound films didn't really settle down for about 10 years. The thing that was affecting Jean Peterson and the teachers at USC was another earthquake, which was television. Suddenly, people had a movie theater in their home. It was the beginning of what we have now, but that was a huge shock. There were minor shocks, like the coming of magnetic sound. By the early 50s, when magnetic sound came in, the people who had started film sound in the mid-20s were near retirement age, and for them, it was another thing where they didn't want to make the effort. So there was a big shift at that point. So many people retired that this unseen miracle happened, which was that the sound union simply opened up the doors and said, "If you want a job, come on in." Many people joined just to have a union job. They didn't have any love of sound in particular, but it was impossible to resist. That generation was still working in film when I started working in cinema in the late 60s.
Zack Arnold: The part that you said that I really want to emphasize is that there is the "I don't want to make the effort" crowd, and I feel like this is where we're repeating history all over again. You've essentially identified these three transitional periods where we went from no sound to sound, give or take about 10 years. We went from film to digital, took about 10 years to find an equilibrium. And the transition from only cinemas to cinema and television probably took at least about 10 years to find that equilibrium.
I would argue the cycle is repeating itself. To steal from what you just said about the "gas-electric period," what I've been saying is that right now, we're in the "horses to cars" period. I believe that artificial intelligence, yes, is a new emerging technology, but the speed at which it's emerging and the level at which it could completely change the craft and the workforce as we know it, I think is larger in scope than any of these previous transitions.
I want to go back to the digital bloodbath for a second. You call yourself an early adopter, and it's very clear from all of your work, especially if somebody were to read Behind the Scene. It's about your transition to digital and being the person that said, "I'm going to learn and teach all of you how to edit a film in Final Cut Pro," way back in the day. But what about those that were not the early adopters? Did you see colleagues that were saying to themselves, "I'm not going to cut digital. I'm a filmmaker. I cut film." Did you see both of these paths?
Walter Murch: No, I didn't personally see it. We were all working in our little Galapagos Island up in San Francisco, and that's Silicon Valley territory, so we were pushing for digital. I'm sure you're absolutely right, but I didn't know anyone who was saying, "No, I'm going to stick with film."
Zack Arnold: I would argue that part of the reason you have the mindset of an early adopter is you were surrounded by the epicenter of that culture in Silicon Valley. I would argue that largely informed a lot of the work that you created. But what I want to get into a little bit deeper is this mindset of being an early adopter. I can see very early in your career where you'd be young and hungry, but I've got to be honest, I've kind of transitioned to being the old curmudgeon that's like, "I like my buttons where they are, and heaven help you if you move my buttons." But you were an early adopter later in your career. You already had Oscars. What was it about your makeup and your mindset where you said, "I could edit Cold Mountain or any of my films in Avid, it's a very established workflow, it would just be easier," but you said, "Hold my beer, I'm going to figure out this brand new technology on this massive tentpole studio film"?
Walter Murch: Two things about that. In the early years of this century, Avid had basically cleared the field. There had been other competitors, but they had either dropped out completely or they were limping in the background, and I thought that's not entirely healthy. I had gotten the unhealthy end of that when I was editing Talented Mr. Ripley in Rome on an Avid, and Avid was less than cooperative with the problems that we were having. They were blaming it on third-party people, and it turned out that, no, it was in fact an Avid problem. So I thought, we need competition here to keep everyone on their game.
I was intrigued by the idea that, at that time, the digital systems essentially reduced the cost of the workprint to nothing. You could just click and make a copy. But the machines themselves were still very expensive. Here was Final Cut, and the idea was that now the machines themselves are not an expensive item, because you can edit on your laptop. I wanted to set that ball in motion in the industry, and obviously, that's what has happened. It was a combination of a bruised personal experience from Avid, who was king of the hill and they let you know it, and also just looking into the future to find a way that you could have an editing room where you could encourage the people you were working with to do first assemblies, because all they needed was their own laptop and the drives. That's the only way you can really learn how to edit: by editing. You have to learn the basics, but just like learning how to dance, until you get out on the floor and start to move your body, you don't know. The digital revolution really enabled that transition to happen.
Zack Arnold: I would also argue that the ubiquitous availability of all these new technologies during the digital revolution, for years, people were saying, "Well, now everybody's going to be making content." And here we are. Everybody and their mom and their dad has a YouTube channel, and everybody is generating content. But what that doesn't necessarily mean is that everybody is a great storyteller. Now that we're transitioning into this new world of artificial intelligence, I want to start broad. What are your thoughts about what's going on with artificial intelligence—generative AI, generating images, telling stories via prompts? What are your general thoughts about this latest transition?
Walter Murch: There's a little mini-chapter in In the Blink of an Eye where I talk about the black box and the snowflake. This was 20-plus, 30 years ago, and I said there will come the day when you can just think your film into existence. We're not there yet; we have to use prompts. But how long is it going to be before there's some little USB insert, and you don't have to articulate in words what you want to see? As a thought experiment, let's say that there is this black box, and the devil comes to you and says, "Here is something that will avoid all the problems of making a film. You can just take this box, attach these two little things, and think your film into the box. If you want to make changes, you think those changes."
That's not far from what a novelist does. There are no constraints on the imagination other than how can you tell a compelling story that is understandable and emotionally engaging. The filmmaker who lusts after this black box says to the devil, "What's the cost?" And the devil says, "Well, nothing much, just your immortal soul." There are many filmmakers who would say, "Here it is, give me that box." We're up to our ankles in that world right now with AI. In a few years, we'll be up to our knees, maybe our waist. What I predicted 25 years ago might actually come to pass.
Opposed to that is this idea of the snowflake, which is an analogy for the cumbersome but delightful randomness of actually making a film, where you're collaborating with a whole bunch of other people, with the weather, with actors, with cameramen. It's a cliche, but it's true: film is this great collaborative medium. The problem with that is that you have to be the general, as the director who inspires great work from your collaborators. That Sun Tzu quote from this ancient Chinese general: "That army fights best, who says, 'We did it ourselves.'" Real directing is inspirational.
What happens when you get everyone cooperating? It's kind of like that classic thing of the blind men feeling the elephant. This film is an elephant, and everyone is feeling it in their own way and making it at the same time. The great thing about that is that you get slight and interesting contradictions that arise out of the slightly different visions of the director, the cameraman, the production designer, the costume designer, the makeup person, the actors. As a result, when it works, you get a kind of spectral brilliance out of the film, just the way that happens with a diamond. When light goes into the diamond, it bounces around and it sparkles. You can feel that in a well-made collaborative film because the film is really smarter than any of the people who worked on it because of this collectivity. They're following it by their own instincts. So the danger of AI, I think, is that it allows for a monolithic vision when you push it to some extreme. Film, when it's really working, is more than that. The collectivity allows for something that is smarter than all of the people who were involved in it.
Zack Arnold: Not only is filmmaking the most collaborative of all the art forms, it's also the most multi-sensory. When you're in the theater, you're seeing things, you're hearing things; it's the most enveloping experience we can imagine. One of my greatest fears, separate from the political and legal conversations, is exactly what you said. If I have all the ideas coming out of myself and I can write a couple of paragraphs of a prompt and here's my finished product, well, then who's going to help me come up with the ideas that I never would have thought of?
I want to talk a little bit more about this process of how we communicate with AI. In In the Blink of an Eye, you have a chapter all about "Methods and Machines." Even though you were writing this about physical machines, you could copy and paste your own words for a new book about AI. I'm going to read the following: "Your choices can only be as good as your requests, and sometimes that's not enough. There's a higher level that comes through recognition. You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it." This process, specifically for editors, of going through all the dailies, the rushes—if we've eliminated the entire process of making the wrong choices, how is AI through one simple prompt going to lead us to the best result? It's not. So if you were going to move forwards and really embrace AI, what would you do in your own workflows to make sure that this continues to be very collaborative?
Walter Murch: I'll preface everything by saying I think we will figure all this out. We're so early in this that with the introduction of any new gadget, there's a period where that gadget is indulged. If you think back to the films that were made in the late 60s with the zoom lens, people grabbed hold of that, and suddenly there were these zooms. After a while, we thought, "Well, maybe not quite." It's a great tool, but we don't do that anymore. I think we're probably at that stage.
The problems that we're talking about are the problems of the novelist. Basically, the novelist is creating prompts for the imagination of the reader. The AI is happening inside the brain of the person who's reading those prompts, which is the text of the novel. When you read the book, everyone puts their own imagination into it. When you see the film, obviously, that's Al Pacino, photographed with a 45-millimeter lens with the sunlight at 57 degrees. We're aiming at some kind of fusion of the particularity of film and the imaginative landscape that a novelist works with. Talented novelists run into problems. That line that I just quoted about being smarter comes from Milan Kundera, a novelist, and he said the duty of the novelist is to create a novel that's smarter than he is. That's sort of the territory we're going into, which is unprecedented. It's a whole new thing where you can work on a film as a novelist, and yet with the specificity of the image and the sound.
Zack Arnold: When it comes to this idea of becoming the novelist, where we can just write a prompt, there's a couple of fears there. One is that the quality of storytelling could diminish. I think a much larger fear is one about actually being able to count on this work and there being a workforce for it. Because now, if one person with a few prompts can make a movie, that's the elimination of a workforce. I think there's also another fear here. One of the real conversations is, you don't even need the storytellers. You just pick up your remote, click the Siri button, and say, "Make me a 90-minute movie where me and Tom Cruise and a bunch of dancing pandas rob a bank." What happens to the storytelling collaborative process when now the storytellers are completely removed?
Walter Murch: There we are. It wouldn't be any good, let's say. We have to go back to—I forget who, Tallulah Bankhead or somebody said—"95% of everything is shit." That may be the future, but it's also the present. If you went back to 1872, the century of the novel, and read every novel that was printed and published, you would emerge with a big headache, probably because many of them were simply potboilers. And lo and behold, in this dung heap, there were a couple of diamonds, novels that have come down to us. It is something to be afraid of, but it's also part of the human condition.
Zack Arnold: You could argue the same thing about any year or decade in television and film. You can say, "Look at the amazing artwork that came from this period," and then look at everything else that was out there, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about all those." That, to me, is really what I wanted to talk to you about: not all the things that are changing, but the things that stay the same. Storytelling has essentially been around since the beginning of human existence. At the end of the day, I still believe we as humans are still going to gravitate to the best stories that help us make sense of the world. So let's talk about some of the things that have not changed since the beginning of filmmaking and storytelling, and how we can hang on to those to continue navigating this future.
Walter Murch: We don't have storytelling without language. The bottom floor of this skyscraper is somebody who is equipped with language talking to people who understand that language and capturing their imaginations. Let's say 150,000 years ago, maybe 200,000, that started. That's how the tribe coalesced, and the stories were told around the flickering campfire at night. One of you, who is the bard or the storyteller or the director, starts spinning a tale, and everyone looks into the flames and they imagine the story.
Fast forward 150,000 years, and that's essentially what we experience when we go into a movie theater. You're sitting with other members of the tribe, and you're looking at the flames—this flickering light on the screen. The difference here is that it's the flames that are coalescing the story itself, and we are all gripped by it collectively, if it's good. We emerge out of the theater different than when we went in. In the best sense, it has been a collective experience because we are picking up what the group of us is reacting to. That's the great and unmissable part of a collective experience of theater in any form. I don't think it's going to go away. It's part of what has made us human: this storytelling around the fire in a group.
We're in a period right now where we're kind of exhilarated by the fact that we're kings or queens, and we have our magic wand, and we press it, and boom, up comes whatever it is on that screen. But what's missing from that inevitably is the fact that you are in control of it. If you don't like it, you take your scepter and you swap off its head and switch to another channel. The real difference of the cinematic, collective experience is that you have to displace yourself in time. You have to be there at a certain time, and you can't stop it if you don't like it. The only alternative you have is to get up and leave. But stick with it, and you have this experience.
Zack Arnold: This idea of going to see films in the cinema, or frankly, watching the same television shows at the same time, is the collective experience that is so important but we're also severely lacking. But we can see that we're already gravitating back to that. I would argue the reason we're now screaming that the sky is falling again is that we've just stopped making really, really good films that require the collective experience. An exception, as of this recording, is the latest Mission: Impossible. When I saw it was coming out, I said to my family, "We have to see that in the theater." It was the collective experience of watching these stunts and feeling all this energy in a group. I don't think we're going to lose that anytime soon.
I'm still hopeful because we need that collective storytelling experience, but we also need great storytellers creating those experiences. The modes in which we're going to do it will completely change. I love quotes, and one that I think you and I share is from Dwight Eisenhower, where he essentially says, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." We're in a state of emergency right now, where your plans are going to go out the window, but we should still be planning.
Let's say that we were to rewind to where you were in your career, well-established but transitioning from film to digital, embracing Final Cut Pro. Imagine that's the stage of your career, but we were to move you to today. What would your plan be? What storytelling skills would you want to continue to learn and double down on? What are the other skills or technologies that you would start to embrace?
Walter Murch: That's a basket of spiky pineapples. The unique thing about film is that it talks to multiple levels of our conscious and unconsciousness. The shorthand version of the human brain is that it's really three nested brains. There's the instinctual brain stem. Then there's a middle level, the mammalian level, where we have emotion and feelings of tribalism. And then there is this new part, which is specifically human, our neocortex, our logical forebrain, where language and logic happen. The ability of film is to talk to each of those levels at a level that it understands.
The stories that are going to be most powerful are mythic, in the broadest possible use of that word. When you experience that story, you feel centered somehow, because the filmmaking is aligning those three brains in a way that under our daily experience, we don't usually. They're usually out of kilter with each other. A good film that's organized orchestrally is integrating those elements. Films can be very sentimental or make you angry, but they also have to make sense. That's a difficult and very human thing to do. And that's where I think saying to an AI, "Give me a heist film with Tom Cruise and a bunch of pandas," would be amusing, but it wouldn't resonate.
Ultimately, if there's any problem with filmmaking today, it's that we're overusing some of the same mythic tropes, so they become shopworn and a little familiar. The only way to turn up the dial on that is to do even more amazing stunts and visual effects and soundtracks. But there's a limit. If 200 decibels is the death rate, your brain turns to soup. We just can't keep getting louder and louder.
Zack Arnold: This idea of the mythic quest really comes back to the foundation of just about all great stories, which is the hero's journey. But like you said, when you turn the volume up to 200 decibels, it's just about being bombarded with sensory input. It's great as long as we hold to these true ideals of telling this hero's journey and following somebody on their quest. That's what creates that collective experience of empathy. Talking into the remote and saying, "This is what I want you to create for me," will probably be an amazing parlor trick, but it's not going to scratch that itch we have for feeling something that helps us understand our human experience.
Another area where you and I have a lot in common is I'm very nerdy when it comes to neuroscience and the brain. I'm having a supplemental interview with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, who talks about the three networks of the brain, including the default mode network, or the imagination network, which is allowing yourself to be bored and being creative. This is one of the most important things that I learned from you in my early days. It wasn't just about the tools; it was get outside and look at a tree or watch a sunset. Those are the things that I think are going to stay the same, regardless of the technology. So let's end by talking about your process throughout the years because of your longevity and your sharpness. I don't think we can leave today's conversation without talking about how you have done this at the level you've done it for six decades.
Walter Murch: A wonderful, loving, and understanding wife. This year, we've been married for 60 years.
Zack Arnold: Wow, congratulations. Of all your accomplishments, I would say that might be the biggest one.
Walter Murch: Absolutely. And neither of us, when we met, were involved in movies. That happened later. Filmmaking is uncertain and turbulent, and there are wonderful things that happen and great disappointments. She's stuck with me, and we have four kids. That's a whole other preamble to the discussion, but that's essential. That's something I write about in the second volume of Suddenly Something Clicked, which is waiting to be published. The book that's coming out in July is Volume One, which centers on post-production. But the other volumes go much further afield into human behavior and how do you stay healthy and keep on an even keel.
Zack Arnold: I can assure you I'm going to be one of the very first on the pre-order lists, specifically for Volume Two, because that's the intersection I've lived at for over a decade. It's not just the creative process, but how we do it as healthy, sane human beings. It's one of the many reasons I wanted you here today, because we're getting so lost in the weeds of all the uncertainty and terror. I just feel like so many people are losing sight of what's most important, which is their health and the quality of their relationships. You couldn't have accomplished what you have if you were just nose-down to the grindstone, 20 hours a day for decades.
So where I want to now leave us is, there are a lot of people listening to this right now that are just scared. They've lost hope. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is paramount to leave everybody with so we can walk away with hope and feel excited about what's to come, rather than terrified?
Walter Murch: It ties into what we were talking about a few minutes ago, which is, what are the stories that we are telling? Clearly, in the world today, specifically in the United States, there's a fracturing of what stories we are telling ourselves that pull us together. The history of the last 20-plus years is that there's a widening gap there. I think it's an animalistic understanding that, wait a minute, in the old days, the United States was unquestionably at the top of the global heap. Now there are these other things we have to take into consideration, mainly China and other global superpowers. We used to be a big manufacturing country, and we're not anymore. So what do we do? What is our role? We need a new myth, in the broadest sense of that word, a story that binds us and all of humanity together in a way that right now is under pretty heavy bombardment.
In addition to all of the uncertainties of the industry, there's this deeper uncertainty, which is what's down the road in 10 or 20 years. Our generation was lucky in that we only had to worry about the atomic bomb, and it was a big worry. And specifically, we had to worry about the war in Vietnam, which was spinning out of control. The film industry and other creative artists started to spin stories to help resolve those issues. So there's a triple-barreled series of problems that confront us, not just as filmmakers, but just humanity in general is confronting things that are, I'm just going to use that word again, unprecedented. So good luck to us.
Zack Arnold: Well, having said that, I want to end where we started, which is with this quote you had said amidst all this uncertainty on your first day of film school: "If the whole house is crumbling down, we might as well do something." From all of this darkness and uncertainty, I hope that amazing stories come from this, and it's coming from our current and our next generation of storytellers.
Walter Murch: There's that quote, I forget who said it, but the human collective is bound together by the stories that we tell about who we are and what our goal is. We're way out at the edge of the diving board here, and we need a story that pulls us together, because right now, those stories are few and far between, and we're experiencing this fracturing.
Zack Arnold: My hope is that by having this conversation, there will be a handful, if not many, people that are inspired to become those storytellers that help us make sense of this giant shitstorm that is life right now. So having said that again, Walter, I literally cannot emphasize enough how meaningful this conversation was to me. I cannot thank you enough. Is there one good place to send everybody to get your new book or learn more about you? I'm guessing you're probably not on TikTok.
Walter Murch: No, I'm not on TikTok. There is a website not done by me called the Murchopedia, like encyclopedia, that is pretty up-to-date with all of the stuff that I've posted and interviews like this that are available online, and also access to the books I've written and other things.
Zack Arnold: I'll make sure I provide a link to the Murchopedia. What a brilliant term to encapsulate all the value and knowledge you've brought to our industry. So once again, Walter, thank you so much for being with us today.
Walter Murch: Thank you.
Edited by: Curtis Fritsch
Produced by: Debby Germino
Published by: Vim Pangantihon
Music by: Thomas Cepeda
Beyond Chris’ detailed explanation, we dive deep into how you can use the principles of the Hero’s Journey to both understand and change the story of your own life.
