"Who's interested in these people, anyway?" Stan asks. One of Harry's crosses is that Stan is irreverent about their work, which to Harry is a sacred calling. Later we find out who's interested: Harry has been hired by the director of a large corporation (Robert Duvall), although at first he deals only with the man's assistant (Harrison Ford). It becomes clear that Ann, the young woman, is the director's wife, and Mark, the young man, is her lover. But what will happen next? "He'd kill us if he had the chance," says Mark. Will he? Harry plays the tapes back and forth, juggling a bank of three tape recorders, in a scene Coppola says was partly inspired by the photographer trying to coax the truth out of his prints in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up." Snatches of conversation advance and recede, maddeningly mixed with a band in the plaza that's playing "Red, Red Robin."The Rumble in the Jungle

While The Conversation was one first films to use sound almost as an additional character, it merely a warm-up for what Murch would do on Apocaplyse Now, voted in 2002 as the best film of the past 25 years by England's prestigeous Sight and Sound magazine.

Over twenty years after its release, I wrote:

If this film doesn't have the greatest audio ever recorded (the eerie 20th century classical synthesized rumble in the jungle can't separate the score from the sound effects soundtrack), it's right up there. I take it back--this has to be the greatest soundtrack ever recorded--Walter Murch is one the great technicians in Hollywood.

What makes Murch's work on Apocalypse even more amazing was that--as Murch explains to Ondaatje--virtually none of the sound that Coppola and his crew recorded on location in the Phillipines (Apocalypse's stand-in for Vietnam) was usable. So every sound on the film was reconstructed by Murch in Bay Area recording studios.

In one of the crucial sound effects of the film, Murch chose to recreate most of the sounds of the film's helicopter rotors on a synthesizer, rather than use actual sound effects. That "can't separate the score from the sound effects soundtrack" of Apocalypse began with that key idea, which ironically enough was inspired by a birthday party and a ball game. As Murch describes it to Ondaatje:

I remember very clearly the moment I got one idea for sound in Apocalypse Now. It was after the filming, at a party up at Francis's house--I think it was Marty Sheen's birthday. He was a baseball fan, and Francis had made Marty think he was going to miss a baseball game by delaying the party. Then at just the right moment he revealed that there was a helicopter waiting to fly Marty to Candlestick Park to catch the game.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4