[MUSIC PLAYING]
I don't in any way want to take away
from the power of the image.
There is nothing more powerful.
We say the cliche--
a picture is worth a thousand words.
And indeed it is.
But you cannot also deny how important these oral components
are--
the words spoken, the songs sung, the music played,
the effects in all their glory.
Whatever it is, this can be hugely important
and the most dynamic elements at times.
And all you have to do to prove what I am saying
is take just a run of the mill horror film.
The teenage girl's in her pajamas.
She's leaving her bedroom.
We know something bad is happening.
And she's heading to the bathroom down the hall.
So turn off the volume, and it's nothing.
Put back the volume, and you know,
whether it's Bernard Herrmann in "Psycho" in the shower scene,
that is a huge part of the dynamic of what's going on.
You can see in the opening of the Vietnam film,
there's a moment when we add the most horrible banshee
scream to some footage of the confusion of soldiers
and that first PTSD where they're rolling over.
And there's two or three cuts and a guy just goes like this.
We don't know what it was, but we
added this distant, horrific, banshee scream.
And if that didn't in some ways get your attention,
then I don't know what will.
[HELICOPTER ROTORS]
[GUN FIRE]
[EXPLOSIONS]
[HELICOPTER ROTORS]
[GUN FIRE]
[EERIE SCREAM]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You want to use everything at your disposal
to ask people to let go of the compelling narrative that
is their life and to submit to the narrative
that we think will add to their life.
And among the many tools in the toolbox
to do that is to have sound so realistic that it
can be startling--
where fighter planes pass by and through.
And the modern sound and technology
has permitted us to do so many wonderful things.
And I was always sort of disappointed
in the soundtrack of so many documentaries
that seem to have, you know, two different sounds.
One was troops tramping.
And the other was cannons firing.
And that was it.
We sort of felt that if we were going
to try to will these old photographs alive,
we had to get into a very, very, complex sound effects.
And we have done this with increasing, I think,
complexity as we have moved along.
So that in the "Civil War", in the middle of Gettysburg,
I think we had 26 tracks going at once.
Now, I think the maximum number of tracks in the Vietnam film
was 160 in the middle of the Tet Offensive.
Most of the footage we receive is MOS--
without sound.
And we have to build it from scratch.
And so we do that.
And it is a huge, important part of what we do.
And we spend a long time sound spotting.
That is to say, we edit with three or four
effects tracks by the time we get to rough cut.
And then maybe by the time we lock,
we may have a few more tracks than that.
But then we open it up to many.
And we spend a lot of time thinking
about when it should be that 150 tracks going,
and when it should be nothing.
And what you're trying to do is talk mostly about what
you want to hear there, and not making too many things
that you muddy things up.
Sometimes, you'll just be looking at a house.
And you might want to hear a dog barking and a screen door
slamming.
Now, you're not exactly sure.
That's what you say.
That's what they write down.
But they're going to give you a car pass,
even though you don't see a car.
They're going to give you light traffic.
They're going to give you some birds and things like that.
And you might end up using all of that with the dog
and the screen door sort of out front.
Or you find the screen doors too hokey at that moment.
The more difficult thing is, what do you
do with something that doesn't necessarily
suggest that you do everything?
What happens?
There's a moment in the Tet Offensive
when one of the characters we've been following
named Bill Earhart is concussed by an explosion that
goes by near him.
It dazes him.
It kills somebody near him.
And he can't hear for a while.
And so all of a sudden the din of the Tet Offensive,
running on all those dozens--
scores and scores of tracks--
suddenly goes silent.
Except, it's not really silent.
There's a heartbeat going on.
You're hearing him talking a little bit.
And then gradually, the stuff that you're watching
comes back up.
It's one of the best moments.
[GUN FIRE]
[YELLING]
[EXPLOSION]
EXPERT: February 5th, I was wounded by a B-40 rocket.
I was utterly stone deaf.
Under any other circumstances, I would have been evacuated.
But I could see.
I could walk.
And I could shoot.
So I stayed.
[SOFT HEARTBEAT]
[DISTANT GUNFIRE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Early in my professional life editing the Civil War,
I violated what was then an unwritten rule,
but one that was no less certain,
that you never in documentary film
ran effects under a talking head.
That if let-- if you were were affecting some historical
thing, when you went to the expert, that was--
I'm going why?
This expert's trying to bring this battle alive.
Why would I end the effects?
And so much to the consternation of one of our editors,
I said, just do it.
Let's just see.
Of course, it worked.
And it was great.
And what happened is, you didn't fall out of that moment.
And it made you feel like you were at Shiloh in April of 1862
not in wherever you were in September of 1990.
NARRATOR: Covering the Confederate retreat
was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who now turned
to lead one last cavalry charge, headlong
into the pursuing northern army.
EXPERT: And he landed square in the main body of the Union
troops.
He was surrounded by one gray uniform in a sea of blue.
And they began to holler, kill him.
Kill the goddamn rebel.
Knock him off his horse.
And one soldier did stick his rifle out into Forrest's side
and pulled the trigger.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For me, one of the most difficult scenes I've ever had
to edit and contemplate was the death-- the assassination--
of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865.
He died actually the next morning on the 15th
in a boarding house across the street.
That scene was difficult for me.
I didn't go to Ford Theater to do the live cinematography.
I contented myself to stay in the relative safety
of the editing room.
But you beware, because what we're trying to do
is wake the dead and make them come alive.
And all of a sudden, it became very poignant.
So we've got lots of stuff going on.
We've got the sounds of the bullet.
We have the sound of the auditorium.
We have coughing, what's called "walla,"
the sound of people talking.
We have laughter.
We have the door slams.
We have the footfalls.
We have a narrator telling us what's setting it up.
And I think it's a pretty good example of what would happen
if you turned down the sound.
You would see almost very, very little of what was going on.
I mean, it would not have any dynamics and any dimension
and shape to it.
Most of it would be a very slow excruciating
zoom from an empty Ford's Theater up to the box
where he was killed.
That's the dominant image of what
I've just described to you.
So that tells you that what I've just
described you is only a small fraction visual, and the rest
oral, and oral in so many different ways.
ACTRESS: Nasty beast.
[LAUGHTER]
ACTRESS 2: Sir, your vulgarity renders you
intolerable in polite society.
[LAUGHTER]
ACTOR: Maybe I don't know the manners of polite society,
but I guess I know enough to turn you inside out old gal,
you sockdologizing old man trap.
[LAUGHTER]
[GUN SHOT]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The most important aspect of our process
is making sure we have enough time.
We just know that for these ideas, the story--
written story, the story--
edited story, the visual story, the musical story,
the effects story, they take time.
And you can't rush it.
Nobody just wants to see the tramp, tramp, tramp
of German troops in Paris.
You need to have some other sound there.
And it's got to be--
we go the extra mile.
And we had the Walpole cops out.
And we were firing in the woods AK-47s and M-16 rifles
to get better sound effects than we thought
that we had to sweeten it.
We got in some cases in the middle
of the Tet Offensive, which is just hell come to earth,
150, 160 tracks.
They have to be made somehow.
And we get letters from people about birds.
We learned really early on we cannot put a bird in a scene
in a place that that bird doesn't exist.
And we would get letters.
You had a certain bird in North Dakota.
They don't fly that high.
So we now keep bird books in the editing room
just to make sure--
or when we're sound cutting just to make sure we get it right.
We want to be able to say we want
to do the best job that we possibly can
and not sell ourselves down the winter.
And it may be out of that little TV
set of yours nothing you ever hear.
But somebody, somewhere, might hear what we hear in the play
back at the big studio, you know, with the great speakers.
And we want it to sound as good for that person
as it does for us.