Editing

Editing 'Cold Mountain' consumed some sixteen months, beginning as soon as shooting commenced in July 2002. Celebrated editor, Walter Murch, worked out of his Mirage suite at the Old Chapel Studios, London and at the Kodak Cinelabs in Bucharest, which afforded valuable access to telecine, sound transfer and 35mm projection.

Murch ran rushes as a silent movie, preferring simply to lip read the players as he responded creatively to the visual music of production. Another of his distinctive editing strategies was to work with 'the idea that Inman was actually killed in the battle, and that it was his ghost - a ghost who doesn't know he's dead - who goes through all these adventures trying to get back home …The overtones of that idea are always hovering around the edges of each scene, informing in subtle ways where the cut points are, what reaction shots we used, and so on.'

Given two parallel narratives throughout, the film constantly challenged Murch to defy the script inventively to, say, linger longer with one strand for the comparative lightness of its image. Murch would experiment with juxtaposing sequences to visually orchestrate the movie's thematic counterpointing of love and cruelty, humour and anguish. In attempting to balance the programmed and the random, Murch explains, 'I have a personality that tends toward the organised so I organise my organising so that there are areas when I'm in freefall: I can't rely on the organisation. I mix together a plan of what I'm going to do and take very careful notes about everything: 1500 pages of typed notes on every take of 'Cold Mountain'!' Kaleidoscopic sceneboards of low-resolution screengrab scans (each referenced to his copious notes) covered the walls of his studio, enabling Murch to handcraft scenes by physically rearranging them while constructing edits.

A colossal 600,000 feet of film negative were digitally processed through the Bucharest lab; some 113 hours of rushes! Sydney Pollack, (Minghella's business partner), euphemistically describes as 'some elaboration' Minghella's practice of 'generating an enormous amount of material and then sculpting it with Murch into something that gets gradually more defined and more pointed.' Minghella admits that he always severely overshoots but argues 'It's part of the thing of being both director and writer of the screenplay. The rule of thumb is one page of script for one minute of movie. But with me it's nearer three minutes per page! Walter lectures me because too many things happen in the script.'

The first edit still resulted in a massive five-hour assembly; fortunately, they had 1.2 terabytes of storage space.

For this movie, the innovative Murch intrigued Hollywood by abandoning the ubiquitous Avid digital editing platform (with which he had earned a double Oscar for 'The English Patient') in preference for Apple's desktop Final Cut Pro (v.3) editing software. 'We were able to have four Final Cut Pro workstations, fully equipped, for less than we would have to spend for one Avid station,' he explains. 'And to have four workstations working on a feature film is a significant improvement over what you usually have, which is two … In addition, we were able to create what you would call satellite stations on four laptops equipped with Final Cut, offload the media for a number of sequences, and continue to work. So if we ever got into a situation where suddenly there was a huge amount of footage, we were able to expand out to eight working stations!' And every day he would mail his edited rushes - burned as DVD 'dailies' – to Minghella (on location 3 hours away) and to producer, Sydney Pollack (8000 miles distant in Los Angeles).