Apocalypse Now REDUX
By Larry Blake
Every film, from a Mini-DV short to a $130
million-budgeted Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, is hard to make. And
while the gap between conception and execution is wide for everyone,
some filmmakers not only set near-impossible goals, but succeed
spectacularly in the process.
Stanley Kubrick labored for four years making 2001: A Space
Odyssey, virtually inventing modern special effects. The budget
and schedule for Jaws more than doubled while Steven
Spielberg kept his eye on what would make the film tick. George Lucas redefined
visual effects nine years after 2001 with Star Wars,
putting the film on the screen for less than $10 million.
But in terms of sheer drama, no film's production and
post-production holds a candle to Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
From the changing of the lead actor one month into shooting, to sets
being destroyed by a typhoon two months after that, to the heart
attack of his next lead actor… principal photography
dragged on in the Philippines for 238 days over 14 months. It wasn't
finished by any stretch, with post-production lasting a still-record
26 months. Oh, yes, did we mention that Coppola was personally
responsible for more than half of the $30 million budget? When all was
said and done, the film that was released on August 15, 1979, was
well-received by the filmgoing public and film cognoscenti
alike.
The reception by the film sound community was unanimous in its
praise, and to this day the sound job is regarded as the ne plus
ultra in terms of creative use of the medium. The track was
crafted in San Francisco by a large crew headed by Walter Murch, whose
“Sound Design” credit was accorded “billing block” status on
posters. (It read “Sound Montage and Design” on film prints.) The
picture and sound departments were staffed by more than a dozen future
luminaries in film sound, among them Richard Beggs, Mark Berger,
George Berndt, Jay Boekelheide, Doug Hemphill, Pat Jackson, Michael
Kirchberger, John Nutt, David Parker, Jerry Ross, Tom Scott, Leslie
Shatz, Dale Strumpell and Randy Thom.
This month, Apocalypse Now will have its first
theatrical re-release in more than 15 years. While most of the
original film remains intact, 49 minutes of deleted scenes have been
put back in, resulting in a definitive version, now titled Apocalypse
Now Redux.
THE ORIGINAL MIX
As the release date of Apocalypse Now was set and moved
back many times during the extended post-production period, some ended
up working on the film for over two years. Led by supervising sound
editor Richard Cirincione, Apocalypse's sound crew comprised
top editors from San Francisco, New York and London. During this time,
a partial music score was composed and then discarded, while the sound
team recorded more than 200 rolls of sound effects. Because the
Department of Defense in no way assisted Coppola in the production of
the film, the intrepid editors would say that they were working for
their own companies in order to gain access to Army training
exercises.
The eight-month (yes, this is also probably a record)
re-recording schedule resulted in what can certainly be called the
first 5.1-channel mix, in that it makes full use of stereo surrounds
and low-frequency enhancement. (Although the Dolby 70mm 6-track
“split surround” format was developed for Superman in
1978, that film played in less than a handful of such engagements
worldwide.)
Apocalypse Now was mixed by Murch, Berger and Beggs in
circumstances quite in contrast to the then-standard practice in
Hollywood. In Southern California, most of the consoles were by
Quad-Eight, most of the rooms were huge, automation was used
infrequently, and, perhaps most importantly, the lines were drawn
quite dramatically between picture editing and sound editorial and
re-recording.
Up in San Francisco's North Beach district, Murch's initial work
on the film was as picture editor (along with Richard Marks, Gerald
Greenberg and Lisa Fruchtman). Beggs was not only the music
re-recording mixer, he also recorded the narration and was one of the
six synthesists who “realized” the score by Coppola and his
father, Carmine. Almost everyone was involved at some point with
recording sound effects, much of which recently became available in a
Hollywood Edge CD set.
The Pacific Avenue mix room at Coppola's American Zoetrope was
designed by Jeff Cooper in the only space available, a long, thin area
with a relatively low ceiling. The mix room was 20×40 feet long, and
the MCI JH-500 Series console was only about 15 feet from the screen.
Because the board had only 28 automated, full-featured inputs,
extensive premixing was required to whittle down the 175-plus tracks
cut for the busier reels. Furthermore, because the machine room only
had seven mag film dubbers, edited 35mm stripe and 2-track stereo cut
elements were “regrouped” seven units at a time onto dbx-encoded
24-track, 2-inch tape to allow the console to be filled up during
premixes, which also utilized dbx noise reduction.
To interlock the multitrack machines with the Multi-Track
Magnetics film chain, Zoetrope chose the Minimag system manufactured
by API, which used a proprietary timecode different from today's SMPTE/EBU
standard. The Minimag system controlled the capstan of the Ampex
MM-1100 machines, with locations fed by a reel of 35mm mag containing
the timecode.
The sound effects premixes, of which there were up to six per
reel, were not spread out in clearly defined groups as is customary
today, with backgrounds, Foley and hard effects of various flavors
each commanding one or more 6- or 8-track premixes. Some films today
have up to 20 of these premixes playing at the final mix.
Because their effects premixes were a quilt of many different
colors, with speaker assignments changing constantly, the Apocalypse
mix crew had to keep detailed notes as to what elements were occupying
a track at any given moment. For example, on reel 6 (the second part
of the helicopter attack), effects premix 1 contains Foley, fire,
surf, PBR (Patrol Boats, River: the type of boat the crew is on) and
verts. (“Verts” was Murch's term for “vertical effects,” which
are essentially one-off events, as opposed to “horizontal” effects
that occur throughout the film, such as backgrounds, PBR and
helicopters. To bring a flow and consistency of style, sound editors
were assigned specific elements instead of doing everything for a
given reel, the then-standard practice in Hollywood.)
Higher math shows that neither the board nor the machine room
would allow for all premixes dialog, music and effects to be hung at
the final mix. The solution lay in dubbing the five effects premixes
into one or two 6-track effects “combines,” while the near-final
music, dialog and narration were playing on the small faders through
the monitor only, having themselves been regrouped to 2-inch to free
up the dubbers. A similar technique was used during music premixing,
with dialog and effects combines or premixes playing in the monitor
while music was folded down from multitrack to 6-track mag.
The engineering staff at Zoetrope, which was at that time headed
by Wayne Wagner, performed extensive modifications on the console to
adapt it for film mixing, among them retrofitting the MCI automation
with four “quad” joysticks. All four could be used if only four
quadrants (left/center/right/mono surround, or
left/right/left-surround/right-surround) were needed. If 5-channel
panning was desired, then two joysticks were used in series. The first
panned through left, center and right, with the fourth quadrant
feeding the second joystick, two of whose outputs were assigned to
left- and right-surrounds. Automation data for Apocalypse was
recorded on a separate piece of 3-track mag, bouncing between tracks.
(An early investigation to record the data on hard drives came up with
a $10,000 estimate!)
While automation had been in use previously in Hollywood and New
York (mostly in the form of the Quad-Eight CompuMix system), it can
safely be stated that Apocalypse was the first time that a
complex stereo film mix used, and ultimately depended on, automation
to such a degree. The level of fine-tuning that the crew was making
throughout the eight-month mix period having to step back and update
complex premixes and, especially, effects combines with additional
elements, for example would have been nerve-wracking at best without
automation.
During the last week of the mix in August 1979, the crew created
two identical 6-track printmasters. One was sent to MGM Studios in Los
Angeles as the “sounding master” for the initial 70mm prints,
while the other was kept in San Francisco as the vault master. It was
also used to create the initial 35mm stereo optical mix.
Although the 6-track mix was noted for its creative use of
surrounds, the 1979 Lt-Rt of Apocalypse contained no
(intentional) surround information, so great was Murch's fear of the
downside of badly aligned surrounds.
VIDEO MIXES
The first special video version of Apocalypse was the
one prepared (read: sanitized) for broadcast on ABC in 1982. The
standards and practices department had Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert
Duvall) refer to himself as a “goofy guy,” because they were
afraid that someone might mis-hear his original “goofy foot.” (One
wonders if anyone at ABC was aware of Jim Morrison's repeated
“fucks” during the performance of “The End” in the reel 1
montage.)
The real movie was first revisited in 1991, when
picture and sound were remastered for release on laserdisc. This mix
was made 2-track only, creating a new Lt-Rt on a DASH ¼-inch deck,
incorporating the stereo surround channels into the matrix format. At
this time, the staff at Coppola's American Zoetrope realized that the
two first-generation 6-track printmasters had disappeared; they have
never been found despite a worldwide search. The unthinkable
possibility no extant version of the 6-track mix of Apocalypse
save for what could be transferred from worn 70mm mag stripe prints
was avoided by a bizarre, fortuitous circumstance.
In the early '80s, Les Hodgson, one of the Apocalypse
sound team from England, was walking through Pine-wood Studios in
London when he recognized the label on boxes of mag that were in a
dumpster. On closer inspection, the label proved familiar, because it
was from Zoetrope and corresponded to the elaborate color codes used
during the Apocalypse mix. Indeed, this was a Dolby A-Type
X-copy of the 6-track master that had been made as a guide to assist
mixers in England when making the foreign-language versions in 1979.
Hodgson rescued these elements and sent them back to Murch in San
Francisco; they remain the only record of the original
English-language mix.
The moves on all of the elements at the final mix (dialog and
music premixes, effects combine and narration single-stripe) were
recorded only to the composite 6-track English printmasters. No
separate 6-track stems of the main food groups were ever made for
archival purposes, in some small part because the crew assumed that
they could put up the final mix elements and replay the automation.
Murch remembers that “it seemed as if the automated board solved all
these issues. We never figured we would need stems.” (It would be
glib to say that, among the film's many other “records,” the Apocalypse
crew was the first to be bitten by too much reliance on automation,
except for the fact that virtually all films in 1979 were mixed to a
composite printmaster only. By these standards, they were ahead of the
game with their effects combines. Stem recording became a worldwide
standard practice for stereo films a few years later.)
Murch's next opportunity to polish the mix came in 1997, when he
was preparing the film for 6-track AC-3 laserdisc release. The
original printmasters were not in today's standard left/center/right/Lfe/left-surround/right-surround
format. In order to get stereo surrounds from the six tracks on 70mm
prints while ensuring compatibility with standard mono surround
playback, Dolby Labs came up with a method of “bandpass encoding”
high-frequency stereo surround information on tracks 2 and 4,
“above” the space that was devoted to “baby boom”
low-frequency enhancement. The standard mono surround track 6
contained low-frequency information for all mono and stereo surround
playback, plus a combine of HF from tracks 2 and 4.
Because this now-obsolete bandpass encoding would have to be
deconstructed every time the master would be handled, Murch decided to
create a new element optimized for modern 5.1 playback. This new Dolby
SR-encoded printmaster was made at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in
Berkeley, Calif.
For those keeping score, this was the seventh generation for
dialog in Apocalypse: original ¼-inch Nagra recording, 35mm
cut element, 2-inch dbx-encoded regroup, 35mm 6-track dbx premix, 35mm
Dolby A-Type printmaster, 35mm A-Type “dumpster X-copy,” 35mm
SR-encoded 5.1 channel “Saul Zaentz” master. Effects went one
more, with the 35mm 6-track dbx combine. Music went three generations
original multitrack recording, dbx-encoded 24-track “wide” premix
into quad groupings, and 35mm 6-track dbx premix prior to the final
three printmasters.
GOING BACK
In the era of DVDs (and, formerly, laserdiscs), extended
“director's cuts” of many top films from the '70s and '80s are
commonplace. Apocalypse Now was as good a candidate as any,
not only because of its classic status, but also because many film
buffs have long had bootleg copies of an early five-hour rough cut.
Zoetrope has a library deals, dating back to 1998, with
Paramount Pictures (which has distributed the video versions of Apocalypse)
and Canal Plus of France, that if Coppola wished to create a
director's cut, they would each kick in a certain percentage of the
costs up to a certain amount. However, as Kim Aubry, Zoetrope VP of
engineering and technology and producer of ANR, notes,
theatrical release was not initially considered. “We always just
thought that it would be under $500,000 to do the editing and sound,
and we thought we'd just use the television elements. But the further
we got into it, the more we became convinced that once you open the
door to this project, you really are back in film mode. It became
obvious that we would need to deliver a reproducible film element
[negative] and a new video master would need to be made.”
Murch always had doubts about going back to the film whose world
he had lived in for more than two years: “I was afraid of getting
off the boat and going back into that jungle, in addition to having
mixed feelings philosophically and practically. Plays and symphonies
have different performances, but what is a film that you then keep
changing it?”
In 1998, Murch worked on the restoration of Orson Welles' Touch
of Evil, incorporating sound and picture concepts that Welles had
written of, but not been able to execute personally. “This broke
down my reserve and I was more open to the idea,” Murch says. His
assistant picture editor on Touch of Evil, Sean Cullen, did
preliminary investigation into Apocalypse elements in fall
1999, and picture editing began in April 2000. Murch gives special
praise to Cullen and to Catherine Craig, Zoetrope's archivist, for
keeping track of all of the material. Aubry hired Michael Kirchberger,
who had worked on the film as a picture assistant back during
shooting, to be supervising sound editor of the restoration (which was
then informally called, of course, AN2K).
There was some previously edited 35mm workprint and worktrack of
the scenes being considered for the new film, and what was still
around was “various shades of pink and white,” according to Aubry.
Cullen and Murch's son, Walter, reconstituted these scenes into their
original daily rolls, and then this material was screened in
Zoetrope's basement theater, as “dailies.” There was also a U-Matic
video copy of the film's first assembly in May 1977. Murch avoided
looking at this, as he “deliberately didn't want to tamper with
[his] brain circuitry, one way or the other.” However, when he
finished editing a scene, he did look at its 1977 version as “a
double-check, a security lock, to make sure that we hadn't missed
anything essential.”
16+6=4?
The film negative of the trims and outtakes had been safely
stored in the National Underground Storage facility built into the
side of a mountain in Pennsylvania. The required material was shipped
to San Francisco and transferred silent to Betacam SP tape at
Zoetrope's telecine facility for digitizing into the Avid. To allow
for seamless intercutting of old and new, the letterbox matte matched
that of the 1998 telecine that was made for the DVD release. The
aspect ratio of this matte, as chosen by the film's cinematographer,
Vittorio Storaro, is 2:1, cropping some of the side of the original
2.40:1 anamorphic image. This controversial decision was intended to
be a compromise between proper wide-screen framing and the relatively
limited resolution of NTSC video. (The cropping did come back to haunt
them in one scene where a character outside of the visible frame was
speaking unbeknownst to the crew during the sound edit and mix. One
cheated line and printmaster fix later, all was well.)
Aubry notes that “at a very early point in this process, we
conceived that the old eight [projection] reels of Apocalypse
were not meaningful to us as eight reels. Instead, what was important
was that we had three video acts, soon to become four.” So, where
the sound elements for the original film were divided into 16 reels,
with another six reels of new scenes to come, the picture and sound
editorial teams decided to work exclusively in the video act format.
Because the re-editing of original camera negative is a serious
and permanent decision, it was initially decided to edit together
interpositives of both the new AN2K material and the 1979
film, leaving the latter untouched in its original form. However, on
the urging of Storaro, it was decided to make prints in the recently
revived Technicolor dye transfer process, which requires going direct
from original negative to three separation matrices that cannot be
edited.
Each of the four acts, as edited by Murch in the Avid, would
comprise multiple theatrical reels of negative, with many of the new
reel breaks different from the original locations due to the addition
of new material. Murch took the opportunity to tighten up the first
and last shots of reels that had originally been left a little bit
loose to allow for the vagaries of changeover projection. However,
with virtually all theaters today splicing reels together on platters,
not to mention that the primary goal of the restoration was for home
video, he cut what he felt was the best timings, period.
The sound for the shots that had been telecined was transferred
from the original 7.5 ips ¼-inch Scotch 208 Nagra tapes to 16-bit
DTRS at the 44.1kHz sample rate, the standard for all work on ANR.
(The production sound team on Apocalypse was Nat Boxer and
Jack Jacobsen. Boxer is one of a handful of lead production sound
people who function primarily as boom operator and not as the mixer.)
When the picture department loaded the DTRS tapes into the Avid
for synching, they discovered first-hand a well-worn piece of Apocalypse
Now lore: A significant portion of the film was shot out of sync.
To be more precise, the crystals on the Nagra recorder and on the
Technovision-modified Mitchell and Arriflex cameras didn't agree. The
cameras were running fast (or the Nagra slow), and therefore sound had
to be removed from the mag during dailies synching, approximately a
frame every 100 feet.
This initially was discovered in the Philippines during dailies
synching by associate editor George Berndt, who came back in 2000 to
cut ADR on ANR. Everything in the shooting and transfer chain
was checked and re-checked, although the exact source of the problem
was never found.
The modern tools at the picture department's disposal allowed
them to calculate the drift of the offending takes and export the
material to Pro Tools, where a 99.94% time-compressed track was
bounced and then re-imported into the Avid for eventual OMF export.
The production sound rolls were threaded up occasionally to find fill
or alternate readings, and Kirchberger recalls how the voice slates
were a microcosm of the mood of the endless shooting schedule: “The
first were a crisp, ‘This… is Apocalypse Now, scene x,
take x’ [thwack of clap stick], while the last ones were ‘This
is… day… 200… what's the scene we're shooting…?’”
SOUND EDITORIAL
The first order of business for sound effects editing was to
load the dbx-encoded premixes and effects combines, plus the 1997
SR-encoded 5.1 master, into master Pro Tools sessions. Assistant sound
editor Erich Stratmann found to his surprise that there were some
digital overs, in spite of the fact that the 0VU reference level on
the mags matched -20 dBfs on the Pro Tools. Although small overs are
often unnoticeable, Stratmann says that there would often be many of
them in succession, rendering the added distortion quite audible.
The offending sections were re-transferred at a lower level
sometimes as much as 6 dB below the -20 standard and using the “Find
Peaks” function in Pro Tools (which only worked for peaks longer
than 10 samples; the others he found by hand), Stratmann would do
precise volume automation to bring only the offending peak down,
raising the rest of the material back to the reference level. He would
then do a bounce of the section in Pro Tools incorporating the fix.
Stratmann created a master session comprising all extant
material from the 1979 mix, with the 1997 5.1 printmaster and the
original 6-track M&E, the only elements that were available for
the whole film. Effects combines and premixes were available for most
reels, although they could find nothing from reel 8 (the Hau Phat
scene with the Playboy Bunnies). As “blind luck” would have it,
according to Kirchberger, they were always able to find a way to make
the joins work.
The crew used a “donut and holes” metaphor to guide
themselves in communicating what they were doing. The area outside the
donut was the original printmaster alone, while the donut rings were
the transition points where effects premixes and combines and new
material would be added to the printmaster in order to get to the
“hole,” which was the completely new material. The intention was
to make the donuts seamless, which usually translated to as short as
possible, as in a hard scene change. But fighting against this goal,
to some extent, was the brilliant way in which effects and music in Apocalypse
effortlessly weave in and out of each other across scenes. Kirchberger
remembers that one of the cooler transitions was during the Kilgore
landing scene when the decay of the mortar covers the transition
point. “Masking was our favorite friend,” Stratmann notes. “In
many cases, the predubs were used as source material for the new
scenes, but also to help us feather back into the printmaster when the
combines didn't provide enough separation.”
There were three other Pro Tools sessions in addition to
Stratmann's master: Foley, which was cut by Jeremy Molod, dialog,
which Kirchberger cut himself, and sound effects, which were cut by
Kyrsten Mate Comoglio and Pete Horner, including both old and new
material.
Kirchberger says that “this show couldn't have been done
without Kyrsten; she's an unbelievably talented effects editor. She
did a cut of the ‘Conex’ scene [when Kurtz reads to Willard in the
storage container], where she presented Walter with two scenarios, and
he heard the first one and didn't even listen to the second.”
Comoglio says that the second version contained “highly EQ'd
sounds made to disorient the viewer, plus air movement sweeps and odd
jungle calls that I volume-graphed in Pro Tools to then evolve into a
more typical, grounded jungle BG after Brando opens the doors and we
know where we are.
“In general, I tried to volume-graph premix all my sessions to
cut down on tracks and on mix time up in Napa,” she continues.
“This worked especially well for the Monsoon Medevac scene, where
Walter wanted a different rain sound for each of the different
materials oil drum, mud, helmet, tent, helicopter, PBR, etc. all
coming and going as Willard walks through the camp. It was lots of
fun.”
The effects for the French plantation were cut by Horner, whom
Aubry says worked “in the original Zoetrope spirit on many different
capacities on ANR. In addition to cutting effects and
recording ADR, he worked side-by-side with Walter at the mix as the
second engineer.”
ADR
Approximately 85% of the production dialog in the original film
was replaced due to what Berndt terms “impossible” conditions on
many of the locations. The batting average in the new scenes in ANR
was much better, notably in the French plantation sequence. (Good
planning on Coppola and Nat Boxer's part was also a factor in
preparing the M&E for that scene, which features a man playing the
accordion in the midst of dialog. Kirchberger found a wild track of
the performance in the production sound rolls.)
Berndt's first order of business was often (as it was for the
ADR editors in the original film) to find out “what the hell were
they saying? Walter and I would listen to all of the takes to piece
together the dialog in a scene.” The actors were helpful in
narrowing things down.
Berndt found out from Leslie Shatz, who had supervised the 1979
ADR, that the Schoeps CMC with an MK 41 capsule had been chosen for
the original sessions, so the decision was made to use it again.
Because of an extraordinary (even by Apocalypse
standards) stroke of luck, no new narration by Martin Sheen needed to
be recorded. Murch told Cullen that he was considering putting in some
new shots of Willard reading Col. Kurtz's dossier, and requested that
he look for any additional material from the original sessions.
At Coppola's storage facility in Napa, Cullen came across 35mm
trim boxes that were labeled “Willard VO Trims and Outtakes,” and
contained a dozen small rolls of mag stripe. Meanwhile, Murch had
found old workprint of dossier material scenes, and, of course, they
happened to be of the same material. It wasn't perfect, though, as
Sheen's voice doesn't have the gravelly quality of the original
narration.
Sheen did have to be brought in for standard ADR for ANR,
as did most of the crew of the Erebus PBR: Duvall (Lt. Colonel
Kilgore), Sam Bottoms (Lance), Albert Hall (Chief) and Frederic
Forrest (Chef). (Everyone is probably relieved that Laurence Fishburne,
née Larry Fishburne in the credits, was not needed to loop any lines
for Clean, so much has his voice changed since he shot Apocalypse
in his teens.) Both Berndt and Murch were greatly impressed by how
well the actors slipped back into their roles. “The first line that
Bobby [Duvall] did required shouting, and he got right back to the
hoarse Kilgore,” Berndt says. Murch found that he had to pitch-shift
ADR both up and down to help bring the actors 23 years back to
shooting (and the original ADR sessions).
Further ADR was done by Aurore Clément (Roxanne) for the French
plantation scene; it must have been strange for her to work again on a
film that she was cut out of two decades ago. Coppola's son Roman
supervised her session in Paris. James Keane, who plays Kilgore's
gunner, was the last principal ADR talent recorded. Keane was also
called on to re-voice the late rock impresario Bill Graham, who plays
the agent of the Playboy bunnies in the original film.
The final ADR sessions were recorded in Zoetrope's basement
facility in North Beach. The necessary lines for the Vietnamese woman
and several soldiers at Kilgore Beach, and for the remaining G.I.s at
Medevac, were performed by volunteers recruited from among the
Zoetrope extended family and recorded by Pete Horner.
THE MIX
Re-recording for Apocalypse Now Redux took place in
August 2000, on Coppola's Napa, Calif., estate. The mixing facilities
of American Zoetrope moved there from the Pacific Avenue location in
1983, with the console changing to an Otari Series 54 in 1990 for the
mix of The Godfather Part III. The VCA-automated console has
50 full-featured inputs and 50 automated small faders with limited EQ
and busing capabilities. In spite of having primarily used moving
faders for the past 10 years, Murch said the VCA automation was
“like getting back on a bicycle.”
Murch spent approximately two weeks premixing the dialog and
effects for the new sequences. Five 8-track premixes were created, two
for effects, one for backgrounds, one for Foley and one for dialog.
These were recorded as Akai native projects, then converted to Pro
Tools 4.3 sessions and Track Transferred into Pro Tools 5.0.1.
Premixes were played back by a 32-output Pro Tools system on the mix
stage, plus an Akai DD8 playback dubber.
All premixes and their subsequent stems were “empty” when
the film was in a section that was untouched, with modulation on the
new material beginning and ending at the in and out points. In
preparation for the final mix and eventual printmaster, Stratmann made
a file convert of the 6-track printmaster of each act to the Akai
format. Not only did this avoid any further AD/DA generations or a
needless pass of the signal through the console, but it also gave
Murch a definitive way to verify, during premixes and finals, that the
tie-ins would indeed match exactly. It was as if they were starting
the mix with most of the printmaster already recorded, and that was
what would be punched into during printmastering.
The issue of generation loss was a factor in Murch's taking the
napalm strike from the original premixes; the subsequent four
generations had removed the impact far from what they had heard on the
mix stage back in 1979.
This first printmastering stage was, of course, in the 5.1
format and was used to make three subsequent printmasters: the
non-noise reduced Lt-Rt for home video use (recorded in full acts) and
the new theatrical AC-3 Dolby Digital 5.1 and SR Lt-Rt, which were
printed to the Dolby MO drive as 10 new film “AB” reels. The
by-act printmaster was carved into reels in the Akai utilizing the
editing functions in the DD8.
An interesting anomaly was discovered when making the
matrix-encoded Lt-Rt printmasters. The first ghost helicopter (the
classic sound effect that opens the film, created by Richard Beggs on
a Moog synthesizer) went from the surrounds to the front as on the
discrete 5.1 version, but the second one seemed to disappear in the
surrounds. It appeared that Robby Krieger's opening guitar notes on
“The End” caused the 2:4 matrix decoding to steer the helicopter
to the front. After much head-scratching and investigation, the crew
realized that there wasn't much to be done about this; it was yet
another example of why the film sound community has welcomed the
discrete 5.1 digital formats.
Because part of the financing came from France, one of the
delivery items was a 6-track M&E. Stratmann prepared the M&E
in the same manner as he did the printmaster, punching in and out at
the same points. New foreign-language versions will be made for the
major FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain) territories.
•••••••
It's a tribute to the crew that they upheld the high Apocalypse
Now standard in relatively little time they cut and mixed 49
minutes in three months, a mere blink in the 26-month schedule for the
original 147-minute film. There's no question that new technology was
a big help, as Murch observes: “You could do a restoration
like this without the technical shift that's taken place over the last
20 years Avids and Pro Tools but I wouldn't like to contemplate that.
Once I started putting the material back, I wasn't second-guessing
anymore because of length. ‘Let my people go!’ Let the film be
what it wants to be. What happened is that Apocalypse Now Redux
has become much more like the script, and has all the major beats the
script had. As a result, there is a greater unity to it; the arc is
more consistent.”
Kirchberger says that “it was a real thrill, which is an
overused phrase, going back to something you worked on 20 years ago.
Walter would come into the cutting room with the lined script and it
would say, ‘For more information, see Michael K.’ Do I remember
what I was supposed to know? Not a chance!”
Walter Murch: “I am anxious going into every film to find the
marriage point between myself and the material. In a mysterious way,
where do I connect with this film at a deep level? I found it on ANR
in the transition coming out of the French plantation back onto the
boat. A long dissolve from Roxanne on the other side of the mosquito
netting so that her image, which is already veiled, becomes more and
more ethereal as the netting dissolves into the fog. The last images
of her are the smile of the cheshire cat as she says her last line.
Then you are in the fog, although you don't know that yet, and you see
Willard beginning to emerge, sitting there on the boat. That told me,
as much as anything, that everything was going to be okay.”
