Walter Murch Biography

Walter Murch won an Oscar for mixing sound on Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, then won twin Oscars for sound mixing and film editing on the 1996 drama The English Patient. Murch is widely regarded as a visionary and deep thinker on the topic of sound design in motion pictures. He met George Lucas in film school at the University of Southern California, and through Lucas began working with Coppola. Murch’s brilliant editing on The Conversation, Coppola’s 1974 thriller of eavesdropping and paranoia, is still regarded as a landmark in modern film sound technique. Murch mixed or edited sound on American Graffiti (1973, starring Ron Howard), Cold Mountain (2003, starring Nicole Kidman) and many other films, and also worked as a film editor on Apocalypse Now, The English Patient and Cold Mountain. He tried his hand at film directing in Return to Oz (1985), a sequel of sorts to the 1939 Judy Garland classic The Wizard of Oz. His book In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing was published in 1995.