Walter Murch’s job is to make sure you don’t notice his work, practicing the invisible art of sound and film editing, or as he might describe it, maintaining the appearance of the dream. His daily routine consists of cobbling together individual photographic frames into moving images, from there into meaningful scenes—familiar sights and sounds—eventually into the movies we love, like “The Godfather,” “American Graffiti,” “The Conversation,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The English Patient” and “Cold Mountain.”
The Bolinas resident sat down with the Light in his studio at Skywalker Ranch last week to discuss his latest movie: “Particle Fever,” a documentary about the search for an elusive particle that holds the key to our understanding of physics and the construction of our universe.
Point Reyes Light: The movie focuses on the search for a particle known as the Higgs boson. What is it, and what is its importance?
Walter Murch: The Higgs was the culprit in a 40-year search. It was first theorized in the early ’60s, and it was the last missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that we call the Standard Model in particle physics. But it was a crucial piece because it explained in the mathematics of the Standard Model why anything has mass, which is to say, substance, which is to say, atomic physical reality. Without the Higgs or something like it, this universe would exist in some form, but it would be a formless form, kind of like a burst of pure energy. The fact that energy has co- alesced, frozen into material substance is due to the Higgs. But they couldn’t find it be- cause the energy at which it exists was greater than any of the colliders—these detecting machines—it was beyond the energies they could reach. And it was knowing that they were either going to find it or not that made this film a provocative idea: no matter what happened once you turned on the collider, you would either find it or see that it was not there. And if it was not there, then that meant you would reinvent the whole model of physics up to that point.
PRL: How does the Large Hadron Collider—this 17 mile underground loop on the border between France and Switzerland—contribute an answer to this question? How does running the experiment finally go about proving whether it exists?
WM: It’s by colliding these protons, which are basically hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons. By colliding these protons almost at the speed of light, so much energy is released that you coalesce matter that does not want to be matter under ordinary circumstances. What you’re really proving by doing this is the existence of the Higgs field. The field is the thing that really gives mass. Like the electrical field gives light and electromagnetic energy, so the Higgs field gives, let’s call it mass energy. And if you hit any field hard enough, you produce a particle. If you hit the electrical field hard enough, you produce an electron. It doesn’t have to be very hard in that case because the energy levels are quite low. The electrons are just a manifestation of the field. So, we were doing the same thing. If we hit the Higgs field hard enough—and the Higgs field is everywhere—so if we collide two protons anywhere, it will produce a little spark, ba- sically a particle. And that’s enough. If you do the experiment right and take enough data points, that’s enough to prove yes, this thing really does exist. The Large Hadron Collider is basically a hammer, and we’re walking around in the dark hitting things with it and listening to what we hit and making deductions about it.
PRL: A large part of the film questions whether this Higgs boson exist or not. From there, the film explains that if we do find it, its weight could lead physical science in two very different directions: supersymmetry or the multiverse. Can you explain what those two theories are?
WM: The film presented this as alter- natives, but it’s really a spectrum from the supersymmetry, which would make a lot of people happy because it would produce a lot of new particles that are theorized— kind of like the Higgs—but have not yet been seen. This would explain things that are currently very perplexing like dark matter. Much of the universe is, until very recently, undetectable by us. We’re only guessing that it’s there, but we would love to actually have more concrete evidence about it. So this collection of theories that are put under the umbrella called super-symmetry just means things that are beyond our current model. But this would continue the march that science has been proceeding along for at least the last four hundred years, which is using mathematics to analyze and theorize about things and then putting experiments together to prove it one way or another. It’s like the 3-year-old who says, “Why is this sky blue?” “Well, because…” Then they say, “Why is that?” “Well, because…” This would extend that dialogue. We would be able to answer more whys but they would also provoke another. At the other end of the spectrum is the multiverse. If the Higgs is very heavy, which means lots of energy is needed to produce it—or produce evidence of it—then this favors an interpretation of reality which says we happen to be in a universe that has certain given parameters. Like the strength of gravity is a certain value, but nobody knows why that is. Supersymemtry would maybe give an answer to why that is, but [in the multiverse theory] it may be that there is no answer, that’s just how it is in this universe and if we could go next door, so to speak, to one of untold trillions of universes, things would be different. This universe just happens to be the universe that has certain values that have allowed us to exist, but it’s one of trillions of others which don’t. So that would be very frustrating to most physicists because it would slam a door in the attempt to explain the why behind the why.
PRL: Because under the multiverse theory, it all becomes random chance that we’re here.
WM: Yeah, it’s just the roll of the dice.
PRL: These theories basically come down to a number, does the Higgs show itself at 115 or 140? How did you explain those ideas and make this into a movie where the general public would take an interest in otherwise esoteric ideas?
WM: The producer of the film David Kaplan is a particle physicist at Johns Hopkins, and the director Mark Levinson is a particle physicist from Berkeley. Mark strayed: after getting his Ph.D. in physics , he became a filmmaker. David was a film student who jumped from film into phys- ics. In a sense, they’re the opposite of each other, but complementary. They were both interested in showing the people involved and what the people were thinking—both the theorists, who were coming up with these basic ideas, and the experimental- ists, who were actually having to put these thing together—and to show these people at a very decisive moment in the history of physics and certainly a very decisive mo- ment in the career lifetime of these physi- cists. It’s a watershed moment, where we will look back in the future, and say things were this way until 2012, and then they were different afterwards. But there’s also the dramatic structure. We were very lucky that the Higgs was found because that was not foreordained, and we were very lucky, for instance, that the machine exploded 10 days after it was turned on, which gave a nice dramatic curve to the story: would they ever be able to put it back together again? I think it has an appeal beyond just the physics. I’ve always been interested in that subject matter, so it was natural that I would get involved in this story. And I also had known Mark Levinson for 30 years.
PRL: How did he approach you to get involved?
WM: I was editing “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Philip Kaufman’s film, at Berkeley, and Mark had just grad- uated from Berkeley with his Ph.D. But he graduated at the bottom of the market for physicists. At that time, nobody was hir- ing. He was interested in film and started hanging around the studio where I was working at the time. I got wind that there was somebody in the building who knew something about string theory, which was a very hot topic at the time, so I tracked him down and took him out to lunch and grilled him on this subject matter. He turned around and grilled me on film ed- iting. That started a friendship that con- tinued for 30 years. I would keep up with Mark: every so often we would talk on the phone, or if I was in New York I’d check in with him. In the spring of 2012, he sent me an assembly of what he had shot and said, “Do you have any suggestions what the best direction would be?” As the con- versation went along, we began talking about me actually working on the film. A project I had been involved in had just collapsed, so I was at loose ends. I went to New York to work on “Particle Fever,” and then they discovered the Higgs and that changed everything. I wound up working on the film for a total of about 15 months.
PRL: Wow, so did you recut it all from scratch?
WM: A mixture. Some had been put together very well. But there was 500 hours of material that had been shot, so it was going through as much of that as I could as quickly as I could. This board over there is a scene board. [He points to a black board that fills a wall, marked with numbers and shapes in various shades of colors, his diagram for the upcoming film “Tomorrowland.”] Every card is a scene, so I constructed a similar board for “Particle Fever” with Mark, thinking about the best structure for this kind of film.
PRL: What do the colors represent?
WM: Different characters have different colors. The intensity of the color has to do with the intensity of the scene. The size of the card is how long the scene, very roughly.
PRL: And the shapes?
WM: The diamond scenes are pivot scenes that everything leads up to this moment. Something happens. It’s kind of like discovering the Higgs. This is a mo- ment around which the film pivots.
PRL: Have you ever mapped out films by other editors, just as an exercise?
WM: No, just films that I work on. When I read a script I make these cards as I’m reading it, and then put them up. As we recut the film, those cards over there [he points to a block of cards grouped on the side of the board] have been taken out of the movie.
PRL: I guess I meant more on an intuitive level: are you doing this in your head as you’re watching certain films?
WM: A little bit. Mostly if the film is not a good film, I will tend to wonder why and start to think about it structurally while I’m watching it. Mostly I just watch films as a civilian. I don’t turn on that part of my brain, because it’s work to do it that way.
PRL: How did editing a documentary differ from putting together a fiction film? WM: This is the first feature docu- mentary that I have edited. I’ve edited short documentary films and I’ve edited documentary sections of feature films, or rather feature films that were shot in a more documentary style.
PRL: Which ones were those?
WM: A lot of what Francis Coppola does. The beach scene, the helicopter attack in “Apocalypse Now” was basically just lots of cameras shooting an event that was happening, whether it was being filmed or not. Francis constructed that scene, but it was basically like this huge, insane toy that he would wind up and then let go. Helicopters had certain agendas they had to achieve, and others on the ground had certain agendas, and there were just cameras filming it as if it were actually happening. That just generates a huge amount of—I think he was shooting six cameras at a time and take after take, all very different—it was a huge amount of footage. Then to have to analyze it was the same type of approach that you bring to a documentary film. I would say once you get it to a certain stage it’s—the equivalent would be if you’re a tailor and you’re making a suit, once you get the fabric on the person, then the two things are almost the same. Once the thing is kind of up and sort of has a beginning and sort of a middle and an end, it’s very hard to distinguish between documentaries and fiction. It’s just how do you make it shorter, intense as possible? How do you make it clear what the issues are? Is the best angle for this concept or not? But getting to that point is very different because with a feature film you have a script. The material is generated specially to answer a certain question or prove a certain point. Whereas a fly-on- the-wall documentary like this, you have a lot of material. At the time of shooting it, you don’t really know what’s going to happen and you don’t know where it will fit. The closest analogy I had to the process is—appropriately for West Marin— butter-churning. Basically, you put a lot of milk into a barrel and you agitate it in the right way and with enough agitation, it starts to clump together. You begin to get a scene that has a shape to it. Once you have that, you can make a card for it. You don’t know where that’s going to go yet, but you just put it to one side. After you’ve built up 30 or 40 cards, then you can begin to see how clumps of cards, scenes will fall together and into bigger and bigger meta-structures.
PRL: You’ve spent so much time work- ing with audio and so much time cutting images. Do you have one that drives the other one? Does dialogue come first or the image?
WM: When I put together the images for the first time, I put it together without the sound. Doesn’t mean there isn’t sound, it just means the sound is in my head at that point. By doing that I’m better able to con- centrate on the visual body language of the images without being distracted by what- ever they had recorded at the time, which may be accidental. I can begin to imagine things that aren’t there yet sonically. Then at a certain point, I do turn on the sound and I start to listen to it and I accept or reject things that come along with the sound.
PRL: Your dad was a painter. What influence did his work have on your career? WM: I think growing up with an artist in the house who was working all the time is basically is what I ended up doing. It sort of familiarized me with that process. He treated things realistically, but the objects that he chose to paint were ambiguous. At the time, his paintings were called magic realism, which has a literary offshoot. He also painted covers for Scientific American, so a lot of his subject matter was scientific, and occasionally I would go along with him. Because he painted realistically, he would say, “Even though those are objects, I don’t think of myself as painting the object. What I think I’m doing is painting the air between my eye and the object.” That’s certainly how I have come to understand sound recording, that I’m not recording the sound of an object; I’m recording the air that is vibrating because of that object.
PRL: You originally studied science in college, right?
WM: I went to college to be an oceanographer, and I studied geology. When I was at college, I flipped like Mark to history of art, Romance languages, things like that. By the time I left undergraduate work, I was heading toward film.
PRL: Why did you transition?
WM: I was thinking about that the other day, because I still read geology. But at that time, in the early ’60s, geology had not yet accepted the idea of plate tectonics, which now is fundamental gospel. To paint with a rather unattractive brush, geology then was more like stamp collecting, which is, “Here’s a rock, what is it?” It was more than that obviously, but without plate tectonics you’re kind of stuck. It becomes just kind of a random churning, but you don’t know why. There’s no over-all pattern to it. I couldn’t figure out what the story was. How does it all fit together? I think that if I had gone to the university five years later I would have been a geological oceanographer. But that hit in 1964 by which time I’d already left.
PRL: How did you discover film?
WM: I was studying at Johns Hopkins, and I wanted out, junior year abroad. But they didn’t have a program like that, so I and two friends put together our own program, offered this to the professors and said, “If we go to Sorbonne and we study these things and we write the pa- pers, will you give us credit?” Thankfully but improbably, they said yes. We found ourselves in Paris in 1963, which was the height of the New Wave. We all got infected with the film bug, you know, Godard and Truffaut and all that.
PRL: What movies do you remember watching at the time?
WM: “Breathless” and “Jules and Jim” had just come out two years before and had been big successes. “Shoot the Piano Player.” Paris then had the only cinema- theque in the world, a museum of cinema. Now they’re common, but then, that was the only place. So you could go there and it was like a free university class in world cinema. Directors would come and talk. And also commercial cinemas in Paris showed these obscure films—30 years ago from Bulgria or something. It was a feast of cinema. When I came back I discovered that there were such things as film schools and so I applied to and got accepted, thankfully with a scholarship, at USC film school.
PRL: You ended up coming to San Francisco with two buddies, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. How did you end up in your current home in Bolinas?
WM: We were living at that time—my wife and I and kid—in the houseboats in Sausalito. I built the houseboat when I was in my carpentry phase. Aggie is a nurse and had started working at the clinic in Point Reyes as a midwife. Her hours were very irregular, and that was a big drive for her. She was riding horses at the time, so we were asking where could we live that combined all of these things? We heard through a store in Mill Valley, an early version of Peet’s Coffee—Phillip’s. The couple who ran it lived in Bolinas. Aggie was in there one day and said we’re looking. They said, “Oh, there’s a place for sale in Bolinas.” We went out and looked at it and eventually bought it. Same place today.
PRL: Is it a challenge working so far from Hollywood?
WM: It’s both a problem and an advantage. Thankfully, when my kids were young, there was enough work up here so that I could be at home. That started to change in the ’90s, so for the last 20 years I’ve had to be away from home a bunch. I think you’re able to concentrate on the film itself better here than in L.A. on average. There, it’s more like a business, and the film is just one piece of a big business.
PRL: That switch between science and art—yours, Mark’s—seems to come up throughout the film. Near the end, for example, the collider’s coordinator Fabiola Gianotti recites a passage she’s memorized from Dante. It’s as if you almost need to have the other perspective to understand your own.
WM: Yeah, I think so. They nurture each other in very interesting and provocative and not very well examined ways. I sometimes like to make the analogy between art and science as between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. Each one feeds on the other, and it would be hard for either to survive without the other. The plant produces the oxygen that we breathe; we produce the carbon diox- ide that they breathe. They give us food; we give them fertilizer. There’s a coevo- lution there. And if you look at the cultural history of the last 5,000s year with a pretty broad brush, there’s a very provoca- tive thing where development in art will stimulate a kind of break up the soil, so to speak, and fertilize it so that science can then do its thing. For instance, the invention of perspective in painting, which dates from the 1300s predates the invention of the telescope. The idea of seeing the world clearly in three-dimensional constructs with lines of sight receding to the horizon starts to train your eye and your mind to look at reality in a certain way. It is out of that soil—that mental approach—the tele- scope suddenly means something. A telescope is a battering ram that allows you to see deeper along that line of sight. Had the telescope somehow been invented out of thin air, 500 years earlier, I don’t know that they quite would have known what do with it. Art, because it deals with the substance around us, is easier to get your hands on, in a sense. Science is about penetrating beneath that surface to another deeper reality.
PRL: You chose to include footage at the end of the film from Werner Herzog’s 2013 movie “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” a documentary about the oldest cave paintings ever uncovered. What was the ratio- nale behind that decision?
WM: In a weird sense, that cave physically is only a hundred miles from the Large Hadron Collider. It’s the earliest concrete example we have of human beings dealing symbolically with the world. And that’s what art is, and that’s also what science is. If you wanted a pretty good definition of human beings, it’s the symbolic representation species. Many other animals use tools; many other animals laugh we now know. But no other animal that we know of deals to any extent with the symbolic representation of reality the way we do—through language, through music, mathematics, painting, film, science in all of its forms. We wanted to end the film with something that was more than, “We found the Higgs!” No, the Higgs is the latest in a 40,000-year trajectory of human beings dealing with the word symbolically and learning about its mysteries by that method. Then there was this sort of peculiar fact that these two place are very close to each other geographically, that the per- son who painted the horses at Chauvet was just like the physicist, standing at the blackboard.
“Particle Fever” screens at the Dance Palace Friday at 7 p.m., followed by a discussion. Tickets, which benefit KWMR, are $20.