Walter Murch
B. 1943
Pioneering film editor and sound designer Walter Murch was born in 1943 in New York City and studied at the University of Southern California’s film school. Murch’s launched his career with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969). He has since worked as film and sound editor for numerous others, including American Graffiti (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), for which he won an Oscar, The English Patient (1996), which won him a double Oscar in both film and sound editing, and Jarhead (2005), among others. Murch also directed Return to Oz (1985) and helped work on the restoration of Orson Welles’s classic Touch of Evil (1998).
Murch has written a book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye: A perspective on film editing (1995), and is the subject of two collections: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002) by Michael Ondaatje, and Behind the Seen (2005), by Charles Koppelman. In addition to film, Murch’s interests include Italian literature, and he has translated the work of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte.
Murch has written a book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye: A perspective on film editing (1995), and is the subject of two collections: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002) by Michael Ondaatje, and Behind the Seen (2005), by Charles Koppelman. In addition to film, Murch’s interests include Italian literature, and he has translated the work of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte.