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Play, download and edit the free video Apocalypse Now Opening Sequence.

Murch’s work on Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” and changed how sound was edited and mixed for film forever. Right from the opening sequence, Murch built a soundscape that forced the audience to experience the film through Captain Willard’s warped and war-wary psychological point-of-view.

By the mid-’70s, theaters had only just started to transition from mono to stereo sound, but Coppola wanted his Vietnam War film to push both theaters and Hollywood at large towards a six-speaker surround system. No one had ever mixed film sound to travel around a movie theater. Not only did Murch pioneer the process, which still to this day is the foundation of most sound mixes, he artistically did it better than anyone has done it since.
“‘Apocalypse’ took on the thought of theorizing, ‘What is really the next step, it is just accept the given technology?'” said “Star Wars” sound designer Ben Burtt at the “Making Waves” post-screening discussion. “We were really conforming to what had been done, some of the stereo films from the ’50s, the CinemaScope process, its advantages and disadvantages, but ‘Apocalypse,’ aside from its aesthetic, it was very thoughtful. It took the idea of what we can present in a cinema can be taken to a much higher level in terms of spatiality, the idea of the four corners of the room.”

For Apocalypse Now, Coppola envisioned a film that started conventionally and gradually grew “more surreal,” according to Murch. Thus, when the director convened a meeting with the editors to establish who edited what, he doled out assignments on unusual grounds. As Murch recalls: “Francis took us all out to lunch and said, ‘It’s a truth that anyone who works on Apocalypse Now goes crazy, so, of all the people sitting at this table, I’m the craziest because I’ve been working on it the longest. But in terms of editors, there is a progression here, because Walter is the newest, so he’s the least crazy.’”

Thus, Murch was assigned to edit the beginning of the film, from the opening to the famous scene in which a village is decimated as a recording blares Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”; that scene was previously Greenberg’s responsibility. As Murch remembers it, Coppola said: “I want Walter to edit the first, let’s say, quarter of the film because that’s the most normal, and he’s the most normal.”

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