As someone who's kept current with new technology, do you think better tools make for better moviemaking? Or do some standard rules still apply? Is the craft a lot easier now than when you started?

WM: Your last question first -- the tools are much better now than they were, but ultimately the creation of the work is of course dependent upon the tools but that dependence is ultimately not significant. Take any writer you want in the 19th century, they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor. The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination. I re-mastered The Conversation a few years ago for DVD. The Conversation was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine -- a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way. Truth be told, I couldn't. It held up for me. I remember making those decisions and I remember doing them in the old-fashioned mechanical way, but I wouldn't have changed anything in it and I certainly wouldn't have changed things because the tools now are so much better and "we could have done it so much better." I think it's true in terms of visual effects because [computers] really are a significant new tool. In the old days, it was rare that you would be able to do a blue screen shot without revealing the fact it was blue screen. Whereas now you can take any shot and make a visual effects shot out of it. You could shoot blue screen without revealing its blue screen.


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As a member of the 1970s era of filmmaking, are you nostalgic for it in the way many historians and fans are? Do you think of it as a "golden age?"

WM: It was emotionally significant for me because I kind of lost my virginity in that decade. It was where all my first love affairs with cinema had happened. I started working in cinema in 1969 -- just in the beginning of the 1970s -- and ended the 1970s with Apocalypse Now, which is a huge film. In a sense, I look back on it that way but I think that's a personal thing because that was the decade I really started working in feature films. It's interesting. I did a survey for an article a couple of months ago where if you go onto a site like Box Office Mojo -- they have a listing of films, what they would have grossed in today's dollars. It's a list of 100 popular films irrespective of ticket price. And the 1970s stand out because of those 100 films, most of the most popular films are in the 1970s. That's the decade with the biggest chunk. I think there are two films from the 1930s, four from the 1940s, 10 from the 1950s and 15 in the 1960s and suddenly there are 20 in the 1970s and in the 1980s it falls back to 12 or something. The significant thing is that none of those films in the 1970s were sequels to anything. They were all original works. They may have been based on a novel but it wasn't like Spider-Man 3. It was Jaws and that was the first time Jaws hit the screen. There was, of course, a Jaws 2, but it's not on the list of 100 most popular films, whereas this decade we're in right now, two thirds of the most popular films are sequels: sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean or sequels to Lord of the Rings or Spider-Man or sequels to Harry Potter. It's a significant shift form that point of view.

Is that indicative of the state of film today? Do you think there are as many good films being made today, or do you think there's been a drop-off in quality?

WM: Our experience in the 1970s was not, "Gee, this is a classic decade." When we were in it, we were just trying to do the best job we could. There was a general feeling that because of the dissolution of the studios everything was over and it took the big successes of the 1970s to revive Hollywood. But at the beginning of the 1970s, there was a feeling that this might be it, that motion pictures might end up being something historical like vaudeville. You know, from 1915 to 1974, people used to actually go to see movies in movie theaters. That was a real palpable sense among people. David Niven, in his books, said, "The game's over. It's all falling apart." Yet we were young filmmakers and it couldn't fall apart because we wanted to make movies. Luckily, the pendulum swung the other direction and we were able to make movies. To answer your other question, I think quality films are being made in every decade in large disproportion to a lot of junk. If you went back to the 19th century, pick a year, read all the novels published that year and the four novels that we remember from that year that were really great, you would find the same thing is true in movies today. There are very popular films today that will soon be forgotten, there are very popular films today that will be remembered, there are very unpopular films today that will remain unpopular, and there are unpopular films today that will be remembered. But that is true for any human activity.


Roth and Francis Ford Coppola
Was any one Oscar you've won particularly special to you?

WM: I enjoy when I lose.

Why's that?

WM: What does an Oscar mean? On the face of things it means, "This [winner] is better than anything else." But that's bulls---. It's like comparing apples and oranges. These five nominated films -- is any one of them better than another? By which criteria do you judge that? I would be happy if they just gave out nominations and there weren't any Oscars. But winning them is definitely an experience -- to get up there and make a speech. Every film is hard work and a few lucky people do get Oscars for what they do and it's recognition for all that hard work on a certain level. If you didn't do the hard work you wouldn't be standing there. On the other hand, people do a lot of hard work and don't get Oscars, so it's a mixture of glory and injustice at the same time.

Have you thought about directing another film?

WM: I've thought about it and I tried for a number of years to get projects off the ground and just ran out of luck and went back to what I love, which is film editing. It's the luck of the draw that Return to Oz wasn't a critical or commercial hit.


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It has a solid cult following, though.

WM: It does, but the projects I was interested in doing... nobody in the industry was interested in making them, and practicality reared its head. I had four kids and college tuition to pay. Developing a career as a director, if you had a film that was successful, is a lot of waiting, which is what I found myself doing and I just love to work.

How is editing like being a short order cook or doing surgery?

WM: Well...both of those people stand for what they do. I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery. You're dealing on an almost microscopic level, trying to achieve a very difficult emotional affect or get across a very delicate story or attack the point. That's the brain surgery part. Other times, you're flipping burgers. Three hundred thousand feet of motion picture; to get through you have to make selections. You have to plow through it quickly and not agonize over each position and just hope your instincts are good.

You're an avid beekeeper. Is making movies like making honey?

WM: [Laughs] Yes, in a sense that a film is a very rich distillation of a tremendous amount of work. I forget exactly what the ratio is for honey but the honey you put into your tea -- that teaspoon represents a gallon of nectar that had to be refined and brought down to size. So there is a similarity on that level.

Click here for "Artificial Intelligence," an exclusive clip from Youth Without Youth.