These quotes come from the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje.
"O: How sound represents a point of view is fascinating in the way it can complicate the narrative stance. It's the way the tone of voice or a point of view in a novel represents the state of mind of a character, without authorial intrusion. It infuriates me when lines from a book are quoted to show the style of the writer, when they really represent the personality or voice of the character. In Anthony Minghella's film Ripley you have the scene where Freddie comes into Ripley's apartment and starts playing the piano, perversely, boorishly, and we witness it totally with Ripley's sensitive hearing. In a scene in a book, the moment quoted may not represent the author's style at all. It represents simply the state of mind of whoever holds the narrative ball at that moment." P. 251
"O: Foreshadowing is such a central device in literature to build up the worth or the danger of a character who hasn't even arrived yet. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, of course. Or even Othello in the first act of the play, before we see him.
M: In film characters can be introduced later in a story, but it's unusual to give them their own point of view-scenes that feature them separate from the established main characters. Hyman Roth, for instance, does not have a separate scene with his wife, talking about Michael Corleone after Michael has left. The one scene Roth has to himself is when he's killed at the airport.
When I talk about divergence and convergence as being rules, they are really rules of approximation. You can change them or break them, but it's good to know the rules you're breaking. And breaking them is always some-what problematic. It can be interesting-like Caravaggio's thumbs scene-but it throws the audience a curve, and to pull it off successfully you have to be fully aware of what you're doing. Probably the most extreme, and the most successful, film to shift points of view unexpectedly is Hitchcock's Psycho. Janet Leigh, the heroine, is killed dramatically and unexpectedly twenty-five minutes into the story, and then the point of view switches-for the rest of the film-to a new character, the detective, played by Martin Balsam." P. 256-257
"M: My rule of thumb is that there are two ways to deal with multiple points of view in a film: divergent or convergent.
O: Can you explain?
M: What I call the divergent method is when you start with all the characters in the same time and space-an Aristotelian structure. After that you can follow them individually wherever they go-as long as you've seen them all together at one point, right at the beginning. That allows you to pungently characterize these people in relationship to one another in time and space: physically, we get to see them standing next to each other and judge how they carry themselves, but also emotionally, how they relate to one another. Once the audience has that imprint, if it's well done, then the film is free to have different points of view.
The overall aim of my portfolio is to have the same story but with a different point of view to allow the story to be given a new genre." P. 251-252
"M: The opposite approach is convergent: two or three stories that start seprately and then flow together. The English Patient is a good example. It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert. The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then-cut-you're on a train, with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation: bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together. You follow Hana and her story, then you cut back to the Patient, going through the desert on the back of a camel; then you cut to Hana again. And you reach a point where almost accidentally these two stories fuse-it just happens that whenthe Patient is being interrogated as a possible spy, Hana is the nurse who gives him a glass of water. Later their stories merge even more closely: she tkes him out of the convoy into the monastery, and they spend the rest of the film together." P. 253-254
"M: The opposite approach is convergent: two or three stories that start seprately and then flow together. The English Patient is a good example. It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert. The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then-cut-you're on a train, with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation: bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together. You follow Hana and her story, then you cut back to the Patient, going through the desert on the back of a camel; then you cut to Hana again. And you reach a point where almost accidentally these two stories fuse-it just happens that whenthe Patient is being interrogated as a possible spy, Hana is the nurse who gives him a glass of water. Later their stories merge even more closely: she tkes him out of the convoy into the monastery, and they spend the rest of the film together." P. 253-254
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