The Conversations

Praise

“Immensely stimulating. . . . This book should be required reading for anyone working in film and a pleasurable option for moviegoers who wish to deepen and enrich the experience.” —John Boorman, director of Deliverance, Hope and Glory and Excalibur

“As the subject of Michael Ondaatje’ s offbeat, exhilarating new book, [Walter Murch] makes poetry out of an arcane, invisible craft. . . . Readers with even a passing interest in the movies should find many pleasures here. . . . The Conversations should be required reading for every aspiring writer—and anyone else involved in learning to shape a work of art.” —Quill & Quire

“Here’s one of the more interesting cross-disciplinary meetings of minds to hit book form in some time. . . . In a series of long conversations recorded over a two-year period, Ondaatje and Murch, both highly intelligent and thoughtful artists, transcend the interview-book genre by following tangents, engaging in arguments, contextualizing everything and reminiscing. . . . This is compulsive and compulsory reading for anyone in film school or interested in film history.” —NOW

“The Conversations is an homage and an exegesis—effortlessly inquiring and creative. Constructed as a sequence of five discursive interviews. . . . The Conversations is companionable, but not excluding, and intellectually exhaustive, though not for a moment tedious. The friendship of the two men throws an illuminating torch light on Murch’s shadowy profession. The editor should be thrilled to have his genius commemorated in this way. . . . The probing thoughtfulness Murch displays in his conversations with Ondaatje reveal a preoccupation not just with theory, but with the prospect of a system of notation that might provide a common language to a cinematic profession that is still, essentially, an infant one. . . . Fascinating.” —National Post

“It’s not often that a quick read provides so much insight.” —Ottawa Citizen

“It is the movie book of the season, in fact, the movie book for every season. . . . Engrossing. . . . What the book sparks, aside from rarely probed thoughts about editing, is a desire to see again the movies Murch has edited and to do this at home hand in hand with reading it.” —Toronto Star

“The Conversations is delightful mainly for Ondaatje’s palpable pleasure, the novelist’ s pleasure for eccentric characters discovered in emblematic moments. Murch . . . is certainly eccentric. . . . The Conversations faithfully represents Ondaatje’s reverance for a man normally beyond public attention.” —Georgia Straight

“There’s much in store here for film fans. . . . Many fascinating revelations about film as art.” —Star Phoenix (Saskatoon)