You can’t just read a little Michael Ondaatje.
Start a sentence, and you’re swept for pages through a grisly Sri Lankan jungle war in Anil’s Ghost or the dusty remains of battle in The English Patient.
The reading is so smooth, you might imagine the writing was effortless. Hah! Michael Ondaatje spends years writing a novel, and more years re-writing it. He says he’s obsessed with editing.
When The English Patient was turned into the movie that won nine Oscars, Michael Ondaatje says he finally met a man even more obsessed than he: the film editor Walter Murch.
This is the man who crafted the Godfather movies and cut both versions of Apocalypse Now — working and reworking dialogue, images, sounds, silence, and time.
The writer Michael Ondaatje discusses the art of editing.
(Michael Ondaatje is speaking at the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, on November 11, 2002, 6 p.m.)
Guests:
Michael Ondaatje, author, “The English Patient”, “Anil’s Ghost”, “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.”