Triple Oscar-winner to be honoured with the Vision Award.
The 68th Locarno Film Festival (Aug 5-15) is to give its Vision Award - Nescens to award-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch. The award has previously been given to special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull and “Mister Steadicam” Garrett Brown.
Murch worked with George Lucas on THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973) and Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People (1969), The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974) and The Godfather: Part II (1974).
His work with Coppola as sound designer on Apocalypse Now won him his first Oscar in 1980.
Following his own directorial debut in 1985 with Return to Oz, he subsequently won two more Academy Awards for both sound and film editing on Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996) – the first and only time in history the same person has won the Oscar in both categories. In this respect he was repeating an earlier record set when he won double BAFTA awards in 1975 for The Conversation.
Carlo Chatrian, Locarno’s artistic director, said: “Having Walter Murch here, apart from the honour of his presence, also highlights the thinking behind this award, instituted two years ago.
“As Francis F. Coppola has written, “he is a true pioneer. A man we should listen to with great attention – and pleasure”.
“The way he works goes far beyond conventional notions of collaboration. The work on The Godfather: Part II or Apocalypse Now, for example, prove that the great films are nearly always the outcome of a close working relationship between major creative talents. And it is to one of the most subtle and influential of these that the Locarno Festival pays tribute this year.”
Murch will reveal his methods during a masterclass in Locarno.
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