Walter Murch

Walter Murch
Murch in Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 11, 2008
Born	Walter Scott Murch (1943-07-12) July 12, 1943 (age 73) New York City, New York
Residence	Bolinas, California
Education	Johns Hopkins, BA 1965
Alma mater	USC School of Cinematic Arts
Occupation	Film editor, Sound designer
Years active	1969–present
Spouse(s)	Aggie Murch (1965–present)

Walter Scott Murch (born July 12, 1943) is an American film editor and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing), he has been referred to as "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema."

Murch was born in New York City, New York, the son of Katharine (née Scott) and Canadian-born Walter Tandy Murch (1907–1967), a painter. As a boy, he began to experiment with sound recording, taping unusual sounds and layering them into new combinations. He attended The Collegiate School, a private preparatory school in Manhattan, from 1949 to 1961. He then attended Johns Hopkins University from 1961 to 1965, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in Liberal Arts.

While at Johns Hopkins, he met future director/screenwriter Matthew Robbins and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, with whom he staged a number of happenings. In 1965, Murch and Robbins enrolled in the graduate program of the University of Southern California's film school, encouraging Deschanel to follow them. There all three encountered, and became friends with, fellow students such as George Lucas, Hal Barwood, Robert Dalva, Willard Huyck, Don Glut and John Milius; all of them would go on to be successful filmmakers. Not long after film school, in 1969, Murch, Lucas, and others joined Francis Ford Coppola at American Zoetrope in San Francisco. Murch and his family settled in Bolinas, California, in 1972.