After we finished THX [1138]... This was back in 1971. After we finished it, the film played at Cannes. Not in the main competition but in the sideshow. And after that, it had a run in Paris. And quite a long run actually in a theatre in Paris. And later on that summer I was back in San Francisco at Zoetrope working on, I guess, The Godfather. And we got a letter from Warner Bros., who were the studio behind THX, saying, 'We're being sued by a record company in Paris for copyright infringement, because they say you have stolen one of their squeaks from a record and how do answer this accusation, Mr Murch?' I saw my incipient career in film going down in flame because it was true.

I had fallen in love in the mid-fifties with musique concrète, and particularly with the work of Pierre Henry. And when I was working on the soundtrack for THX, there was a scene where the opening shot was of a machine that was sort of rotating, like a gyroscope but slowly. And the camera moved off of this to a scene between Robert Duvall and another character, Dom Pedro Colley, playing SRT. So THX and SRT were having a conversation in a confined space with this machine, surrounded, I think, by foetuses waiting to be born, or something like that.

So, my challenge, simple enough, was to come up with a sound for this little machine. And I decided, as a tribute, to use a squeak from the record Pierre Henry called Sonata for a Door and a Sigh, or Concerto for Door and a Sigh, something like that. It will come to me in a second. And this short clip on the record consisted of a barn door somewhere in Normandy being opened and closed with a rusty hinge interspersed with a woman sighing kind of languorously [imitates sigh and squeak] for five minutes. And I chose one of the squeaks, being particularly a good one, a nice juicy squeak, and transferred it to film and then made a loop, a physical loop out of that piece of magnetic film, put it in the Moviola, this machine that played the loop and then I transferred that sound onto a long strip of magnetic film. And so what was on that new piece of film was simply [imitates squeaking sounds]. And I took that film and synced that looped sound up with this machine, which was doing this, so [imitates squeaking sounds] got in the film.