Robert Schwentke Quotes

I have no control over a film. I don't know what will be left on the cutting floor.

David and I got cut out the editing process on that. We were able to affect it more than not. We sent in our notes, we were able to see cuts. We weren't allowed to see dailies and we weren't allowed to sit in the editing room and just work.

Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.

I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing.

I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.

I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor.

I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.

That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you.

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

Four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time.

Most of the films I've done were ruined in the postproduction, not during filming.

Once you walk off the set, if you're an actor, the rest isn't your responsibility, which I like a lot. I'm not responsible for the final product, which is why it's always a pleasure when you see it's in the hands of the people afterwards putting it together.

If Steven Spielberg brought me a movie four hours long and said, 'It has to go out this way,' I guarantee you that's the way it would go out.

There's no such thing as a non-final cut director.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

I thought it was a wonderful line - right on the cutting room floor.

I enjoy editing when I'm directing, but when someone else is directing, that's their film to cut.

You act in a movie, and at the end of the day, the director and editor decide what your performance is.

You learn pretty quickly: if you fall in love with your edit, you're bound to be heartbroken because it will all be re-cut.

Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.

I may have given my best performance but what if the role gets edited?

I used to sit on the editing table to see where I may have gone wrong because after editing, only the good parts go on screen.