Abel Ferrara Quotes

You seldom get that in film where you're lucky if you get any say at all in the final cut.

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

I've never made any film that I wouldn't go back and re-edit.

Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.

I don't believe in director's cuts where you make things longer. The coolest thing was when the Coen brothers did a director's cut of 'Blood Simple,' and they made it shorter.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

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.

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.

My approach to working in movies is to empower the director to have power over me and to really support his vision because he's the guy, at the end of the day, who's going to put it all together.

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

To me, 'director's cut' means that what was released before was somebody else's cut. That, to me, always implies that what was released wasn't what the director wanted.

The thing I realized about final cut is it's the power of the best cut. I didn't have final cut on 'Prisoners,' but what you saw is the best cut. 'Sicario' is a directors' cut. 'Arrival' is a directors' cut.

I can't remember who said, 'No film is completed, just abandoned,' but I think most filmmakers will tell you that they could endlessly fiddle with their films for the next couple of decades, you know, changing things, altering things.

It took me a year just to edit 'Shotgun Stories.' Actually, it took me two years to edit 'Shotgun Stories.'

I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.

My first cut that I showed the studio was probably 2hrs 20min.

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release. Anything I think isn't working or might not work, I don't even put it in the director's cut. And usually it's the studio suggesting I put stuff back in, as opposed to studios saying, "You got to lose 40 minutes," they are always saying, "You've got to gain five minutes."

If I could get myself in an editing room, that'd be trouble. I mean, that's how it works, you know? You leave everything on the field. I would pick apart - I do, even on the first time. More than once is just too much self-destruction. I don't need that.

Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

In the past I've worked with directors who saw very much their scene in their head and knew exactly how they were going to cut it.

I don't watch the dailies. You want to just turn in your resignation when you watch the dailies.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

Watching the completed version of The Two Towers for example, I was very conscious of scenes - sometimes whole sequences - that I had seen being filmed or edited but which hadn't made it into the final cut.

Even though I studied in New York and I know the American system, I come from France where I learned that with movies in France where the director is king. There's no such thing as a studio edit. It's the director's cut, period.

Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.