Editing Decisions Quotes

Deleted scenes are like in a middle gray zone. It's like, well, they're deleted because they're not good or you lost the battle and you couldn't put them in the movie.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.

Well, I'll be honest with you, sometimes you don't know you're playing a moment that's going to be in a montage. Sometimes it's a scene that didn't work out the way you hoped it would be and ends up in a montage.

I was going to be credited as Wray Nerely, my role in Con Man. It got cut in the reshoots. I was like, "Wait a second. I'm cut." It's a better telling of the story, but unfortunately, Wray Nerely gets cut, which is actually exactly right because if Wray Nerely was ever in Star Wars, he wouldn't make it to the final edit.

First of all, the first cut of the movie was like three and a half hours and I walked away going, 'Wow, I know there's like twenty minutes that I can cut - ' when I first saw it 'But I don't know after that.' The first time I put up then in front of people I was like, 'Oh, my God, I can take that out and that out and that out.'

When we first put 'Let It Be' out, I had to cut out a lot of stuff that I really like and wanted to stay in there. The stuff in the new DVD has a lot of the stuff that had to be cut out. So for me, it's like the egg is now complete.

Usually you always see first cut is an extended version, because it's basically everything you shot, and you have that version and then you start cutting stuff out.

As an actor, you are sort of only in charge of yourself. All you can really control is your performance. You don't know what they're going to do with it in the editing room, what they're going to cut out, which take they're going to use. You know, your control is very limited. As a director, it's ultimately your piece. You have a lot more responsibility, but you also have a lot more creative control. It's scary, but also liberating in a way.

I did a lot of this through writing flashbacks. Many of the flashbacks took place at Cal's school and I eventually cut them because they didn't seem essential and they slowed the pace of the story in the first third of the book. They were essential to me, though, in that I learned about my characters.

My role was cut from 'Sooryavanshi' because the track was not working for the film. So they had to take it out.

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.

Everything else - music, cinematography, costumes, design, acting - can be judged at face value. But when you're looking at editing, you don't know what the totality of the material was, and you don't know the working dynamic between a director and an editor - whether the editor was micromanaged or given free rein. It's very difficult.

When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

In film or TV work, you can have this amazingly dramatic pause, and they'll just edit it out.

But at a certain point you've gotta be ruthless with the movie because you can have these great scenes, but they aren't specifically building the story that needs to be built at that moment.

The nice thing about a documentary, I think, is that so much of it is editing, too. You sort of get to keep making decisions. It's not as much like when you do a narrative, fictional piece, and you have a certain number of shooting days, and you're like, "Well, that's what it is." You can continue to seek out more photographs or try to find more footage. The genre gives you the ability to keep working on it, which is great for a first-time director.

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

I had heard all sorts of stories about Woody Allen's directing - directorial approach. And some of them turned out to be myth, but one of them was that he doesn't rehearse, and another was that he doesn't really direct. If he doesn't like it... he cuts it out of the movie or even replaces you. And he doesn't talk to you.

I shoot a scene, edit it, and then, two days later, I doubt whether or not it has turned out right. I reshoot a small part of it, go back to the first edit of it, and do all sorts of things.

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.

When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.

If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.