Editing is agonizing, fretting over facts; it’s not virtue-signaling or confusing the ephemeral with the eternal. Unless we can tell the difference between the meaningful and the meaningless, the material and the immaterial, we will be lost in illogic.
I've never written a book before.
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.
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.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.
I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.
I'm amazed that movies ever get finished at all - much less come out good once in a while. It's an awful lot of work and it can go wrong a thousand different ways.
My dad told me, 'Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.
'America' took at least five days of actual filming.
If a producer goes to the censor at the last minute, just before the film releases, then he often settles with cuts because he cannot afford to lose any more time.
Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.
The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.
I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.
Having your book edited is like watching your cat being operated on. It's uncomfortable and someone is probably going to get hurt. Most likely the cat. But in the end, things work out for the best and your cat is better it. And then your cat gets released in hardcover, and you have to read all of his reviews.
I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
The truth is, an actor's performance is the result of work by a lot more people than just the actor. When you see that character portrayed up on screen, there is the work certainly of the actor, but there's the work of the editor, there's the work of what the camera was doing. What the music was doing, all of the above.
Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.
I don't like fast editing.
I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.
Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.
The Coen brothers: Of all the directors I've worked with, they're the only ones who have given me the storyboards attached to the script. It was very cool for me, because I knew when I was in close-up or if it was far away, and it also made me know that anything that happened in the edit wasn't personal. Because they edit their own movies, so they were editing it as they went.
