I don't like fast editing.
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
I've had editors over the years who couldn't find a clue if it was stapled to their butt.
When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.
What a director should be doing is making it appear as though there was no script.
Between the ages of 18 and 20, I made three hour-long films. One was a superhero film called 'Carbolic Soap.' One was a cop film called 'Dead Right.' And the other was called 'A Fistful Of Fingers.'
Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.
Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you're playing with time, and you don't have that ability where someone can pause at home. That's such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don't really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.
Sometimes there's something that a writer doesn't see or a producer doesn't see when he's looking at a shot.
I have the soul of a director.
I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me.
Jonathan Demme is a very sharp editor of his movies.
I want to challenge my cinematography and my editing.
I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.
I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.
Reality TV finds talented people. There are no scripts. The editing is what it's all about. Great editing makes those shows.
When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.
Louis Malle is maybe one of my favorite directors, but I love Tarantino.
In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.
The difference between one writer and the other, or one director and the other, is the way he deals with a scene.
People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.
I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'
The thing to keep in mind is that's how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.
I'm too big a fan of rhythm and editing. I'd much rather my editing be brave than my shooting.
Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.
