Scene Arrangement Quotes

Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.

In a play, you dictate pace, you dictate rhythm, you dictate when people look at you, when people should be looking at something else. In film, the editor does that.

The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it's in the edit. It's not an actor's job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking.

In TV, you are much more likely to see the episode closer to the script as written - in terms of the order of the scenes - than you would in a movie, and here's why: you don't have as many days to edit. You have 10 to 12 weeks or more to edit a feature, and you have four days to edit TV. That's a huge difference.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

In television, you are of necessity working in bits and pieces and scenes, and things are out of order, and you never can have the same sense of how will this look when it's all put together, what will the effect be.

The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it's more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.

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.

Directing is such a crucial part of the writing process; you start directing and you see what does not work. "Oh, God, what was I thinking?" and then you can rearrange it.

There's the internal rhythm within a sequence, and then there's the rhythm between the sequences, and that's extremely important in constructing the narrative. For example, you don't put two big dramatic scenes right next to each other. But you can use the rhythm of the transition shots; they can often serve a double purpose.

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

After we map out all the main characters' individual arcs, using color-coded index cards, we arrange them by episode and get a rough idea of the scene order.

Actors basically do their thing on the set, and then you put all the pieces together, switch them around, and maybe put them a different way that looks better. We just give him everything he needs, and then he goes in and does his thing.

I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression.