I wrote ‘All is Lost’ while editing ‘Margin Call’. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.
It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm’s editing and censoring many of the tales.
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You’ve got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I’ve got my Freud mixed up. It’s just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.
One of the things I learned in editing ‘The Reagan Diaries’ is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.
I think ‘GoodFellas’ is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint – to me, it’s just a perfect movie.
Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.
Movies remind me of recording. Just the process of it – the intricacies, the technicalities, the days and the long hours, and mastering and mixing and editing. But seeing the final product, it all pays off in the end. That’s the rush – when you see things come to life.
Since I was a child, I’ve liked telling stories. Maybe because my father’s a director, I grew up loving stories. I’m not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.
I’ve driven people mad on films that I’ve made – I want more takes; I want to try new lines. Then I want to interfere in the editing process, and I want to interfere in the advertising process – everything, everything. Pretty much Barbra Streisand in trousers, I am!
I have been a huge fan of Gautham; I remember him editing ‘Kaakha Kaakha’ and I used to pray for it to become a superhit.
There is anxiety, but it comes after you’ve finished filming because it’s out of your hands; people are editing it, they’re cutting it, marketing it. And it’s… part your career sort of rides on that. But when you’re actually filming it’s a team thing and it really feels good there for me.
In ‘Serena,’ stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer’s rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it’s a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.
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 my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.
I feel like I might be a designer or stylist – or a director because I have always been super interested in cameras and editing.
Writers are in control of editing processes – making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing.
The less the camera is able to capture what you’re seeing in a scene, the more editing it needs.
My dad grew up as a computer programmer, so he always had random computer software, and I started opening up editing software at age 12 and figuring out how to build websites.
I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I’m very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it’s not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.
I don’t do a lot of editing post-shoot, but I use Lightroom to play with contrast and texture and to remove dust.
I don’t come from a film background. I haven’t learned anything about films or film-making. But I have a thirst to know everything about my profession. I want to learn about cinematography, about editing, about music recordings, about post-production. So when people in the know talk, I willingly listen.
Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff – all this bad, stupid stuff – and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.
A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is.
Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I’ve made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time – they are my audience. They’re the people that I think about while I’m writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.
I can lock myself for months in the editing suite with no noise or distractions. It’s fascinating to see the film taking shape.
Although Patterson Beams was not my first plug-in, I knew from the beginning that I would write it, because the single biggest time consuming factor for me was editing each beam manually.
I haven’t watched ‘Half Baked’ in 17 years, since I was editing it. It’s like looking at an old picture where you have bad bangs or something.
I put myself in the place of the listener when editing my writing. The last thing that I want to do is be preached at and told who to be or what to think when listening to an artist. However, I do want to be inspired. There’s a fine line.
You can’t allow your creative sessions to be dominated by miniscule editing processes.
Of course, when you’re making a documentary, you don’t have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.
If I walk into the editing room, it’s six hours lost. I’m massaging frames. I’m, like, ‘Oh, take six frames off that shot. Hit the music cue right there.’ I will drive everybody crazy if left to my own devices in that room. So I try to do everything I can by staying out of the way.
When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, ‘Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.’
My father’s films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It’s the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.
Sometimes when you’re heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don’t know if you could ever do it again.
We Need To Talk About Kevin,’ as an adaptation, was pretty major. It’s a long book, and it’s in letters, so it was a real editing experience to boil that down and make it cinematic. I learned a lot doing that film.
So if we’re going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing – today that doesn’t matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers – you really need to have a cross-platform story.
When you’re making the film, you don’t really think the audience; it’s only when you start editing that you really start to became aware of your audience because you’re thinking of how you communicate these ideas, and how lucid can you be, and yet stay within the language you’ve established.
I’m a writer first and an editor second… or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don’t claim to have all of them at my command.
I like files. I like editing a CSS file without necessarily having to edit an HTML file. I like fixing a problem by replacing a corrupted file with a clean one. Maybe I’m set in my ways, but I don’t consider it a hardship to open a folder or replace a file.
We all know that the ‘reality’ of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.
Formulating the proposal is about 80% of the actual time of the process. In the end, the time spent filming, editing and postproduction is a very small proportion of the total time you spend in the production of the film.
You can really shoot things you think might work on camera one way, then you can try it that way, and then if you think it could also work another way, you have that luxury of shooting a bunch of different steps, and then they can decide in editing what works the best.
The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It’s like going to get all the ingredients together, and you’ve got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake – or not.
