Words matter. These are the best Editing Room Quotes from famous people such as Christopher Nolan, Rithy Panh, Damien Chazelle, Peter Landesman, Fred Willard, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.
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.
I love being in the editing room and playing with tempo and with the rhythm of shots.
You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can’t be four hours; it has to be two hours.
I don’t know why my lines that were cut from the film didn’t make it onto the DVD. I have offered to go into the editing room with Christopher and work shoulder to shoulder with him to fit all my lines in. I think he thinks I’m kidding. I’m only trying to help.
If I can have the opportunity to go into an editing room, it’s like the golden ticket for me. All I want is to learn about everything else in the filmmaking process. I just directed a music video which just came out and that’d sort of be the area of the field that I’m going to move into, I hope.
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There’s not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that’s shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.
What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you’re on set. When you’re on set, it has nothing to do with when you’re in the editing room. And when you’re in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go.
The problems I have with a flawed script are always revealed 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.
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.
I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.
Television is such an evolving medium. When you’re doing a TV show, it’s not like you just shoot for six weeks and you’re in an editing room with all of your footage. It’s like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what’s not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.
I directed a short series for Hulu called ‘Paloma,’ and being in an editing room, I learned a lot about acting. It gave me a new bolt of energy in terms of my interest in filmmaking because it made me realize how collaborative filmmaking can be and also that you’re not just limited to one job.
I love the idea that the editing room is the final time you write. You should still be creatively solving problems even at that point. It’s not really until you’re locked that you can call it quits.
The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I’m tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.
I’m just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It’s great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you’re sitting at the edge of your seat and you find yourself holding your breath.
When you’re doing a TV show, it’s not like you just shoot for six weeks and you’re in an editing room with all of your footage. It’s like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what’s not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.
A lot can change in the editing room.
I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.
With film, so much is in the director’s hands. Once something is cut together – unless you’re in the editing room – you don’t really remember what the alternatives are. The exercise in theater is night after night, you are doing the same play, but you have another opportunity to explore.
As an actor you have to bring to the table your creative input. But when a director like Ridley Scott says I want you to do this this way, you know when he gets to the editing room he has a reason for it. It’s like watching a masterpiece.
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.
When I did ‘Gilbert Grape,’ Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.
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.
Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.
I don’t know – I haven’t seen any of my movies after I finish them. I leave the editing room; I don’t go back.
A lot of directors, they don’t go into the editing room during the shoot. When they come back, they’ve forgotten what they’ve shot. That’s why their films come out a year after they shoot them.
In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you’re using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you’re taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.
Sometimes when I’m in the editing room and there’s a new person there, like a music editor or a post person that I don’t really know, I’m like, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be in here. This is too personal – you can’t watch this.’ But then I’m like, hey dummy, you’re about to show this to the whole world.
At the end of the day, making ‘Monster’ was unbelievably hard, as making any movie is. And the only thing that made it worth it is not those awards and all those kind of things that I can barely remember because I was so overwhelmed. It was really that night in the editing room, that day on set. It was those things.
When I am shooting, I am inside the theatre, when I am in the editing room, I am inside the theatre. I always try to feel what they will feel. I see a film, not as a director, but as the audience. If I am entertained, they will be, too.
I was sleeping on editing room floors for $300 a week.
David and I got cut out the editing process on that. We were able to affect it more than not. We sent in our notes, we were able to see cuts. We weren’t allowed to see dailies and we weren’t allowed to sit in the editing room and just work.
When you’re in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
When you’re directing, you see your ideas. You see them created right in front of you on the monitor and the sound stage. You get that experience all over again when you get into the editing room and you start playing with it.
I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.
The first thing I do in the editing room is the ‘radio edit,’ where you listen to the dialogue and don’t even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.
I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I’m shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That’s not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you’re composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.
The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.
