Quotes About Editing

When you're putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding over and over again are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.

What I'm suggesting is a list of priorities. If you have to give up something, don't ever give up emotion before story. Don't give up story before rhythm, don't give up rhythm before eye-trace, don't give up eye-trace before planarity, and don't give up planarity before spatial continuity.

The function of the first draft is to help you figure out your story. The function of every draft after that is to figure out the most dramatic way to tell that story.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Write like you're in love. Edit like you're in charge.

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

I can't write five words but that I change seven.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

Sometimes I'll use four or five different photo apps on one photo just to get it where I want it to be.

With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.

When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It's already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that's your photograph. Then you don't really think about it anymore.

I believe Photoshop is in some way the contemporary darkroom, the creative area that all photographers have available today.

The process is always the same. I get an inspiration for a new song, I put it down on paper immediately so I won't lose it. When I am ready to go to the studio with it, I play it a few times on the piano and edit, add, and type the lyrics and take it to the studio. Sometimes I don't have anything on paper.

Everybody hates to edit my film. Back in the day, we called it film - now, my digital cards. But I shoot an awful lot of pictures. I don't want to hesitate, because I believe the moment is everything in a picture. So, I take the pictures.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

When you do a piece of journalism, you may have to cut away 95 percent of what you are experiencing.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.

A good part of the work is just reading a manuscript and coming to the office. I can't imagine wanting to even read an article about book publishing.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.