Quotes About Editing

One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

I love writing, and I love postproduction. That's great, because you start to reassemble the film, and you sit there, and you start to really put the film together, finally. The shooting of it is the most stressful part of the process.

To me I don't deal with stress well at all, and it is stressful enough for me to deal with my own one character. So if I had to deal with all the characters and the special effects, and the editing and make the writing tweaks and do everything the director does, that would drive me to an early grave, and I just can't do it.

I've always recorded the same way. I put down as many ideas as I have, then strip them away at the mixdown. It's better to have too much music than not enough.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

I was directing as a kid in movies, and that was always my strongest interest. When I was under contract at Universal, I conned an editing room out of them and spent my money to rent a camera and shoot film and make some movies.

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.

In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.

The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.

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 documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

Any project that you shoot, it's never going to be completely finished the way that... I don't think I've ever worked on anything where every scene has been kept in the order that it was originally in, or that it hasn't been cut down in some way.

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.

All the stuff we have to edit out of our music, we put in our kids book.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

I look at the plotline and let my co-author basically write the book; first draft. Then they give it to me, and I totally destroy it and write all my stuff over it.

Certainly as an actor, half of your work is not going to end up on the screen anyway, because in the editorial process, they need to cut to the other actor in the scene. Very often, your best work ends up on the cutting room floor, because it just doesn't work with the overall narrative drive of the story.

I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.

Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.

I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?

Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark.

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.