Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat.

There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn't.

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.

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

In making films, you're dealing with hundreds of people and a crew, but eventually, it's you and an editor, and that part of it, I liked it a lot. The experience on 'Up in Smoke' was great. I really enjoyed it.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.

I like pre-production and post the best. I don't like shooting at all. I find it grueling and tough, but I love post and the whole process of seeing the film finally come together. You start ironing out all the rough spots, and the really bad bits you just throw away. So from day one of post to the last day, you see nothing but improvements.

There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.

When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.

I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.

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.

There are so many details in a movie that it's amazing how much work you'll do to change what adds up to not that much material.

The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.

It's very rare to watch a movie and think, 'That's the movie we shot!' So many things happen, with edits and things getting cut out.

Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he's an editor himself - we cut together. It means he's constantly thinking about my problems while he's filming.

In films, you have to follow the director's vision. Filmmaking is a director's medium. So everything happens as per the script and his vision.

I never think about it much, the visual aspect of it, until we start making the movie. I don't really think about it when we write. When we finish, and I start putting the film together, and we pick the locations, I do think about that a lot.

Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you've shot, regardless of what the intent may have been.

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

When we were shooting the movie, and of course in the editing room we had to make choices, but the shots fall almost exactly where we thought they would. They're not about content; they're never meant to be about what just happened. There's that weird phenomenon where the more you like a movie the more your mind wanders and goes all over the place.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.