Michael Rooker Quotes

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.

I don't do any editing while we're making the movie. I sit down and watch it all with my editor, we make longhand notes on pads, and then we begin our work.

I directed a movie and now, I'm going to do the editing.

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.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.

Four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time.

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing.

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.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

I used to sit on the editing table to see where I may have gone wrong because after editing, only the good parts go on screen.

When you see an early edited version, you're not sure what it is. The movie is getting on its wobbly legs.

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.

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.

It took me a year just to edit 'Shotgun Stories.' Actually, it took me two years to edit 'Shotgun Stories.'

There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.

Whenever I'm not shooting, I'm in the editing room with my footage. While the crew is taking 15 minutes to an hour to set up the next shot, I'm behind the Avid, putting the flick together.

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities.

Whenever I'm doing any film, there's always three different things. There's the script, which is really just a blueprint. And then, you shoot the movie and it's an entirely different experience than you would expect from reading the script. And then, there's the whole post process and the editing, and it becomes something else entirely.

My dad told me, 'Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.

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.

The truth is, an actor's performance is the result of work by a lot more people than just the actor. When you see that character portrayed up on screen, there is the work certainly of the actor, but there's the work of the editor, there's the work of what the camera was doing. What the music was doing, all of the above.

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.

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.