Terry Gilliam Quotes

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release. Anything I think isn't working or might not work, I don't even put it in the director's cut. And usually it's the studio suggesting I put stuff back in, as opposed to studios saying, "You got to lose 40 minutes," they are always saying, "You've got to gain five minutes."

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

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

A scene gets cut a few frames here and there, but there's a cumulative effect to it, and then the music needs to be reworked. It's demanding, but when you see the improved cuts, it's always better.

I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.

I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.

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.

The idea of being able to polish something for nine months - it's the perfect way to hone your film.

One of our big tools is screening. We screen usually 12 times, which is much more than most filmmakers do, and we recut in between each one, because we really need to feel how the audience is reacting to the movie.

Seeing the first edit is the worst.

Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck... our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck. That's the hard part.

My first cut that I showed the studio was probably 2hrs 20min.

My first cut was three hours and 17 minutes. And then I just became very shrewd about the editing.

When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

I'm an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.

Damn, my first cut that I showed to distributors was probably about two hours and 20 minutes, even though my contract said two hours. So, I had to lose 20 minutes. It's incredible that it just keeps happening.

You always have three movies that you have to reduce into one. You have the screenplay. And then, you do a workshop and you add more scenes. And then, on the day you shoot, there's more action and interaction. It's like a souffle. It has a tendency to just grow and explode, and it's just too long.

I always figured that once I wrapped a film, then anything beyond that is none of my business. If I can avoid seeing the final product, then all I have in my head is feeling good about the experience.

My first cut is always pretty similar to the final cut.

I believe in hiring people to do their jobs.I want to hire an editor.They say you make a movie three times: when you write it, when you direct it, and when you edit it. So I have three shots to get it right!

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.

Interestingly, my first director's cut was an hour and forty-one minutes. Then, the studio actually wanted to add more to the story, so we went all the way up to an hour and forty-seven minutes. After that, I made some additional cuts and now we are where we are.