Peter Greenaway Quotes

I cut 'Deer Hunter' myself.

I think you either have chemistry or you don't. If you could create chemistry in the editing room then there would be no films without chemistry, obviously, because there are a lot of good editors out there who'd be able to take care of that then if that's how it really worked.

Once your acting job is over, you just hope they have a good editor and they put together a good film.

I learned early on that it's heartbreaking to - there's the editor that comes in, and then they have to craft the movie together, and sometimes you give a whole performance that's just been cut up, and maybe it's better for it, absolutely, but you still have to deal with the loss of that.

Movies are an editor's medium.

Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

I make plays. In the air, on the ground, one cut or a million cuts - I don't think it matters.

There are some directors who don't like the set much. They like post-production, where you have all the ingredients in the can - you've got all the footage, all the music, the various effects - and then you have to do the alchemy necessary to make it all good, a long and very key process of putting everything together and making it into the cogent thing that you want.

That's the process of making the film and it isn't until the world puts their eyes to it that you find out if it's creating any kind of connection at all. But every single film at some stage of the film I think, "I wonder what this is going to be?"

Ultimately, you just have to do what feels right for the film. It really helps when you have great collaborators like my editor, Eduardo Serrano, who kept telling me various scenes should be longer.

The way I work is that I never let people do an assembly. I don't like it because it shapes the film in a way that I can't really control. To me, editing is making the film and it's a huge process and editors are under-rated.

A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries; the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.

The film is made in the editing room.

My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.

[on editing of the films] There is always a question of time, and the director. I've worked with a lot of directors who don't mind my involvement. They appreciated it.

When in doubt, delete it.

It's like live action if you reshot every scene a million times after finishing the movie. Because even apparently by the very end, a few weeks before they were screening it for the world premiere, they were making changes. That's just simply something you can't do on live action.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.

There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.

A good director is very well prepared, and knows exactly how he's going to cut the film, so the shooting is as efficient as possible.

If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.