Daniel Handler Quotes

Usually you always see first cut is an extended version, because it's basically everything you shot, and you have that version and then you start cutting stuff out.

If I could get myself in an editing room, that'd be trouble. I mean, that's how it works, you know? You leave everything on the field. I would pick apart - I do, even on the first time. More than once is just too much self-destruction. I don't need that.

Watching the completed version of The Two Towers for example, I was very conscious of scenes - sometimes whole sequences - that I had seen being filmed or edited but which hadn't made it into the final cut.

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 have no control over a film. I don't know what will be left on the cutting floor.

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.

Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.

I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.

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.

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.

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.

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

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.

Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.

David and I got cut out the editing process on that. We were able to affect it more than not. We sent in our notes, we were able to see cuts. We weren't allowed to see dailies and we weren't allowed to sit in the editing room and just work.

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

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

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.

Once you walk off the set, if you're an actor, the rest isn't your responsibility, which I like a lot. I'm not responsible for the final product, which is why it's always a pleasure when you see it's in the hands of the people afterwards putting it together.

You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.

I may have given my best performance but what if the role gets edited?

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.