Jeff Nichols Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

I never watched a frame of the film until it was finished.

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.

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.

Of course, a movie is in constant flux.

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.

I've never made any film that I wouldn't go back and re-edit.

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.

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

The thing is, you never know with any movie how it's going to turn out. It's always a mystery - you'll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

Each movie I make has its own heroes, and the two heroes for me in 'Arrival' are Amy Adams and Joe Walker, the editor. We worked very, very hard, and it was, by far, the longest editing process.

Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.

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 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.

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.

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

I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.

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.