Christopher Guest Quotes

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

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.

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

Don't worry about getting final cut, worry about making the best possible cut.

I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I don't think enough directors know enough about editing.

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.

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.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

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

People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work.

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.

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.