Michael Apted Quotes

[ Digital revolution ] only has allowed me to work faster, editing digitally, which I'm doing right now, a film on volcanoes. I can edit almost as fast as I'm thinking, editing with celluloid means always searching for this little reel of film, and number it, and scribble on it with some sort of pens, and gluing it together, and working on a flatbed. It's much, much slower.

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.

Consistency is very important when you're making films.

I feel a lot of films that are shot digitally, even low-budget independent films, they look super slick now. Because the technology is so good that they look too good.

We were working with this lousy print and it just wasn't going to be good enough. I said that we should get the original negative and do it from that. Well, a couple guys pointed out that the negative was locked up over at Deluxe.

I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.

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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

Some movies get rushed out right after you make them and I'm not always happy with that.

From where I sit, I see the digital cinema creating sloppiness on the part of filmmakers because they know if they really get in trouble, they can fix it later. So they don't pay that much attention, and of course it costs a lot more money.

I don't like to watch dailies or video playback unless I have to.

The thing I realized about final cut is it's the power of the best cut. I didn't have final cut on 'Prisoners,' but what you saw is the best cut. 'Sicario' is a directors' cut. 'Arrival' is a directors' cut.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

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.

I can access footage much quicker, yes. But in terms of living with a film and knowing what's right, digital doesn't do that for you.

I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics - you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit - and I became a film editor.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

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.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

Anybody with a good smart phone can shoot and edit a film. Distributing it is the hard part.

I take time with my films and I want to work on every script properly before I move on to something else.

It takes two years to make a good film.