Rithy Panh Quotes

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.

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.

The relationship between a director and an editor in documentaries is so important.

I love documentaries. I love the format. I've been doing them for a long time.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

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

I'm very interested in the editing process - in all aspects of film-making, really.

From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.

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.

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

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.

Docs, in general, are made in the edit bay, archival docs even more so.

The making of the documentary is an involving and collaborative process where you go deeper unlike in movies where you just borrow someone else's script.

I edit as I write and shoot. Any extra line, any pause that I know will get chopped on the editing table is done away with then and there.

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat.

The film is made in the editing room.

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

'The Look' is my first documentary, and I enjoyed the freedom of working within a small team.

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.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.