Ralph Fiennes Quotes

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.

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.

There are so many details in a movie that it's amazing how much work you'll do to change what adds up to not that much material.

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.

I've always been a relaxed person on set, but I think the main thing is I think about it from an editing point of view way more than I did before.

Actors basically do their thing on the set, and then you put all the pieces together, switch them around, and maybe put them a different way that looks better. We just give him everything he needs, and then he goes in and does his thing.

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.

Whenever I'm doing any film, there's always three different things. There's the script, which is really just a blueprint. And then, you shoot the movie and it's an entirely different experience than you would expect from reading the script. And then, there's the whole post process and the editing, and it becomes something else entirely.

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

I don't think writing stops until the film is out. In the edit, it's another draft. [The script] is the food for set, and then the set is food for the edit, and the edit is food for the screen. It's constant, and this is just the first stage of it.

For my first movie, I think my first cut was like three hours, because when you first direct a movie, you want to keep everything. But I'm not one of those directors who falls in love with the stuff they've done. Already when I'm doing my first cut, I'm willing to cut out everything that is necessary.

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

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.

In making films, you're dealing with hundreds of people and a crew, but eventually, it's you and an editor, and that part of it, I liked it a lot. The experience on 'Up in Smoke' was great. I really enjoyed it.

Movies require a lot of patience. I like instant results. If I have done something that's not funny at all, the audience will let me know in two seconds. With the movie, I will have to wait nine months to know if I was that bad.

You know, post-production is a bit of a grind to me. If I'm producing a film, I really... I mean I like editing, but all the other crap, the color mixing and... it's all a grind. And so as a result I cut back producing the number of films I was producing.

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.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

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.

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.

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.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

The thing with TV and filming is the timing is all faked anyway. You do it so many times, from so many different angles. You never really do it all in one go anyway, so they just fix it all in the edit.

I co-wrote and produced 'Sticky Fingers' with Catlin Adams, who directed it. I learned a lot writing and producing with Cat. I spent as much time as I could in the cutting room with her. All the producing experience that I had helped.

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.