Abel Ferrara Quotes

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

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

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.

Most of the films I've done were ruined in the postproduction, not during filming.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.

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.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

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

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

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.

I don't watch the dailies. You want to just turn in your resignation when you watch the dailies.

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

Filmmakers need to realize that their job isn't done when they lock picture. We must see our films through.

Nobody ever starts out to make a mediocre, commercial film. You always think it's going to be something. And then, once you're done with your shooting, you have no control. You're just done, as an actor.

Of course, a movie is in constant flux.

Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

Editing is not a part of the filmmaking process I've ever been privy to as an actress.

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 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.

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.

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.