Fede Alvarez Quotes

My first cut is always pretty similar to the final cut.

Interestingly, my first director's cut was an hour and forty-one minutes. Then, the studio actually wanted to add more to the story, so we went all the way up to an hour and forty-seven minutes. After that, I made some additional cuts and now we are where we are.

My first cut that I showed the studio was probably 2hrs 20min.

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

I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room 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.

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

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release. Anything I think isn't working or might not work, I don't even put it in the director's cut. And usually it's the studio suggesting I put stuff back in, as opposed to studios saying, "You got to lose 40 minutes," they are always saying, "You've got to gain five minutes."

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

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

The only reason for using another cut is to improve the scene.

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

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.

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.

There's only one movie in my career I've had regrets with cutting it shorter, and I think some scenes maybe I shouldn't have cut.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time.

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