Wyck Godfrey Quotes

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

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.

For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

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.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.

The film is made in the editing room.

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 great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

We set out to capture what was happening, and then we cut that into the series.

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

I fell in love with film and its potential. The idea of putting one image next to another image and creating meaning blew my mind.

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.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

I just think a lot of movies are too long. I want to know how to make my movie as tight as possible.