Thomas Newman Quotes

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.

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

My dad told me, 'Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.

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

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

I believe you make a movie three times: once in the development process - putting the ingredients like the script, cast and crew together - once in the shooting process, and once in the editing process.

It took me a year just to edit 'Shotgun Stories.' Actually, it took me two years to edit 'Shotgun Stories.'

The film is made in the editing room.

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.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

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.

Of course, a movie is in constant flux.

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 film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It's like going to get all the ingredients together, and you've got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake - or not.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

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.

I have a tendency to overcut my movies.

I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.

I used to sit on the editing table to see where I may have gone wrong because after editing, only the good parts go on screen.

The idea of being able to polish something for nine months - it's the perfect way to hone your film.

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.

It's very rare to watch a movie and think, 'That's the movie we shot!' So many things happen, with edits and things getting cut out.

On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie.