Alex Graves Quotes

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

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.

I won't rewrite on set, but I'll just trim the fat.

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

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

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.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

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.

In any movie, there are a number of scenes that get cut in an effort to keep the film from running too long. Some are of little consequence, but others are important scenes that are very painful to lose.

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

Veteran' is an exercise in editing because there is a lot of moments I took out and some that almost didn't make it.

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.

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat.

The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

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.

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