Amber Stevens Quotes

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

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.

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

Consistency is very important when you're making films.

If you would ask me what my ideal process is, I would say, long pre-production, long production and long post-production.

I'm amazed that movies ever get finished at all - much less come out good once in a while. It's an awful lot of work and it can go wrong a thousand different ways.

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.

I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.

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.

What happens is that with difficult processes on a film, they get very intensely compressed because a clock is ticking.

You have to edit it, mix it, color grade it, there are processes and the audience doesn't care when they binge-watch a show. They think in four weeks you should get the next season.

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.

There are films that look very interesting when on paper, but things change while shooting. At times, things changed during post-production, and I see no reason to blame anything on anyone. It is a collaborative effort. If it failed, we should face it.

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.

Producing just one video is a long process. First, you decide your song, then you have to figure out the arrangement of the song; will you play it on the guitar? Will you make it a music video? Once you figure that out, you record it and then edit it, which can take two to five days to finish.

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.

On the set, I visit the set for a lot of the rehearsals, and there's always a writer on set. And then I'm involved in post-production, very intensely involved in editing, and the sound mix and color timing. Really, I have about nine jobs.

And then my editor really likes that because he's left alone to do what...to create those things instead of me breathing over his shoulder and I like it because I don't have to sit in the editing room all day. I get to watch just dailies.

In an ideal world the script is written lean and tight and therefore there are no scenes left on the cuttring room floor and therefore no extended edition.

There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.

I've made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I'm the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you're the boss, if it ain't good, you don't use it. You just cut it out.

Actors basically do their thing on the set, and then you put all the pieces together, switch them around, and maybe put them a different way that looks better. We just give him everything he needs, and then he goes in and does his thing.

You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.