Cutting Room Quotes

I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me.

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.

People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

I always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.

I co-wrote and produced 'Sticky Fingers' with Catlin Adams, who directed it. I learned a lot writing and producing with Cat. I spent as much time as I could in the cutting room with her. All the producing experience that I had helped.

I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.

I’m not being cynical, but when you’re doing a movie you have a number of choices as an actor. Then you see it all cut together and all of those precious little pieces you put in are maybe on the cutting room floor. So, you don’t have that much control. You have very little control, in fact.

Over-length is one of the things that most often results in the destruction of the movie in the cutting room.

The film is made in the editing room.

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

Certainly as an actor, half of your work is not going to end up on the screen anyway, because in the editorial process, they need to cut to the other actor in the scene. Very often, your best work ends up on the cutting room floor, because it just doesn't work with the overall narrative drive of the story.

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

I think screenwriters, I think editors in the cutting room - they have a lot of responsibility that we don't think about, but they could cut the coverage of an Asian person to focus on a white person because, unknowingly, they think that white person has more to say or is more interesting.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'

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 thought it was a wonderful line - right on the cutting room floor.

I lose tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. For Scary Movie 3, for example, we had a lot of Matrix spoofs, a Hulk scene, and some of that stuff just doesn't hold up - it's too much plot, audiences just didn't want to hear about it.

Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.

If I could get myself in an editing room, that'd be trouble. I mean, that's how it works, you know? You leave everything on the field. I would pick apart - I do, even on the first time. More than once is just too much self-destruction. I don't need that.

We're not allowed in the cutting room - and that's extraordinary. So, when a director is asking for certain nuances and colours and we feel that they're phoney, but we do it because the director asks for it, that's the one that they pick in the cutting room. And I contend that when you see a movie with bad acting, don't blame the actor... blame those guys in the cutting room because they like that take.

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.

All too often in tough economic times, it is the environment that gets left on the cutting room floors of Congress as everyone scraps for limited federal dollars.

My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.