Editing Flexibility Quotes

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

I don't shoot movies quickly because I get a lot of coverage and a lot of angles, so we have all the pieces in the editing. I do a lot of takes, but it's because I'm looking for something.

When you are in control of what the final product is, there is kind of no limitation to what you feel like you can do because you know that if you don't like it, you can just cut it out.

When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.

We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad libbing could be sliced from the final product.

The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it's more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.

With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.

I like to kind of change my performance so that there's more to play with in the editing suite. At the same time I think by the time you've done say 55 takes you're exhausted and you've kind of lost the power behind it that you had on take #1 or take #2.

I like to write scenes in the middle of the night. We could change every word of 'Family Ties' between Monday and Friday.

The beauty of TV is that it does not have to be live. In this case, rather than spending an hour or two hours staring at a door and waiting for somebody to come out, we can just tell you after it has happened.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

On YouTube, we were our own masters. We could sit on an edit until we got it right, we could choose quality over quantity.

In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.