Film Cutting Quotes

I enjoy editing when I'm directing, but when someone else is directing, that's their film to cut.

I cut 'Deer Hunter' myself.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don't want four takes that are identical.

When I was about 14, I got a splicing kit, which means you could chop up the film into little pieces and switch the order around and glue it together.

Usually you always see first cut is an extended version, because it's basically everything you shot, and you have that version and then you start cutting stuff out.

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

What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.

Whenever I see a cut of a film and something is gone, I don't notice it unless it obviously should have been kept.

A good director is very well prepared, and knows exactly how he's going to cut the film, so the shooting is as efficient as possible.

The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.

The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I'm shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That's not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you're composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.

When you cut a film, certain scenes fall away and don't fit into the shape of the movie.