Movie Editing Quotes

That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you.

I can't watch a movie where the actors are great and the photography sucks.

It makes you feel good when a movie works. Usually when I see an old movie I've made, I say to myself, 'Oh God, why did I do this?' and 'Why didn't I change that?' and things like that.

I was briefly in the original version of 'Tombstone,' but I didn't make the final cut because that movie went through a couple of different permutations.

I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'

For my own films, I would like to see 'Bullet in the Head' remastered. The original cut was actually almost three hours.

I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn't even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn't going to a lot of comedy.

Editing is not a part of the filmmaking process I've ever been privy to as an actress.

Jonathan Demme is a very sharp editor of his movies.

And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

I directed a movie and now, I'm going to do the editing.

I didn't mention the tooth thing to anyone until it became clear that...we started to discuss just taking it out of the movie [The Hangover] because we couldn't find anything that worked and they couldn't afford to do a full like digital effect. So that's when I called my dentist and it worked out.

I just hate that Lucas... and it is not just Lucas, because everybody does it, where, boom, they get it out, and then there's a special edition for a movie that doesn't deserve a special edition.

I cut 'Deer Hunter' myself.

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.

What's in the movie compared to what we shot is the tip of the iceberg.

I remember watching the Blu-ray, and also when they first released it on DVD in the collection of all three movies of 'The Godfather,' and seeing all of those scenes that they cut out, and there wasn't a single one of them that I wished they had kept it, but they were the most exciting thing to watch anyway.

I have a tendency to overcut my movies.

Sometimes you can have a great scene but it just doesn't need to be in the movie. If it's not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it's not purposefully serving a breath - it has got to go.

With bad movies, I have this image in my head of the director and the editor in the editing room watching a scene that is not happening, looking at each other and saying, 'Put some music in there.'

I've tried like hell to make bad movies good, and I can't. Maybe Marlon Brando has been able to do that at times. But even he has a hard time making 'The Appaloosa' a good movie.

Even when 'Kaakha Kaakha' was released, there were people who gave it an average rating and said they couldn't figure out what was happening. Three days after its release, the producer called me and asked me to remove all of Jothika's scenes from the film. I told him; in that case, you can also remove my name from the director's slot.