Rough Cut Quotes

My dad told me, 'Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

A lot can change in the editing room.

When you're editing the film, you use a temp track. So you're putting music in there for a rough cut to keep track of what's going on. It can be a hindrance if wrong, it can be an enormous asset if you get it right.

A lot of films come out before they're finished.

When you see an early edited version, you're not sure what it is. The movie is getting on its wobbly legs.

When you're working on a film, it's not always finished visually, what you're looking at.

For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

With the fight scenes, they would take a video camera and shoot alongside the camera so we would piece it together on the computer and had an extremely rough cut of what we were doing.

You first do the assembly cut, which is basically the cut that mirrors the script. You've got to start with that.

It didn't get into Sundance although I showed a rough cut which is a mistake to all filmmakers out there.