We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.
Every single director stops at the moment he thinks he has the shot. Sometimes, directors shoot an establishing shot where everything is in the shot. He's going to use this at the beginning and the end.
There are quite detailed rules with sitcom. When people can leave scenes, act structure, joke rhythm. You can't not have a straight man.
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.
The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.
As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.
I like to shoot scenes where I can see the beginning, middle and end of the entire scene. But, when you edit a movie together, you can just cut right into the middle. You don't need to see them walk into the room and put their jacket on the chair. There's always a lot of shoe leather that you can remove.
It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.
In 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the challenge was just transitions. Time transitions from 1961 to 1906; how do you follow a character in one environment to another? And sometimes these transitions were quick, so how do you do that?
It's always easy, I think, to raise the importance of a scene through the addition of music. But it's very awkward to end it unless there's a door slam or a gunshot or something that just takes you right out of it.
A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.
Some of the most exciting moments in 'Star Wars' are when you're cutting between stories and you're building this momentum.
'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'
There wasn't space to mood-up. I think Rose Byrne was just extraordinary. Talk about a character that could be really unsympathetic at times. She just jumped in these scenes that go from anger to hysteria to crying to laughing and back to anger. I just marveled.
As an actor, often you're stuck with these scenes in which a great period of time is in between them - for example, if you do a biopic, it might be a year, it might be a decade, you never know.
When you're on an ensemble show and you're messing around with everybody every day and you're not in every scene, and then all of a sudden you're in every scene, it's rough.
That's when you're laughing the hardest because you're not really in character. You're just trying to learn the moves, but once they call, "Action!", you're in it and it's like you transport yourself to a different place.
If you're going to walk into a scene on a stage, you've gotta know what room you just left and what just happened.
In movies, you just see somebody close their eyes, and you go on to the next scene.
My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.
The only reason for using another cut is to improve the scene.
As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.
There's always the pressure on the director of how to transition from one scene to another, especially when it can really be oblique on 'Game of Thrones.'
