Selective Editing Quotes

If I tape an 11-hour day, guess which parts end up on air. Not the bits when I'm pleasant, but the parts when I'm obnoxious.

I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.

I would say to people of a libertarian conservative position on an issue, do not do a taped interview. You're going to come out looking really bad. No matter what you say, no matter how eloquently you answer a question, your answer is not going to be what you said.

I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.

I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.

If you sign up for TV, expect the edit to make things interesting.

Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that.

I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.

I've done my best to avoid B pictures.

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

People say they make movies to show what 'really happens.' But they only show what they choose to show.

In film and television we are oftentimes so pampered that the truths are withheld.

As much as I like Michael Moore - and I'm on the same political side as him - I think his documentaries are really a batch of manipulations and lies.

Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. 'Lying' is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

For my first movie, I think my first cut was like three hours, because when you first direct a movie, you want to keep everything. But I'm not one of those directors who falls in love with the stuff they've done. Already when I'm doing my first cut, I'm willing to cut out everything that is necessary.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.

I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.

Television’s a funny thing. You can be edited in ways that makes you appear to say what you didn’t say.