Move.
What makes a movie a movie is the editing.
I've been in the business for, I don't know, 37 years, I think.
Something like that.
I did not really realize what editing was until I was in the editing room myself.
There's magic to editing. Magic is a discovery...
of something new that wasn't intended that works for the movie.
Once you start to realize that film is the sum of editing...
then editing is the thing you're always looking at.
Showtime, folks.
I think great editing skill...
will protect a director from suicide.
The first filmmakers simply photographed what interested or amused them.
They held a shot until they got bored or the film ran out.
The fathers of cinema, Edison in the United States...
and the Lumičre brothers in France...
were very pessimistic about the future of cinema.
There was probably a worldwide interest...
in seeing these images move...
but once you'd seen somebody playing a joke with a hose...
why pay money to see something that you can see for real out in the street?
In fact, Auguste Lumičre went as far as to say...
that cinema was an invention without a future.
But Edwin Porter, one of Thomas Edison's employees...
proved him wrong.
Porter discovered that cutting separate shots together...
could create a story.
Edwin S. Porter really was the one with The Life of an American Fireman...
I think, that started intercutting...
and creating an emotional impact on the audience...
by intercutting two shots that are not related to each other.
One scene is going on at one place...
basically, the firemen rushing to a fire with their horse-drawn wagons...
and the other scene is the fire, miles away.
You intercut the two and you understand, psychologically and emotionally...
that these people's lives are in danger...
and these people are coming to rescue them...
and you're rooting, all of a sudden, for that to happen...
and you're hoping they save the people.
I often think about what it must have been like to be there...
to create the art form as it was happening...
and say, "Why don't we try this?" "That doesn't make sense."
We do it in the editing room now.
We cut to something and say, "That doesn't work."
Imagine what they must have said in 1904.
The Great Train Robbery was Porter's next film.
That's when you really begin to see the possibilities.
I'm not saying this because I'm an editor, but the invention of editing...
is the thing that allowed film to take off.
It's the equivalent of the invention of flight.
Both human-powered flight and motion-picture editing...
were invented in the same year, and they have similar kinds of effects.
The invention of editing gave birth to a new art and a new language...
a language that can transport us in the blink of an eye...
from the vastness of the desert to the mysteries of the human face.
A cut can bridge millions of years, connecting the prehistoric past...
to an imaginary future.
Editing can slow down time...
or speed it up.
The timing of a cut can startle audiences...
or amuse them.
...with a long knife trailing after me. I am in great danger.
I'll never let go. I promise.
The choice and length of shots...
shape our response to everything we see on the screen.
And editing is why people like movies.
Because in the end, wouldn't we like to edit our own lives?
I think we would.
I think everybody would like to take out the bad parts...
take out the slow parts, and look deeper into the good parts.
I started working on what used to be called...
the upright Moviola, which is an editing machine...
that looks something like a green sewing machine on legs.
I switched to computer editing in the mid '90s.
The editor is sort of the ombudsman for the audience.
As an editor, you only see what is on the screen...
not what was going on at the time of shooting...
and that's how it's gonna look to the audience.
I make it a principle not to go on the set...
not to see the actors out of costume...
not to see anything other than...
the images that come to me from location.
A major Hollywood production shoots almost 200 hours of film.
Unspooled, the film would stretch from L.A. To Vegas.
An editor may work for months, even years...
crafting this footage into a two-hour movie.
The finished film will contain thousands of shots...
each measured in frames of one-twenty-fourth of a second.
For a writer, it's a word.
For a composer or a musician, it's a note.
For an editor and a filmmaker, it's the frames.
The one frame off or two frames added...
or two frames less...
is the difference between a sour note and a sweet note...
is the difference between...
clunky, clumsy crap...
and orgasmic rhythm.
Verna Fields made many good contributions to Jaws.
We all refer to Verna Fields as Mother Cutter...
because she was very earthy and very maternal.
She cut her films at her house, in her pool house...
in the San Fernando Valley...
and it was a very haimish kind of a workplace.
The shark didn't work as well...
or as often as it was supposed to work according to the screenplay.
That's the spot.
We had a contest where Verna would stop the Moviola on a frame...
where she wanted to make the cut, and I'd stop it where I wanted it.
If ever we stopped it on the same frame...
that had already been marked with a grease-pencil "X"...
we knew that was the right frame on certain things where we didn't agree.
All of our disagreements always happened with that darn shark.
Verna was always in favor of making less to be more.
And I was trying to squeeze that one more...
'Cause it took me days to get the one shot. So I'm going back to...
I'm on a barge for two days trying to get the shark to look real...
and the sad fact was...
the shark would only look real in 36 frames, not 38 frames.
And that two-frame difference...
was the difference between something really scary...
and something that looked like a great white floating turd.
Out of my way.
Well, I got so desperate on Terminator 2...
trying to shorten that film to a manageable length...
as we all understand that to be...
that I said, "Wait a minute, do we need all these frames?
"If we just took out one frame every second for the entire film...
"we'd shorten the film by a couple of minutes.
"Let's just do it as a test.
"We'll take a reel and we'll take out one frame in every 24."
And the editors looked at me like I was nuts.
"Let's just try it. Come on. Nobody's ever done this."
We took out one frame in every 24, and it was a mess.
There were jerks, there were things, there were cuts in the wrong places.
You totally saw it and it just didn't work.
Every one of those individual frames was important.
Once you know that as an editor, now you get scared for a while.
It's like, "Jeez, am I cutting here or am I cutting here?"
But then after a while, you start to realize that there's great power in that, too.
D.W. Griffith was the first great filmmaker...
to understand the psychological importance of editing.
Working a decade after Porter, he did more than anyone else...
to advance the storytelling tools Porter had developed.
Griffith invented and popularized techniques...
that established the basic grammar of film.
His melodramas were the first to draw audiences...
into the emotional world of his characters.
He certainly was the first man to use the close-up in a big way.
It was so revolutionary that the producers, when they saw this, were aghast.
They thought, "You can't put this picture out like this.
"You can't cut to this big, ugly shot of somebody.
"We're paying for this actor, this actress. We wanna see their whole body.
"We don't wanna just see their face.
"Second of all, the audiences won't know what to respond to.
"They're gonna be all confused."
Well, the proof is in the pudding and the reality is...
that the audiences were not confused at all.
Griffith brought it together in one magnificent film, The Birth of a Nation...
and we saw the accumulation of 10 years of editing knowledge...
put into a movie.
And all of a sudden, you not only had close-ups...
but you had flashbacks...
parallel action...
and you had all sorts of things being used to make the audience...
keep attention focused on a certain part of the frame.
D.W. Griffith established the tenets of classical film editing.
And classical film editing relied on the concept of the invisible cut...
in which action would always be continuous and fluid and moving.
The goal was to mask the cut so the audience wouldn't notice...
and could forget that they were watching a movie.
Let's take another look.
Notice how the gesture matches from one shot to the next?
Griffith's seamless editing is still practiced today...
and was the dominant editing style in Hollywood movies for decades.
At last.
Look again. The cut is so smooth that it's barely noticeable.
It's all for telling the story.
And all you wanna do is get the person emotionally invested in the story.
So it becomes this invisible craft.
We call it "the invisible art." And, indeed, it is.
I mean, the more invisible we are, the better we're doing our job.
Unfortunately, the invisible style of editing...
kept editors invisible and unappreciated as well.
For years they have been the best-kept secret of the movies.
The first cutters were considered hands for hire...
rather than creative partners in the filmmaking process.
They looked at the images by holding the film up to the light.
Then they would check their work by running it through a projector...
and making the necessary adjustments.
Griffith's main cutter was Jimmy Edward Smith...
who virtually lived with him at the studio...
where they worked far into the night running the film shot during the day.
Later, Smith's wife Rose joined the editing team.
The Smiths married during the cutting of lntolerance.
For their honeymoon, Griffith allowed them the weekend off.
- Lights. - Needs about 20 minutes out of it.
The Kazan film The Last Tycoon had a wonderful scene.
It was obviously the story of Irving Thalberg.
And I always took that as a wonderful metaphor...
about the editing process.
It's silent, it's anonymous.
What's Eddie, asleep?
The goddamn movie even puts the editor to sleep.
He's not asleep, Mr. Brady.
What do you mean he's not asleep?
He's dead, Mr. Brady.
Dead?
What do you mean he's dead?
He must have died...
How can he be dead? We were just watching the rough cut.
Jesus, I didn't hear anything. Did you hear anything?
Not a thing.
Eddie...
he probably didn't want to disturb the screening, Mr. Brady.
Today, not only is the editor still alive...
but he has become the director's key collaborator.
No other crew member...
spends as much time working alone with the director.
Finding the relationship with the editor...
is like trying to decide whether or not to get married.
Because if the marriage isn't a good one, it's gonna be a sticky divorce.
When I was doing my first movie...
the only thing I knew is I wanted a female editor.
'Cause I just felt a female editor would be more nurturing...
to the movie and to me.
They wouldn't try to be winning their way just to win their way.
They wouldn't be trying to shove their agenda or win their battles with me.
They would be nurturing me through this process.
- Give me your hand! - She killed me, man.
Who would've fucking thought that?
I think editors play a big role with directors in giving them support...
making them feel...
like they can look at something that may have trouble or problems...
and be comfortable enough so that they can approach those problems.
Hi, Vincent. I'm getting dressed.
In the beginning, he really doesn't guide me...
and then I put together what I think he wants.
And pretty much, we've worked together so long, I can judge what he would want.
- What the fuck is this place? - This is Jack Rabbit Slim's.
An Elvis man should love it.
- Come on, man, let's go get a steak. - You can get a steak here, Daddy-O.
Don't be a...
After you, kitty cat.
Initially, I had it really long.
It was like a date in real time.
And it was Sally's job to kind of, you know...
little by little, convince me to bring it down...
and it still could be funny.
You'd still have what I'm talking about, but maybe it wouldn't be so painful.
He did want it to feel very much like a date...
and it was very long at first...
and we just had to kind of live with it for a while.
Just like, you know, letting me live with it long enough...
so I could eventually, "I've had it enough. I've seen that enough.
"Maybe now I can lose this part.
"Okay, so it was like here, and now it's like here."
Finally, we bring it down, and then I brought it too far down...
and then he said, "We gotta bring it back up."
"That's it. No more. This is not a video."
We do that for eight months, so intense.
I see him more than my husband.
And sometimes I get annoyed with her for not reading my mind 100%.
It's not good enough that she reads it 80% of the time, all right.
We work very intensely together...
and it's kind of amazing that we still like each other.
If I was with my husband that long, I don't think I'd like him that much.
By the time I've thought of an idea, written it...
found the financing, cast the film, directed it...
I get to the cutting room and it's like I've washed up on shore.
I'm so happy to be there, 'cause then I think:
"Now we can start making the film."
It's so hard to be a director, and it's hard on the set.
By the time they come into the cutting room the first week...
they're usually half the people they were when they started out.
They're shells of the people they were.
And at least in my cutting room, I try to make it very easygoing...
and try to heal them back into shape so that they can get to work on the movie.
When Matthew Broderick is busted from having thrown the election...
in Election...
he enters the principal's office...
and sees all the people gathered there who know he's guilty.
Mr. McAllister, I hope you can help us clear something up.
He wanted to cut it like the end sequence of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...
with holding on the faces for a really long time with the swelling music.
And I was like, "No, let's cut it really fast and build to a climax."
And I didn't wanna do that.
It was cheesy and would call too much attention to itself.
And he just wouldn't wanna do it.
He wouldn't wanna put it in the movie like that.
So finally, I said, "I'll pay you $25."
And I said, "No, let's not do that."
- I go, "Okay, $50." - And I said, "No."
He's like, "No."
And I said, "$75."
So he even gave me an invoice, and it says that I owe him $75.
So I paid him $75 to cut it in. And that's how it is now.
I think successful editors...
are really sly politicians.
The Russian Revolution sparked a revolution in film editing as well.
The crazy Russians start fucking around with images...
and juxtaposing them and creating different emotional effects.
Lenin saw film as the perfect medium...
to inspire his largely illiterate nation to join the Revolution.
They took these films out in the middle of the farmlands...
and showed them to the farmers and peasants.
They began to understand...
that they could get a certain emotional, psychological effect...
by a certain type of cutting from one image to the next.
And that became a manipulation of what the audience was feeling.
The Russian filmmakers...
rejected the bourgeois stories and seamless editing practiced by Griffith.
Instead of melodrama, they offered real life.
To make the film Man with a Movie Camera...
documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his team...
took his cameras into the streets to record a typical day in Moscow.
It's constantly reminding me that I'm watching a movie.
There were scenes inside an editing room.
You see how they edited movies back in 1929.
They were engaged in a pure explosion of creative activity...
in manipulating these images.
Every modern editing convention that we know of...
is demonstrated in Man with a Movie Camera.
The film celebrated not just the Revolution...
but the role of the cameraman and the editor in helping to create it.
Vertov and his wife Elizaveta cut their documentaries and newsreels...
in dark basements with rats scuttling underfoot.
But in this film...
he made the editor as important as any other worker in the Revolution.
The theoretician Lev Kuleshov also experimented with film editing.
In his most famous study...
he took a shot of a Russian actor and intercut it with three different objects. ;
a bowl of hot soup...
a distraught woman draped across her husband's coffin...
and a little girl playing with a teddy bear.
When audiences saw the film, they raved about the actor's performance. ;
how hungrily he looked at the soup...
how sorrowfully he gazed at the woman...
and how tenderly he watched the little girl.
But, actually, it was the same expression each time.
Now this demonstrates the power of juxtaposition...
the power of montage...
by taking one shot and another shot to give it a third meaning.
And the third meaning is, in effect, an emotion that's much greater...
than the sum total of the two parts that put it together in the first place.
And this is the basis of all editing, by the way.
One of Kuleshov's contemporaries, Sergei Eisenstein...
combined these experiments with Marxist ideology...
to create films of revolutionary fervor.
He saw editing, like history, as a clash of images and ideas.
The meaning of the film was not in the shots themselves...
but in their collision.
"When two elements are in conflict," he argued...
"their collision sparks a new meaning of higher order."
Where Griffith tried to hide his cuts, Eisenstein reveled in them.
He wanted the audience to feel the frame...
to know that this is a movie, not life.
Eisenstein is the first real director.
He killed himself in his staging...
he killed himself with his camerawork and everything...
but it was all at the service of the scissors...
every little, single, solitary bit of it.
I got a movie projector when I was 11...
and one of the first movies I got was The Battleship Potemkin.
I just ran that Odessa Steps sequence over and over again.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
One of the things that makes it incredible is the editing...
the incredible juxtaposition of images.
What the Russians did was a response to what Griffith had done.
Classical editing, and now, Eisensteinian montage...
and you can take that further.
The American cinema has absorbed all of that stuff from the Russians...
and now it's in our film.
The fact is that many of these techniques have been appropriated...
into what we do every day as editors right here in Hollywood, California...
making action pictures...
because we are also trying to get a response from the audience.
We're also trying to get them to rise out of their seats...
out of their complacency...
but not necessarily for revolutionary purposes...
but just to really have a great time in the movies.
Don't you fucking move!
Editing techniques the Soviets used to convert their population to Communism...
now drive Hollywood's action blockbusters.
- Where's the shot? - What shot?
- Who took out the shot? - Which shot is that?
The money shot. Bus driver's head.
The brains-on-the-window shot. The bits-are-on-the-visor shot.
We thought we'd show it to you like this without all that...
Put it back. Don't "show" me anything.
You don't need it. You're not even giving it a chance.
How's the rearview-mirror gag supposed to work without it?
Am I the only one here who respects the writing?
You've got suspense and you've got action.
I found a good combination in the two Terminator films...
was to have a suspenseful build-up to an action release.
In Terminator 2...
you have a slow, tense build-up of these characters moving around...
closing in on the young John Connor.
Then he sees the Terminator for the first time and it's all in slow motion.
I usually like to use the slow motion in the build-up...
where it has this kind of protracted, dream-like or nightmarish quality...
and then there's a cathartic break, and then it kicks into gear.
Get down.
In a chase, something is going right or something is going wrong.
And you wanna accentuate that.
Rhythm is one of the ways you do that.
You also wanna create peaks and valleys in terms of rhythm.
Chases are a wonderful thing to work on as an editor.
I wouldn't want to do them as a steady diet...
but every now and then, it's great fun.
My favorite chase that I've ever worked on was the Canal Chase...
as we called it, in Terminator 2.
Our ancestors were survivors. Therefore, we're here.
And so there's something plugged into our reptilian hindbrain...
that makes us relate to the idea of being pursued and getting away.
So we get to go through these kind of cathartic simulator runs...
while we watch a movie...
and we get to experience that heart-pounding fear of being chased.
It's a natural form of excitement.
Editing can hone that, sharpen that.
The tempo of the cuts, the variety of shots that are used.
The changing image sizes of the character's reactions, eyes.
All these things are in the palette.
By manipulation and juxtaposition...
you can increase the excitement.
This is the first thing: I'm standing up...
which allows me a considerable amount of freedom of movement.
And it also means that I'm "sprung."
I guess that's the only word for it.
And frequently, when I'm looking at the cut...
I will stand here...
with my hand on the controls almost like a gunslinger...
and trying to hit the point of the cut...
with my knees bent.
And somehow, this is important for me...
because it allows me to internalize the rhythms...
the visual rhythms of what's happening.
At this point, we've started with a blank slate.
So, the question is, what are we gonna start with?
That looks like a good possibility. It establishes things.
So there's Anthony saying, "Action," and they start to come forward.
We could begin it anywhere in here...
but see, there now, somebody falls right here.
And that's good. Falling is good.
We will edit this shot into the timeline.
There it is.
In the end, there will be probably 5,000 shots in the film.
And all of them...
have to ultimately be the right shot...
in the right place, for the right length of time.
When I was watching Nosferatu when I was a kid...
our main guy is up in the castle, and night has fallen...
and we're very suspicious something's about to happen...
and we see Nosferatu down the hall.
That section is what scared me the most.
And in terms of editing, it caught my attention because of this:
We saw this vampire with pointy teeth and scary eyes...
very far away down a hallway, and then we cut to our guy.
He's very scared, and we cut back. He's six feet away from us.
He's just on the other side of the door.
Every time I saw it, I was very scared.
And I remember waiting for that moment of being surprised.
When people come into a theater...
they're already keenly aware of their own fears.
It's like, "Let's gather round the campfire and listen to the shaman talk."
The screen being the fire. We'll sit in a circle.
We'll be in the darkness. We'll be in a dreamlike state.
We'll be connected to strangers...
in a way that we're normally not in the rest of our culture.
And we'll feel things in unison.
The opening sequence of Scream is almost a film in itself.
It is kind of whacking the audience upside the head in 15 minutes...
where you introduce a character, develop her, endear her to the audience...
and then kill her unexpectedly.
That's a matter of yourself and your editor sitting there and thinking:
"What is that audience, that phantom audience...
"that you imagine in your mind, thinking?"
It's all judgment calls. It's all about rhythm.
It's all about getting that part of it right...
so that there's no moment where they feel quite easy...
no moment where they feel they can know exactly what's coming next.
Hitchcock was one of the first directors I was aware of as a kid.
When Psycho came out, it caused a buzz in the neighborhood among the parents.
And I remember my mother saying:
"It's this horrible old man, he makes these horrible movies."
I just said, "Really?"
But it was a sense of the totally forbidden and somebody who'd crossed the line.
No!
So later when I saw his films...
it was kind of the delight of seeing this kind of savage wit, if you will...
that beneath, in Hitchcock's case especially...
the very urbane, sophisticated, civilized veneer...
was this kind of feral, quick animal...
that knew exactly where the jugular was...
and kind of delighted in the taste of the blood.
Hitchcock was the master of suspense.
Jonathan Demme was devoted to Hitchcock...
and his influence can clearly be seen in The Silence of the Lambs.
Suspense is really an expression of fear.
We can build that in our storytelling by withholding information.
Frankly, it's a manipulation.
But in using that manipulation, it also empowers the story.
Not knowing where we're going to go next...
is the thing that human beings hate the most.
We'd all like to know where we're going, if it's gonna be all right.
My editing process is an intuitive process. It's what feels truthful.
It's what feels strong and it's what works.
And you hear this from a lot of editors.
Dede Allen always used to say to me, "I cut with my gut."
And she's right.
Cavalry!
Three riders!
Just over that hill!
There's a mismatch here...
and I'm gonna have to determine whether this is a problem or not...
because Brown is looking toward camera...
but when we cut, he's looking up off to the left.
We can have Jeremy come in and cut...
so that Jeremy's head is masking Brown's head...
so that the mismatch is not seen.
And now I'm going to mark this frame...
and I'm gonna get rid of this area...
which is three frames.
And now I'm going to look at it in context and see how it looks.
Three riders!
Just over that hill!
Good.
You have to have the personality that enjoys that...
It's almost like making little pieces of jewelry.
That patience of the individual shots and how they're crafted together...
but at the same time, you have to have an appreciation for the larger picture...
and how these shots fit into the larger picture of the scene...
and then how the scene fits into the larger picture of the sequence...
and how the sequence fits together with the larger picture of the whole work...
and then how the work fits together with society.
So it's boxes within boxes within boxes.
In the 1930s, movies became an even bigger business.
The movie studios introduced sound films...
and radically reshaped moviemaking.
Hollywood retooled itself on the model of the factory assembly line.
The studios cranked out movies with almost the same speed...
that Henry Ford mass-produced cars.
Stay where you are, all of you.
"I don't want it good," Jack Warner declared, "I want it Tuesday."
You now needed an industrial system to make this all work.
In the first 20, 25, 30 years of cinema...
large numbers of editors were women.
It was considered to be a woman's job...
because it was something like knitting.
It was something like tapestry, sewing...
that you took these pieces of fabric, which is what films are...
and you put them together.
It was when sound came in...
that the men began to infiltrate the ranks of the editors...
because sound was somehow electrical.
It was technical. It was no longer knitting.
There is the soundtrack, which might be several tracks...
and the image.
And without the happy marriage of those two...
you're not using every bit of potential that you possibly can in editing a movie.
The scene in Horse Whisperer where Sam Neill and Kristin Scott Thomas...
An argument results because she is gonna leave.
The intent of the scene was to show that the marriage was foundering...
and it was dialogue basically overlapping as they were speaking.
So they were both miked.
To make it even more dramatic, I even took out more air...
and made the overlaps more intense.
I could do that because I had separate tracks to work with.
Are you a psychiatrist? He says it takes time.
Well, I don't care what he says.
I cannot sit here and pretend everything's gonna be all right.
I am not pretending, I am trusting...
We are losing. We are losing her!
In effect, by taking out all the air in that particular dialogue scene...
it did have kind of a suffocating effect because there was no respite...
there was no air there. You couldn't draw a breath.
And it became that much more intense because of it.
To me, sound is very important.
I create a sound template that is both with sound effects...
and temporary music that evokes certain feelings.
I've worked with Per Hallberg, who's a sound designer...
and with Ridley Scott.
For example, in Black Hawk Down...
the incursion of the Black Hawks entering into Mogadishu.
It was almost like a ballet, a science-fiction ballet...
people landing on a different planet.
I was not interested in hearing all the helicopters, only music.
Showing it from a subjective point of view.
So this idea of science fiction, when I was putting the scene together...
just inspired me to use almost no sound.
I remember that the real Black Hawk pilots wanted to see the footage.
So, one day I just showed them an assembly.
They were really moved.
One guy, there was a tear in his eye, and he says...
"I don't know. This looks great. I got goose bumps."
These were the guys that were there...
and it felt real to them.
There was this scene in Dante's Peak...
where Pierce Brosnan has to walk back through a long tunnel to his truck...
and the tunnel is about to collapse.
And you hear the sound, the little sound of sand...
falling down the walls.
So at one point, the music editor asked me for the scene...
and she proceeded to put music on it...
and I looked at it and I said, "That doesn't work at all."
Because suddenly I'm hearing music...
and I'm not hearing all that stuff, that tiny little sand thing...
that makes me scared.
If you were in a really dangerous situation, your ears would be so open...
and hearing every little tiny, tiny sound.
If it just has music smooshed over it...
you know, it takes away that sense of listening with all your might.
I mean, if I were the character, I'd say, "Turn that off! I can't hear."
The advent of sound expanded the editor's role in Hollywood.
During the '30s and '40s...
directors rarely came into the cutting room.
The editing was controlled by the studios and their supervising editors.
One of the most powerful was Margaret Booth...
supervising editor at MGM for 30 years.
Mastering the transition to sound...
she caught the attention of legendary producer Irving Thalberg...
who was the first to call cutters "film editors"...
starting with Booth herself.
She oversaw all the production but had a say in almost every one.
Maggie was probably the toughest and most feared woman at MGM.
People would shudder when they'd hear that she was on the phone...
or she'd bust into the editing room...
or you'd get a call, "Come down to Room F," which is her room.
You'd think, "God, what have I done now?"
Margaret would tell the editors. ;
"It's your responsibility for the pace of the movie.
"It's your responsibility to get the best performances out of your actors.
"It's your responsibility to make it as good as you can."
Margaret Booth, she used to say:
"If I feel there's a cut at a certain spot...
"whether it matches or not, cut.
"If you cut for the emotion...
"you will get away with so much by doing that."
And I would hear her really yell at different editors...
who would say, "It doesn't match." She'd say, "I don't care. Cut."
Booth, like other great studio editors of the era...
helped create many of the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Editors today are still doing the same.
We totally control the performance of an actor in the cutting room, actually.
A lot of them won't admit that.
Most actors learn early on that the editor is the one to make friends with...
'cause their performance depends a great deal on the editor...
and the taste and the talent of the editor.
We'll see dailies, and Take 5 is spectacular. It is great.
But there's also something wonderful in Take 7, and Take 4 and Take 3.
Sometimes, an actor will see it onscreen and say:
"That was terrific. You used Take 5."
They don't know, they don't realize...
that you are borrowing from every single performance...
and the editor is the person who is responsible...
for finding those moments in each performance.
You talk about Basic Instinct, I think, to a large degree...
that the great performance that Sharon is giving there...
is also constructed...
by Frank.
He spent an enormous amount of time...
in selecting every part of every take...
that he felt was important.
In cutting the interrogation sequence...
using the basic scenes that were back and forth from the dialogue...
the scene would be fairly dull.
I had to create her looks and his looks.
They were manufactured. They weren't really shot that way.
I would take a piece...
of Michael looking at her from a different part of the scene...
and a piece of her looking at him from a different part of the scene.
I don't make any rules, Nick. I go with the flow.
Sharon asked if she could see it, and I said, "Yeah, it's done."
And Sharon came upstairs and said, "You must remove that scene."
And I said, "What scene?"
And she says, "You know the scene. In the interrogation."
But they were all afraid, I think, that these shots would hurt her performance.
And even Sharon, I think, still thinks now...
that she lost the Oscar nomination because of these shots.
And I said, "Sharon, that scene is gonna make you a star."
And Paul said to her:
"You shot it. You know what I was doing...
"and basically, I like it. And it works."
Then, you know, the rest is history.
Most actors' idea of a well-edited movie...
is a movie that has a lot of the actor in it, particularly in close-up.
And that could cause me a lot of grief, but what the heck.
I knew an actor who used to read a script basically this way:
He would say, "Blah-blah-blah. My line."
And he'd read it, "Blah-blah-blah."
Steven Seagal was an action hero, who, on Under Siege 2...
I felt would break me in half.
He was allowed into the cutting room to cut the action sequences.
I thought that's all he was gonna do.
But his first time he came into the cutting room...
he said, "Okay, put up reel one."
He was gonna go through the whole movie.
But there was a time when during one of the fight sequences...
that I found myself with my arm behind my head...
and Seagal was demonstrating on me what he did.
And he's a big guy, plus he carries a gun.
I think, ultimately, he did like his performances.
But the fact that an actor came into the cutting room...
created an antagonistic relationship with the director...
and as editor, I was caught in the middle.
I have a friend who did a picture...
where there was a comedian in the film who had final cut over only his scenes.
And he had decided recently...
that he didn't want to be a knock-about comedian anymore.
He wanted to be a Cary Grant-style comedian.
So he came into the editing room and cut out all of the pratfalls...
and all of the physical shtick that he had done in the picture...
which obviously didn't help the movie any.
I have never let an actor into the editing room to have feedback.
I think, in general, this is how I feel as an actor.
Even though I love the cutting room and nothing would make me happier...
than to sit there and watch them do their stuff, I feel it's inappropriate.
I feel like that's the time for the director to have with the editor.
Home for the Holidays was about a mess, it was about a holiday mess...
it was about a family that was a mess, about chaos and anarchy in the family.
The centerpiece is this Thanksgiving dinner scene...
and everybody's gathered around the table...
and everybody's crazies are all over the place.
Jodie Foster, of course, attracted the most wonderful bunch of actors...
who, just working with her, they left their ego on the doorstep.
Nothing makes us happier...
than to walk into a scene where there's six different actors...
they all have different styles of performance...
maybe even different pacing...
and somehow figure out a way to weave them all together.
Lynzee and I will sit there and say, "What do you think she's thinking now?
"Is she thinking, 'How do I get the hell out of here? '
"Or, 'I really like this guy and I'm kind of attracted to him. "'
We'd get so into very obscure behavior.
We'd see the deep meaning the actor had brought to the character...
in terms of whether they picked up their fork...
before or after the spoon was picked up. "Now what did that mean?"
And, of course, each little meaningless gesture adds up to a full performance.
When I got the dailies...
I assumed that everything she shot...
were things she intended to be on the screen.
And I enjoy the challenge of that, of just trying to use everything.
At one point, a turkey gets pushed and splashes on someone.
Every time we looked at it, we would try it a different way.
Now, you can have the guy who's doing it on his close-up...
and then have the turkey splash...
or the turkey splashes, you see the reaction shot.
You can go a billion ways.
Cocksucker!
One of the things that I love about Lynzee...
is that she's one of these people...
who really sees that there is a beautiful and sunny place out there.
If we could just get to it, it's there somewhere.
There are periods within the editorial process that I will hand it over...
not only to my editor...
but, at times, to my lead actor.
First of all, if you have Jack Nicholson starring in your movie...
and you call somebody, an actor, up, and say:
"Would you like to spend two days working with Mr. Nicholson...
"or do you have something better to do?"...
he usually gets a good response.
When Jay and I feel that we've really got the picture in a great place...
and it's particularly easy now that we're editing electronically...
where I'll have Jack come into the editing room with Jay and I'll check out.
And he'll bring Jack in and run the movie, even run outtakes...
and talk about if there's a take that we didn't use.
He did something interesting that he remembered, why didn't we use it?
What Nicholson did at the end...
was a Nicholsonian construct.
The disjointed nature of the cutting is on purpose.
You imagine this guy who's taken the only love...
that had been possible in his life...
and squandered it for what was his own personal obsession.
If you've written it smartly, you have a smart actor playing it.
And that actor, when it's Jack Nicholson, can be very helpful in the cutting room.
I find that with the actors, in most of the pictures I made...
we kind of nail it on the set, usually...
and invariably, looking at rushes, I'll tell Thelma, "That's the take."
Then she'll feel a certain thing for some other takes...
and we line it up that way.
Because we grew up in the cinéma vérité period of documentary filmmaking...
it was a marked influence on how we work.
For example, I found it extremely helpful...
when Marty's doing heavy improvisational films...
like Raging Bull or Goodfellas...
that my years of trying to carve a story...
out of a mass of documentary footage...
helped me wade through miles of improvisation...
and begin to find a way to shape it.
Of course, in a film like Raging Bull...
De Niro and Joe Pesci were remarkable to watch kicking off each other.
I wanted to have a very open, honest approach to the imagery and the story...
in the scenes that were not in the ring in Raging Bull...
and that came a lot from a kind of wiping away...
of all technique that I had thought about before...
and going back to a sort of an impact that I had when I was about 5 or 6...
having seen Italian neorealist films on TV:
Paisŕ, Open City and The Bicycle Thief.
You're supposed to be a manager, supposed to know what you're doing.
I did what I wanted to do.
- That's what I'm worried about, you... - You want a title shot?
What are you talking... What am I, in a circus over here?
I ask him, he's got more sense about this. What are you doing?
You been killing yourself for three years now, right?
There's nobody left for you to fight. Everybody's afraid to fight you.
Okay. Along comes this kid, Janiro. He don't know any better.
He's a young kid, up and coming. He'll fight anybody.
Good. You fight him. Bust his hole. Tear him apart. Right?
What's the biggest thing you got to worry about, your weight?
- I'm worried about the weight. - The weight?
What're we arguing for? I just said the weight.
That was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do...
because I only had one camera on the actor at all times.
So I didn't have the response, the immediate response of the actor...
so it meant that I had to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle.
It was a lot of fun, but it took a long time.
Ultimately, what I think I need her to watch for me...
is the emotional impact of the picture...
keeping track, emotionally, of the characters.
This is the key for me.
I always find the editor has more objectivity than the director.
'Cause the editor wasn't on the set. The editor didn't cast the movie.
The editor didn't do the storyboards. The editor didn't inundate him or herself...
with a year and a half of pre-production.
So the editor has the most objective eye...
in that creative environment.
I remember one night, I go over to Steven's house in Poland.
I said, "Steve, I want to run this scene for you." And he says:
"Okay," and I run the scene. He looks at me.
He says, "I'll see you in the morning." He walked out.
He was so emotionally involved with the scene...
he couldn't believe that he shot it, it was so real.
We were all terribly affected by the film.
There's something inside that takes over...
when it's very emotional, when there are problems in people's lives.
Something emotional takes over that's beyond your conscious mind.
It seemed like an extreme example, but when you're editing that kind of film...
you have to disassociate.
You have to see each thing as a scene and you build a scene and do the best...
you can with each scene. When it melds together that's when you get the full force.
I think this scene in Schindler's List really illustrates the importance of...
emotion through film editing.
It's the scene where they have a drink together...
the first drink they've shared because Stern has refused to drink with...
Schindler until this moment.
There is just a pacing that is so...
emotional for me. So profoundly, deeply felt.
Someday...
this is all going to end, you know.
I was going to say, we'll have a drink then.
I think I'd better have it now.
Mike Kahn's choices of how long to let the characters look at each other and...
study each other, and think about how they're feeling, that was all done in...
the editing room. It wasn't in the script and it wasn't on the floor the day I shot it.
That whole emotional, kind of, meeting of the minds...
between those two great men happened in the editing room.
In dialogue scenes, I like people looking at each other.
I like eyes to meet.
And so they're getting into each other and you're connecting.
For me, I'm always having problems...
cutting long scenes where people talk to each other.
'Cause you've got...
an unlimited amount of choices and opportunities...
when you just have two talking heads.
The scene can go many different ways. The drama could become comedy.
Pathos could become tragedy.
It could become, you know, kind of like...
a grilling session or a deposition...
if you cut it really fast, or it can be very leisurely and introspective...
if you used a lot of thought and a lot of the breaths and air and the pauses...
not just the words. And that's where a great film editor can help a director.
Another way of looking at film editing is that it's a dance of eyes.
Philip Seymour Hoffman's eye is looking.
That's a good thing.
Now, let's cut to a close-up of Hoffman looking...
and the close-up of Hoffman is here.
We've never seen this angle before, so...
the brain has to figure out what it's looking at and maybe why it's looking...
at it. And to the degree that...
you hold shots...
a certain length, you allow a certain train of thoughts to happen.
When you cut a shot off...
you've also cut off the thinking about that shot.
Now, we want to cut to what he sees because that's how we're going to...
understand what he's thinking about.
Now there you see him thinking and...
then his eye goes down. So let's rerun that at speed.
Flinch.
Point of view.
Thinking. Other co-conspirator.
"Let's do it, now."
"What?" "Let's go. Oops, something's up. Don't do it."
And we go.
There's something about film, because of its sensory completeness...
the fact that it is sound and image...
in this powerful fusion...
that gets at something very deep within us.
Filmmakers realized that sound and image didn't just stimulate emotions.
They could also influence beliefs.
During WWll, the U.S. Government enlisted Hollywood's best.
Editors and directors brought with them the same techniques they had used...
in fiction films to stir audiences across America.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the United States of America.
The Hollywood recruits applied their skill to American propaganda films...
such as Why We Fight.
Both German and American political leaders...
recognized how powerfully sound and picture can manipulate audiences.
One of the most infamous examples of film used for political propaganda...
was Triumph of the Will.
Director Leni Riefenstahl...
used sound, music, and masterful editing...
to make Adolf Hitler into a god.
When the Allies went to war against Germany, British editor Charles Ridley...
re-edited the same footage to turn Hitler into a fool.
Whether used for propaganda or entertainment...
these techniques showed how powerfully editing could shape hearts and minds.
I'd seen the German propaganda in Holland when we were occupied.
The methodology of the whole thing is, of course, to show...
only one side of reality.
Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future.
I'm doing my part.
I'm doing my part, too.
You know, Starship Troopers is, style-wise, as a movie...
has been influenced consciously by...
Why We Fight in WWII...
Triumph of the Will. I used the Leni Riefenstahl touch...
just to tell the audience this group of people is not aware of the fact...
that they are used by the government...
to give their lives for goals that are...
only interesting to the government.
Fresh meat for the grinder?
So, how'd you kids do?
I'm going to be a pilot.
Well, good for you. We need all the pilots we can get.
I think the theme of the movie is:
"Come on, it's great. Let's go to war and die."
What about you, son?
Infantry, sir.
Good for you. Mobile infantry made me the man I am today.
In editing, you can do the same trick. It's all trying to sell us something.
Manipulation that's done by editing...
manipulation done by the glamorous photography...
and by a certain kind of music that makes you think...
that you are going to Heaven or whatever.
The manipulation of the elements within a film is a very powerful thing.
It's almost a sacred thing, in a way, because you're creating effects...
you're creating responses in the audience.
Editing is manipulation.
We're manipulating reality...
as the audience sees it, 'cause you want the audience to respond in a certain way.
Whether it's a laugh or a sigh...
or a fright...
everything's manipulated.
Some people say, "This director, he's manipulated the audience."
Well, that's so naive because that's all we do, is manipulate.
After WWll, Hollywood continued to make movies the same way it had...
before the war.
Although editors were now unionized...
they were viewed, for the most part, as highly skilled mechanics.
There was a man named Owen Marks...
he edited The Petrified Forest, Casablanca...
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, East Of Eden.
His films are immortal and the man is completely unknown.
It's sort of symbolic of the way...
editors have been ignored...
in the...
literature about Hollywood.
Editors worked on Cutter's Row...
and were expected to conform to the established rules of editing.
If we were to think about the films that were being made...
there was a certain film language that was very distinct.
Certain kinds of coverage. Long shot.
Two-shot.
Single, single.
There was almost a formulaic way of presenting films.
This film language was very strict.
And in editorial terms, there were rules...
that one felt could not be broken.
A master shot had to come first and then if you had an over-shoulder...
you went to the over-shoulder. You never went to the close-up...
till you'd done the whole dance, coming from far to close.
For instance, if you were going to have a transition from one place to the next...
it would be done with a dissolve.
The next thing you've got to remember is that a gentleman you meet among...
the cold cuts is simply not as attractive as one you meet...
in the mink department at Bergdorf's.
In the '40s and '50s, the audience would expect a character to drive up...
you'd show him getting out of the car and he would walk up to the building.
Then he would open the door and then the editor would match cut...
the door opening on the other side. And he would walk in...
and come over and sit down.
- Pull up a chair. - Thanks.
This seemed to me absolutely stupid that you had to show somebody coming...
down the stairs and all the way across the road and up the other side.
You knew that they were coming from here and they were going to there.
Why couldn't you just cut directly?
In France, a group of film-critics- turned-directors also challenged...
the doctrine of invisible editing and launched a revolution among editors.
When I first saw the French Nouvelle Vague, I instantly loved it.
I loved the idea. I loved the way they edited...
and thought I would like to cut like that.
Godard used jump cuts because it was like, "Why not?
"Nothing interesting's happening in the middle part so let's go to a jump cut."
When I saw Breathless, I was staggered at Godard's brutality.
What they brought to editing was a breaking of the rules.
Whatever books that said, "This is how it had to be done," they burned them.
Breathless is too hip for me. I come from the Lower East Side.
I'm an Italian-American guy. It was, it's too beat, beatnik.
It's like, bohemian.
It's too cool. I liked it. I didn't know what the hell was happening in it.
You know, when I first saw Breathless in the '60s...
it's like, wow.
I mean, just in the first five-minute sequence in introducing...
Jean-Paul Belmondo's character as this petty thief...
every rule was violated in terms of how long to hold the shots...
the discontinuity of what was going on. Even screen directions were mixed.
And I thought, "Either this guy doesn't know what he's doing or he's...
"so confident that he has the grammar of film down, that he's trying to show us...
"a new way to use the material he has to tell the story."
There were some films that really changed our perception...
of what...
filmmaking was and certainly it affected what editing was.
I think one of those seminal films is certainly something like Bonnie and Clyde.
Some people say I broke those rules first. I certainly did not.
I mean, the Russians broke those rules...
and the Germans broke those rules. This was nothing new.
But it was new for Hollywood.
Several editors have had big impacts on me, have...
influenced my thinking.
Dede Allen certainly is one who has taught me that. ; "Don't be afraid to...
"take a chance on doing something that doesn't seem like it's going to work."
When Beatty and Faye Dunaway get to know each other, they're standing...
on a street corner and she says, "I don't believe you rob banks."
And he said, "Yes, I do, look at my gun," and pulls it out...
and holds it to her on the street corner.
And that could easily have been done with the tilt down to the gun, the pan...
over to her hands fidgeting with the Coke bottle, up to her face...
but it was done in, her eyes look from him...
down, gun, back to him.
It keeps you on edge. There is the excitement.
There is the danger. There is the eroticism in not being...
able to fully get every moment because you're cutting it off.
And you are not allowing the moment to come to fruition.
Bonnie and Clyde was much more violent than anything we'd done because...
the Americans like violence much more than we do.
Well, it was shot in so many wonderful ways because this is the scene that...
Arthur intended to be...
cut in this fashion.
The fact that it was so beautifully executed...
right from the very first cut.
Jerry Greenberg was my assistant.
And on the last scene, I left Jerry alone with that scene and he did all...
the primary editing on that. All I did was tighten it later.
Again, one is not saying that this was the beginning of the American New Wave...
because one is sure that there were smaller films before that.
But this was the one that, like Birth of a Nation...
which suddenly an audience sort of said, "Wow."
Bonnie and Clyde paved the way for films like Easy Rider.
So I had only had one feature under my belt. We started on Easy Rider.
I was editing while they were traveling.
Footage was flowing in by the mile.
It was great, exciting. It was different than anything I'd been involved in.
You asshole.
These transitions that everybody remembers, going from one scene...
to the next, where it flashes forward to the scene, flashes back...
to the scene you're in. Dennis didn't want a straight cut.
I didn't want dissolves. So we kept throwing that around.
And it was Dennis who cooked part of the idea which was, "What if we...
"went and then came back?" And I said, "Yeah, but let's do it...
"three times." Then we finally arrived at the length.
Each one is six frames. I said, "Now we can use these whenever we want to."
Well, as it turned out, it started to become a device.
So we stopped doing that. I said, "No, we aren't going to do that.
"We'll only use it in special places." Without giving anything away...
everybody was stoned when they were shooting.
I learned soon on that I could not be stoned and edit.
While it was going on, I thought it was grand.
Then I'd look at it when I was straight and I'd say, "This is awful.
"I gotta throw it out and start all over."
This film has become an icon.
I'm grateful that I had something to do with it.
Because I had grown up in the '30s, '40s, and '50s...
with movies as they were then.
And finally, we were going to run it for Columbia...
with Leo Jaffe, Chairman of the Board. It ended.
There was this long pause. Leo finally stands up.
Then he says:
"I don't know what the fuck this picture means.
"But I know we're going to make a fuck of a lot of money."
One of the things you have to develop as an editor...
is a very strong intuition about...
where is their attention.
And...
under most ordinary circumstances...
you're carrying that attention around...
without doing violence to it.
It's like a cup full of liquid that you're carrying.
"I don't want to spill anything."
And as a result, people feel the invisibility of what you're doing.
I often forget that what he actually does...
is assemble the film in a technical way...
because most of our discussion's about: "Why aren't we caring as much...
"about this character now as we were two scenes ago?
"Why have we lost the thread of that character's development?
"Why does it feel like the end decelerates...
"when, in fact, the cutting rhythm is faster?"
But a lot of what a director does...
is what the immune system of the organism does...
which is to say, "Yes, that's good.
"I will allow this to come into the body."
Or, "No, that's a different blood type.
"I don't want that to come in."
Walter's theories?
I'd say, every day Walter shares a theory with me.
So they're going up, trying to get away from him before he catches them.
Then the cavalry come around the corner.
And Veasey, the Philip Seymour Hoffman character...
realizes that his only chance now is to yell...
and maybe the Northerners will shoot the home guard.
And Brown shoots him in the back.
Shoots one of the other guys. And they all roll down the hill.
Then Brown gets shot.
And the last image is of Inman, our hero...
in this pile of bodies. We don't know whether he's dead or what.
Sex scenes, in general, I think, are probably difficult for everyone.
Difficult for writers, difficult for actors, difficult for directors.
It's the most intimate sort of moments that humans can have together...
and you're saying, "Actually, let's put it on a 40-foot screen...
"for a few thousand people."
One of the things I wanted to do with Body Heat was make a very sexy movie.
There had been a whole liberation in American movies in the '60s and '70s...
about what you could show.
But as that freedom took over...
it seemed to me that the movies had become less erotic.
They had become more explicit.
Larry really wanted me to bring a woman's sensibility to the film...
largely in having it be as implicit as possible as opposed to explicit.
After all, eroticism is born out of what you can imagine...
as opposed to what you actually see.
That's the difference between eroticism and pornography.
You need, not just this incredible technician...
this artist, but you need a psychologist. Someone who can handle you.
Because a director, in the quiet confines of that room...
is like a caged animal.
In that particular scene...
we had more footage that was more explicit...
and there was simply an editorial choice not to show it.
The erotic landscape in films, the sexual landscape...
is often the hardest to do because everybody has an opinion.
And everybody has a point of view about what's sexy and what's erotic.
And it's an odd place to go to, as a filmmaker...
partly because it's been trespassed into so many times by so many other movies.
I think it's very erotic when you don't see that much.
It was an interesting problem with Out of Sight.
The way it was written was just one scene in the bar.
So I cut the scene where they meet...
and he sits down and talks to her and they start flirting.
And then the scene in the bedroom was only shot silently...
because it was going to have the dialogue from the first scene laid over it anyway.
So it didn't work as a scene.
Then we got the idea, Steven Soderbergh and I, sort of between us...
to start intercutting.
We just tried one or two things and it started to gel.
Flashing back, sometimes we flash forward.
I would say, "Let's do this and cut from here and the hands." And he'd say:
"Let's try overlaying the dialogue here." We just did it together.
It was really exciting.
We did this little thing of stopping the frames.
It's never really a long freeze. It's just a few frames that we freeze.
Just heighten the sexual tension between the two of them.
It tells a story. It's very emotional.
It's very sexual, I think, without really showing much.
Some other films I've done have shown more.
. -You went to see her? - To warn her about Chino.
- So she did help you? - We shouldn't get into that.
You know, when they're undressing separately...
and we've got odd dialogue over the undressing.
Nothing to do with what they're actually doing. Yet, I think...
that it's really good and very good storytelling.
This kind of cutting in Out of Sight and in movies like JFK...
represents a further break from Griffith's classic style of seamless editing.
You gotta start thinking on a different level, like the CIA does.
Where editors once labored to preserve the illusion of continuous time and space...
they now fracture it at will, creating new possibilities for storytelling.
...exactly what he said he was. A patsy.
Oliver Stone is a very wonderful director for an editor because...
he gives the editor free rein. He says to the editor, "Play jazz.
"Just go free form."
There is a scene in JFK where...
Oswald walks from a house to a theater...
and he said, "When you cut this scene just make it very chaotic."
So I cut the scene in what I thought was a chaotic way...
and I showed him the next day and he said "No, no, no.
"It's gotta be way more chaotic than that."
Since we cut JFK on a three-quarter inch linear editing system...
one thing it had was the ability to hit these buttons...
and change where the edit went.
So I sat there and just banged on the keys like this...
and I showed it to him the next day and he went, "That's it!" It's in the movie.
In xXx, I did have a new editing philosophy.
I had been interested in Cubism all my life.
And one day I was watching extreme sports videos.
Somebody will do some amazing stunt.
They'll do it in reverse and do it forward and then they'll do it in reverse.
I suddenly thought, "What if I did it in so many angles...
"that I didn't care whether you saw the beginning of a stunt...
"from four different angles?"
And the way we would cut it you would feel...
that you were going around the event in pieces...
so that by the time that motorcycle lands...
you've actually experienced the jump...
almost as if you're on the motorcycle...
as opposed to standing back at a safe distance...
observing the event like you would in real life.
This is not real life.
This is really relishing...
this action moment...
by making a Cubist editing approach.
Another change in editing is the accelerated pace of movies...
a subject of controversy among filmmakers.
An encounter with two swords 30 years ago...
would have been probably done in a master shot and a couple of exchanges.
Today that encounter could evolve into 200 shots.
Split-second eye blink.
A blade going into a chest. Slight movement of a wrist.
So the audience is taken right down...
into this roller-coaster ride of minutiae. And that's what they want.
Because kids today are raised on television and then MTV...
and commercials...
they not only can process information faster...
and understand what images mean, but that they demand it.
I think the MTV generation in the '80s kind of...
created this style of editing.
And Billy Weber and I on Top Gun, we were pushed in that direction.
Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson were very much in tune with their audiences.
They felt that that was what the audiences liked.
And I think they were proven right...
given the box-office on some of those early movies.
And I mean fast cutting was not invented now or with MTV.
Just look at Lou Lombardo's work on The Wild Bunch.
Sometimes a cutting style is effective inside of a movie...
to shake you up and rattle your soul.
But consistently to have that style...
pounding away at you like a metronome on high speed for two and a half hours...
is a little bit, at least for me, maybe I'm just getting old...
but it's a little bit debilitating.
Now, it doesn't bother my kids.
Because my kids were raised on 30-second commercials and on MTV...
and VH1 and they were raised on video games.
I feel like I was born 80 and I'm growing backwards.
So now I'm somewhere around 27. You know, I get a tattoo...
and I'm feeling closer to a generation that has...
learned to absorb information at a speed that was...
heretofore unthinkable...
and where their rhythms are well...
more hungry than a traditional narrative pace.
What I'm afraid of is the tendency for everything to go by quickly.
And I'm afraid of what it does to the culture.
A sense of consuming something and throwing it away...
as opposed to being enveloped with something.
Of taking the time to see and experience time in a different way.
First, one understands...
that he causes much of his own suffering needlessly.
Second, he looks for the reasons for this in his own life.
To look is to have confidence in one's own ability to end the suffering.
Finally, a wish arises to find the path to peace.
For all beings desire happiness. All wish to find their purer selves.
Many times editing is about when not to cut.
When to have the silence.
When to let the moment be itself.
The musicality of Places in the Heart, is one of the things that is the strongest.
And I don't mean the score.
I mean the musicality in the way that the scenes flow together...
the ambience of that rural Texas summer...
hot, with the cicadas...
and there's a Foursquare Protestant feeling.
After her husband has been shot by this drunk black kid on the railroad tracks...
there were no funeral parlors, you couldn't afford one anyway...
in the Depression...
the body was brought back to the home and laid out on the dining room table...
where they just had Sunday dinner.
An incredibly moving moment.
And we just held on her.
We would have been married 15 years this October.
We had two children...
and I never knew till just now Royce had a scar right there.
And it was just exquisite, moving, beautiful.
If we had cut it, it would have destroyed everything.
Editing is like poetry. It has to do with rhythms, with visual...
It's visual poetry.
The digital revolution has further enhanced the poetic powers of the editor.
George Lucas, who began his career as an editor...
is one of the pioneers of this new technology.
All art is technology. That's the very nature of it.
The artist is always bumping against that technology.
And the advent of whether it's a new color of blue...
whether it's a proscenium arch, whatever it is...
it changes the way we work in that art form.
With computer technology, editors now can make changes within the frame...
adding or removing elements from the original image.
This increases the editor's control...
but also multiplies the number of decisions to be made.
Now you can edit in what I call 3D.
Which is, you have a scene...
and you have people in the scene and you can cut those people out...
you can move them around in the scene.
You can go in for a close-up, go out.
You can sort of direct the film in the editing room...
which is, growing up as an editor, what I've always wanted to do.
The new technology also makes it possible...
to cut the movie before shooting begins.
Pre-visualization gives an editor much more input in planning the movie.
I have a system now, because of the digital world, I have a group of kids...
who do little videomatics of things. We have a little blue screen.
We can send these editors in and shoot scenes...
on just an amateur video camera.
So I can actually shoot the film and make the film and write the film...
right there in the editing room.
Every main character in our movie has a digital counterpart.
We have totally virtual actors now and we use them quite a bit.
Mostly we use them for stunts and things.
We have a lot of situations where it's better to use a digital actor...
than it is to use a real actor.
Christopher Lee is 80 years old.
He can't really fight the way he did in Attack of the Clones.
You're not gonna get an artificial-intelligence computer...
that's neurotic enough to be able...
to understand how you create a performance.
Performance is an art.
At the end of the day, all this stuff has to work...
to tell a story.
And if you're not telling a story...
it doesn't matter how much razzle-dazzle there is.
It's not about the tools, it's about the story.
In many ways, we're the last storyteller.
The movie's been written by the writer and then it's directed...
and then it comes to the last storytelling which is in the editing process.
The last draft of the screenplay is the first cut of the movie.
And the final cut of the movie...
is the last draft of the script.
An editor can take a sequence that a director has shot...
and reconfigure it so that it becomes a whole different sequence...
which is much more beneficial to the movie.
Bob Fosse referred to me as a collaborator...
on his movies and I don't think there can be a greater compliment for an editor...
to be called a collaborator, to really...
have that function.
And now a word about dykes. Pow.
I like dykes.
How could you say that?
Lenny was a biographical film of the comedian Lenny Bruce...
who was often arrested for taking language...
to the legal limits of where it could go in the late '50s.
The most wonderful thing that happened in it...
was near the end of the production. We had to show the film to the producer.
And the script for the film was the best script I ever read.
But we were having a problem. We hated the ending.
You're trying to stop the information.
Bailiff, will you please remove this man from the courtroom?
It was just not coming together.
When Lenny is dragged out of the courtroom...
his life is effectively over.
Between that period and the time of his death...
there were 20 minutes of material. And I turned to Bob and I said:
"Why don't we just kill the son of a bitch?"
I took out two reels of film...
and I went straight from "You can't stop the information"...
to Lenny's body on the floor.
And that was the most exciting thing I've ever done in a cutting room.
I mean, we just loved that.
The opening scene of Apocalypse is a good example...
of what you can achieve editorially...
that is not based on the original script.
There were some collisions of images that occurred to Francis...
as he was shooting the film...
that were at variance with how he had planned to begin the film originally.
The trees being napalmed was originally shot for the surfing scene...
which comes much later in the film.
There was a shot of jungle...
bursting into slow-motion flames with helicopters flying...
at odd angles in slow motion through the frame.
And when Francis saw that shot in dailies, which was, I think, simply done...
to record this explosion.
It wasn't intended to use it in the finished film.
But he looked at it and said, "That's the film right there.
"Jungle, flames, helicopters."
The Martin Sheen character was one that was shaped...
very significantly in the editing room.
The film itself was shot...
with the idea that there would be a narrative glue to hold the film together.
What exactly that glue was...
and who the character of the narrator really was...
was really not shaped until well into the post-production process.
Willard punches the mirror. Blood comes out of his hand.
All of this is really happening. That's real blood. That's Marty Sheen.
None of that was intended to happen. That was just Francis saying. ;
"Marty, let's shoot an improvisation with you trapped in your room...
"and what is gonna happen."
I think as we worked on the film, we realized...
that the film itself was, in its own strange way, a kind of modern opera.
And the reality of dealing...
just in the beginning, with the Martin Sheen character...
was not sufficient to give the audience...
not only the emotional state with which to enter the film...
but the visual iconography of the film itself.
Going through the dailies of the film, I collected a number of images...
of the Cambodian heads, burning images from the end...
and worked them in through a series of multilevel dissolves...
with the burning napalm and the helicopters flying through...
and then images of Willard's room and Willard asleep...
and he's trapped in this nightmare. You have been hearing helicopter sounds...
and now you see this ceiling fan...
and what you're hearing is the sound of a helicopter.
Is that coming from his dream? Is it a reality?
Is somehow that sound coming from the fan?
I remember when I was assembling those images...
almost jumping away from the editing machine when I put that sound...
with that image...
because it seemed to me that that fan was making that sound...
even though I knew it was impossible and if it convinced me, who was doing it...
it surely would convince others.
Now they begin to coalesce and they turn into a real helicopter.
Coming from a fan?
No.
And then you hear a real helicopter fly over the room.
Willard gets up out of bed, goes over to the window and says. ;
Saigon.
Shit.
All of that, the narration, and the helicopter flying over...
and the napalm jungle...
is concocted into something...
that is a powerful beginning to a film...
not only powerful in and of itself...
but powerful in the way that it sets the stage...
for the journey that this particular film is going to take.
Obviously, great directors give you great material to work with.
But the ultimate film that you see is the edited version...
and the editor is greatly responsible for that.
I find my work absolutely fascinating and absorbing.
I sat down to work and 30 years went by...
without my noticing it.
It's true. When I go into an editing room in the morning...
I edit. My assistant has to remind me it's lunchtime.
Or Steven has to come in and say, "Hey, Mike, why don't you stop for a while?"
Because time goes by like that.
You're building a whole other world. You're building a whole construct.
There's a joy on one level in that it's like putting a puzzle together.
"I have thousands of pieces and how do I tell the story?
"And this goes before that. No, that doesn't.
"Actually, I only need half of that."
The job is not unlike the Talmudic scholar...
who goes and sits and argues about the book...
over and over again, always coming up with new answers...
that are just more subtly refined than the last answer.
To sit in a theater at a preview and to hear an audience laugh...
at that moment when you expect the laugh and it comes back at you...
or to hear an audience shuffling and crying because...
it's so sad and you expect that moment to really happen that way...
that's so marvelous.
It tells you what power we have.
I believe in people being able to learn because otherwise, what's the point?
We're all gonna, you know, be passed one of these days...
and how are we gonna take this fantastic thing called film...
and motion pictures and storytelling...
unless we pass it on and teach people how to do it?
In the century since Edwin Porter introduced editing...
editors have emerged from their dimly lit back rooms.
Once anonymous men and women...
they have gradually become principal collaborators in the filmmaking process.
The best-kept secret in the movies, the editor, is finally out.
The Oscar goes to...
Thank you. Thank you so much.
You know, Steven gave me...
my first editorial advice. I don't know if you remember this or not, Steven...
but Steven produced I Wanna Hold Your Hand, my first movie.
I talked to him about a lot of things but when it came to editing he said:
"Hey, Bob, real easy. When in doubt, cut it out."
And...
I've been saying that in the editing room, as you guys know...
for all these years.
Steven also was able to... When I was making that movie...
Steven had just bought his first mansion in Beverly Hills.
And...
he said, "Hey, I've got this great pool house.
"You guys don't have to edit on the lot where there's no windows...
"in the editing rooms. You guys can edit in this pool house."
And we said, "Hey, that's great."
We went in the back of Steven's house and edited I Wanna Hold Your Hand...
in the pool house. But this strange thing kept happening.
We'd get there in the morning and the editors would pull the reels...
off the racks and all the sprockets would be torn up...
and there'd be, like, ripped film.
And of course you don't have to, you know...
think very far to figure out what was really happening. So I asked...
Steven about it one day and he said, "Sometimes I can't sleep...
"and so I thought I'd go up to the pool house and run a few reels."
But what happens in that editing room? You sit around, you talk about girls.
And you talk dirty. And you lie on the couch.
And you enjoy yourself. And you eat chocolate bars.
And like I said before, when somebody hears a director coming...
you throw everything away and you stand up straight like you're working...
and...
that's what editors do.