Ballet dancers really know how to enter a room.

The studio was very nervous about 'Raging Bull.'

Boxing is insane and, in my opinion, should be banned.

You have to have a great director to make a great movie.

I never thought I would get married: I'm such a workaholic.

Doing 3D on 'Hugo' was a big learning curve for me, but fun!

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

It's part of your job always as an editor: you always have to drop stuff.

When you're a film-maker, sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity.

I'm not a big believer in fate, but, boy, I've had a lot of lucky breaks.

We do documentaries on the history of cinema in between our feature films.

To receive footage that has been shot with editing in mind, it is a blessing.

Film, if properly cared for, will last almost 100 years, but digital will not.

I don't think you can be a great director without knowing a lot about editing.

'Raging Bull' was badly received at first. It took 10 years for it to be recognised.

Even though my parents are American, I spent my whole childhood and adolescence abroad.

Throwing things out is one of the most difficult and important things you ever have to do.

As you can imagine, between Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese, I've had quite a rich life!

I always thought that's the wonderful thing about filmmaking: people see things differently.

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

My family goes way back in New York. So I am a New Yorker; I feel like a New Yorker. It's in my bones.

You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.

Editing is really like plumbing a good deal of the time. You put two things together, and a current runs through it.

Some young filmmakers, unfortunately, don't have the ability to resist attempts to maybe cut their films down unfairly.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

In 'Silence,' there was no improvisation at all; really, you're dealing with a script and a 17th century way of speaking.

The difference between a film that ends up three hours and a film that is envisioned as three hours is that it's written that way.

I can access footage much quicker, yes. But in terms of living with a film and knowing what's right, digital doesn't do that for you.

When we were cutting 'Raging Bull,' Martin Scorsese was watching 'The Films of Hoffmann' on a 16-mm print over and over and over again.

Jack Cardiff - the greatest cameraman who ever worked in colour - was a lab boy to start with so he knew Technicolor from the inside out.

Having been raised overseas, I wanted to become a diplomat. But the State Department thought I was too 'liberal' to be happy with that job.

I read the script just once, and then forget it.I just deal with what I see every day on the screen and whetherI believe it and understand it.

Michael Powell always used to say 'I'm a typical Englishman'. He was and he wasn't. He was very cosmopolitan and spent a lot of time in Europe.

'Raging Bull' was just a dream to work on, but it took a lot of work to get all those fights to work right and incorporate them properly into the story.

Whenever I can, I like to go to Cotswolds, in England, where my husband had a cottage. I spend my time reading his diaries, which I would like to publish.

If I hadn't met Scorsese, I would never have become a filmmaker. He has taught me everything I know about editing and has given me the best job in the world.

When you're in a movie with an audience, you can feel where a film is dragging. People start to move. They fidget. You need that perspective. To give it a cold eye.

Cutting improvisation is really hard, because things don't match, and you end up with some bad cuts sometimes. But we'd rather have the bad cuts and the great improv.

I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first.

I love improvisation. I mean, it's hard to edit, because things don't necessarily fall together - you have to find ways to give it a dramatic scope, shape. But it's so much fun.

It's hard for people to understand editing, I think. It's absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay, and you have to form it - this raw, unedited, very long footage.

Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he's an editor himself - we cut together. It means he's constantly thinking about my problems while he's filming.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

'Silence,' I think, was the hardest, because it's so different from everything we've done before and required very delicate handling and trying to find the right meditative pace.

I just happened to see an ad saying 'Willing to train an assistant editor,' and I learned enough from that to go to NYU for just one summer course. That's all that I could afford.

We don't worry about continuity because when we're doing so many improvs, it's better to get the laugh. It's better to get the great lines even if they're in the wrong part of the room.

I hope films will be somehow preserved and seen by as many people as possible in the future. There are endless treasures for audiences to discover, if only we can keep them from disappearing.

I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, 'Oh really? Why don't you go try - it's not easy.'

There are more women editors than people realise. I think we're more able to keep our eye on what the film needs. Between men, sometimes it's a real ego battle, and that's very bad for the film.

I particularly remember with 'Casino,' everyone was like, 'It's not 'Goodfellas!'' No, it's not 'Goodfellas.' That's right: it's a different movie. Now, everyone thinks 'Casino' is a masterpiece.

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