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I love making genre films. It's something I've really been attracted to since I was a kid, mostly because, as a kid, it was forbidden fruit.
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.
Movies, over time, as they do or don't find their audience, or they find a different audience, they change in your memory and in the eyes of those who see it.
Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.
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.
Part of the discipline of being an editor is that you have to be a good audience member; your work is to be a surrogate audience member on the films you are working on.
I always wanted to tell stories. From the time I had 20 cents or a quarter in my pocket, I could peddle my old Rambler 500 down to the corner store and buy comic books.
Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually.
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.
Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.
The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination.
I am so delighted when I get to see a really good movie. In that experience the artifice of movie making, the photography or the cutting style, falls away because you are inside the movie.
When I do think, ‘Man a f—cking motel room with a couple of thousand dollars worth of narcotics would do me right,’ I just look over at my dog and remember that Buster’s never seen me high.
By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it - and what other things you don't hear - you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
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.
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 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.'
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.
Like a lady who has lost weight and she's just getting to that point where she can fit into that favourite dress, you get the film down to just about the right cut. You can feel it when it happens.
'Raging Bull' was staggering to work on. I was well aware of how lucky I was to be in this extraordinary situation. That film is very unique. It stands on its own. It's just burned into the screen.
This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.
I think everyone loves 'The Departed.' That was a movie that had a lot of problems structurally. And we had to battle with it. Fight. Experiment. Try different things. And I think finally we hit it.
I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work.
If people enjoy the film, it can be really intriguing to see what created that film, how each one of those unique components came together, who the people are who did it and what it meant to them to do it.
Even in 'The Red Shoes,' a film that nobody ever has complaints about, there are enormous continuity bumps, and it doesn't matter. You know why? Because you're being carried along by the power of the film.
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.
When I started out, I preferred to watch my films without music, as its presence tends to mask the underlying pace of the film. I felt I could feel the rhythm of the film better without music to influence me.
[Martin] Scorsese says one of the great things he loves about it is how Mark can't get the right shot and he's killing people because he can't get the right shot. It's an example of what film-makers are like.
'Hellraiser' is an amazing world that Clive Barker created, and it is such a beautifully vibrant and surreal world within which to work. It is also not an undaunting canvas. It is a canvas created by an artist.
Michael's Powell art director was a painter and they had a wonderful friendship and artistic understanding. Michael himself, in the way he designed his own house, it was always with bright colours. Very un-English!
One of our big tools is screening. We screen usually 12 times, which is much more than most filmmakers do, and we recut in between each one, because we really need to feel how the audience is reacting to the movie.
I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you're frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again.
I won the Oscar for 'Raging Bull' for those fight sequences. If you look at those fight sequences, those were so incredibly storyboarded and shot in an incredible way - that is the conception a good director has to bring.
An actor's performance can be improved or shaped - or ruined - by what takes you use, how long you are on the actor's face, what line you put on the other actor's face, and when do you use close-ups or wide shots or two shots.