Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.

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.

Everything else - music, cinematography, costumes, design, acting - can be judged at face value. But when you're looking at editing, you don't know what the totality of the material was, and you don't know the working dynamic between a director and an editor - whether the editor was micromanaged or given free rein. It's very difficult.

Whenever I'm doing any film, there's always three different things. There's the script, which is really just a blueprint. And then, you shoot the movie and it's an entirely different experience than you would expect from reading the script. And then, there's the whole post process and the editing, and it becomes something else entirely.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

I no longer do a film for the wrong reasons. I have to be convinced ethically and morally. Both the director and I have to be on the same page. There are just five songs in most films these days, and they have to be amazing. There has to be a twist in the screenplay. The editing has to be crisp. Your hard work should show, but effortlessly.

Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press.

I personally think a fight scene is the most cinematic thing you can witness because all the elements of filmmaking come together, you know, with the camera speed changes, editing, make up effects and general smoke and mirrors of trying to make it look like you are hitting someone when you're not. It's filmmaking in it's purest form, I think.

I think a lot about the editing of the films when we're making them, partly because I studied that, and partly because if you think about being in love while you're supposed to be acting in love, there's nowhere to go. You have to focus on something else and then do what's being asked, and you might get some semblance of something interesting.

Our job as friends, mentors, parents, and writing coaches is not to write anyone's college essay. That's cheating. Plus, it sends a discouraging message to the teenager that he or she can't be trusted with this important assignment. Trust the student to write the essay, but verify that it gets done. Gentle editing and proofreading are allowed.

John [Cassavetes] had shot a great deal of Shadows and I had to go fulfill my contract in California, so he and all the rest of the Shadows cast came out to California and they finished it off and he cut it. He turned the garage into an editing room and he was by then a director of Shadows. That's the only thing he'd directed. But, he loved it.

Well, the 'Giuliana & Bill' show is a little bit different because Giuliana and I are the executive producers of the show, so certainly we have a lot of control and we have total, I guess if we wanted to, editing power, but I will say, in the seven seasons we've done the show, we've never used our executive producer powers to cut something out.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

When we were shooting the movie, and of course in the editing room we had to make choices, but the shots fall almost exactly where we thought they would. They're not about content; they're never meant to be about what just happened. There's that weird phenomenon where the more you like a movie the more your mind wanders and goes all over the place.

I'm really specific in the way that I shoot. I've always had a very good sense of what I need in the editing room. I used to shoot in a way that drew more attention to the camera and I've tried, in each film, to draw less and less attention to the camera. I think when you pay attention to the shots, you're aware of the fact that there's a director.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

The show with Buckley and Vidal was happening live. There was no editing. There was no delay. So they were aghast. How America reacted is sort of the most interesting thing because as these debates progressed, the ratings were going up. So people began to program these sort of point-counterpoint setups, where two people with opposite sides would come on.

My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will.

There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room.

The longer I write, the more important I believe it is to write the first draft as fast as possible. In drafting, I push myself so I am at the edge of discomfort...Later, it will be time for consideration and reconsideration, slow, careful revision and editing. But on the first draft I have to achieve velocity, just as you do if you want the bike to balance.

I have really been fortunate, incredibly privileged, to have done so much editorial work, and I would love to do more. But just as my editions have tried to balance the familiar with the new, the commercial with the scholarly, so too I have to admit that I don't want to do editing for the sake of it, and some possible projects would be of uncertain value to me.

Someone said to me that we have to encourage more young women to want top-level editing jobs. I think that will happen naturally as we have more role models, more examples of boss ladies who aren't sad and cruel and overworked and undersexed like in DevilWearsPrada, but who are straight-up owning it and notable not for their gender but for their editorial savvy.

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

What comes first? The melody, always. It's all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I'm quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it's good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.

I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

You collaborate with actors who are also talented and visionary and come together on a artistic direction within the confines of humanity and realism. The collaboration that you have had with all of these people plays an integral role in its final stage where editing and music are combine to enhance your work. This whole process is very rewarding and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

The thing about how that process works is that it's more about the editing and time for judging the ideas. Most pieces I publish each week have been around for months. This is a response to the beginning of the strip, when I was making them so quickly. I would just conceive a piece, finish it, and then the next day see it in the paper. That was when I was doing dailies four days a week.

I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve. ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing.

Comparing filmmaking to a plastic model, shooting is the process where you mold and color each piece, and editing is where you build a finished whole from the pieces you molded and colored. Obviously, the latter is the most enjoyable part in the making of plastic models, so editing is the process in filmmaking I enjoy the most. But at the same time, editing can be a painstaking task, too.

It is amazing how little effort most people make to improve control of their attention. If reading a book seems too difficult, instead of sharpening concentration we tend to set it aside and instead turn on the television, which not only requires minimal attention, but in fact tends to diffuse what little it commands with choppy editing, commercial interruptions, and generally inane content.

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.

One of the first decisions I made, as the director of "Hide and Seek," was that our film would be silent and use underscoring of original music that I was planning on composing. The decision was mostly predicated on knowing how time consuming the editing of dialogue can be and given the various locations we shot in, I didn't want to worry about having to mix room tones in such a short amount of time.

A perfect movie is a different thing, but a funny movie is easy. I was really happy that I got everyone that I got. Everybody got to play to their strengths and was paired up in the right scenarios. It was very fortunate. It was exciting, the whole process. It makes more difficulty in editing 'cause there's more footage, but the guy I had handle it was a documentarian editor for a long time, so it was very useful.

During the preproduction when I'm shooting and then once we wrap we go away. And then the visual effects guys take over. And then they add all those little bits and pieces. They come up with ideas during the cut in the editing, and they said while would be really cool if we did this thing here where the blade pops out. So then you see the movie and say wow that's a really neat idea. I wish we would have thought of that.

When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I'm writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I'm subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don't resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.

And so you try your best. Sometimes you go in with one thing, with one desire and come out with something else. In the case of 'The Aviator' it was to create a Hollywood spectacle, but by about the second or third week of shooting you just want to literally survive it. Because don't forget, I also go through the editing process too, and when the film is released I have to talk about it. So, I take all of that very seriously.

It should be obvious that this pattern of systematic holes and gaps in Iraq's declaration is not the result of accidents, editing oversights or technical mistakes. These are material omissions that - in our view - constitute another material breach. It is up to Iraq to prove that there is some other explanation besides the obvious one, that this declaration is just one more act of deception in a history of lies from a defiant dictator.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

Alfred Hitchcock talked about planning out his movies so meticulously that when he was actually shooting and editing, it was the most boring thing in the world. But drawing comics isn't like shooting a movie. You can shoot a movie in a few days and be done with it, but drawing a comic takes years and years... That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.

Ultimately your job as an actor is to perform however you're being asked to perform and there's many different procedures as an actor that you're going to run into that you should be prepared for and be ready to go to work and do the best you can and give the director the best thing you can to hopefully give him things on that day that could be shot preserved and out into a canned, then when they go into the editing room that's where a movie's made.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

Using film was so much easier than the digital technology of today. But digital is still at the beginning of what it can be and they'll be fixing all those problems. It's just too complicated - negatives, tinting, flashing - it's a whole new system that takes a lot of time. Of course, it's not as physical. Even the editing. You used to feed a piece of celluloid into an editor. [Digital] is not expensive and that is an advantage, but I must say that I don't love it.

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.

Directing's the best part. Whenever I've directed something, there's this feeling of demand and focus that I like. And secondly, it means that you've gotten through all the writing stuff, and the producing stuff, and casting, and prep, and all those stages that are seemingly endless. So directing is sort of the reward for all the work you put in before. And then there's the editing, which is another amazing stage of the process. It's incredible the moments you can create.

The relationship with actor and director is probably closer to theater, in that, when we record the dialogue, there is very little in the way of the creative collaboration - no cameras, lighting or even locations. Then, once we record, the post process is very similar to the post flow in filmmaking - editing, sound design, mixing, etc. At the end of the day, it's all about storytelling and honing in on a tone by developing a rhythm and structure that suits the storytelling.

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