Quotes About Editing Film

#1. Editing is a natural extension of the collage making. It's actually one of the few areas that women were able to excel in in the film industry from the beginning.

Rachel True

#2. I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called 'Film Culture.'

Jonas Mekas

#3. With comedy, you get an immediate response. I'm the whole kit and the kaboodle. I am the whole thing and can steer the whole situation how I want to. With film, you are basically in one area. Comedy is straight to it and the film is heavily shaped the camera and editing, so it's different.

Joe Torry

#4. I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.

Stanley Kubrick

#5. Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#6. I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

Ken Burns

#7. When you are acting in a film, you have no idea what scene the editor is going to choose. For instance, after you have directed, you feel more comfortable delivering a performance. Because you know the real performance is put together in the editing room.

Dolph Lundgren

#8. I was editing for Kunal Kapoor when I got my first film 'Jaan Tere Naam' as lead actor.

Ronit Roy

#9. It was really interesting to be editing the film [Trust] in New York and directing the play in Chicago, and one definitely informed the other. The play probably benefitted more because I realized what scenes could be cut, and I cut those scenes from the play.

David Schwimmer

#10. My father's films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It's the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.

Isabella Rossellini

#11. When you're editing the film, you use a temp track. So you're putting music in there for a rough cut to keep track of what's going on. It can be a hindrance if wrong, it can be an enormous asset if you get it right.

Nicholas Jarecki

#12. I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it's a film of theirs or someone else's, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it.

Joe Dante

#13. The idea that a film is created in the editing room - it's only a certain kind of movie that's made in the editing room and it's not one that I really want to see.

Ethan Hawke

#14. Shooting an improv-based film is incredibly liberating, exhilarating, and fun, but editing that kind of movie can be difficult for obvious continuity reasons.

Hannah Fidell

#15. I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

Alice Englert

#16. I don't know why my lines that were cut from the film didn't make it onto the DVD. I have offered to go into the editing room with Christopher and work shoulder to shoulder with him to fit all my lines in. I think he thinks I'm kidding. I'm only trying to help.

Fred Willard

#17. Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

Leos Carax

#18. The film is made in the editing room ...

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#19. For an actor working in television or film, I think it's important to understand how the medium works - how the camera and lenses work and how the sound and the editing works.

Simon Baker

#20. A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.

Sofia Coppola

#21. 'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way.

Walter Murch

#22. It's an ongoing process, in the script, on the set and in the editing room, to make sure you are being true to the emotion of the film without turning it into a melodrama, and making sure you're getting all the laughs you can without it turning into just some stupid comedy.

Jon Turteltaub

#23. 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.

Walter Murch

#24. The way I work is that I never let people do an assembly. I don't like it because it shapes the film in a way that I can't really control. To me, editing is making the film and it's a huge process and editors are under-rated.

Julie Delpy

#25. You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#26. It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.

John Waters

#27. I never start editing a film until it's completely shot; I don't edit along the way, ever. When it's finished I come in here and we start with reel one, scene one and start editing shot by shot by shot until we're finished.

Woody Allen

#28. The content dictates the style all the time. That's the way it is. If the content of the film is highly jagged, neurotic, fast-paced, it just called for that kind of shooting, editing and performance.

Woody Allen

#29. 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.

Walter Murch

#30. I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

Martin Scorsese

#31. Formulating the proposal is about 80% of the actual time of the process. In the end, the time spent filming, editing and postproduction is a very small proportion of the total time you spend in the production of the film.

Francis Alys

#32. Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.

Jeremy Clarkson

#33. People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

Steve Martin

#34. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Ray Harryhausen

#35. The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.

Edward Dmytryk

#36. The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

Steven Spielberg

#37. For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

Tom Bissell

#38. I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.

Julie Delpy

#39. You know, post-production is a bit of a grind to me. If I'm producing a film, I really ... I mean I like editing, but all the other crap, the color mixing and ... it's all a grind. And so as a result I cut back producing the number of films I was producing.

John C. McGinley

#40. A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.

Robert Bresson

#41. The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.

Steven Zaillian

#42. You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.

Aaron Eckhart

#43. When you're making the film, you don't really think the audience; it's only when you start editing that you really start to became aware of your audience because you're thinking of how you communicate these ideas, and how lucid can you be, and yet stay within the language you've established.

Jonathan Glazer

#44. Editing a film is always a question of time, and the director. I've worked with a lot of directors who don't mind my involvement. They appreciated it.

Richard Gere

#45. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

Orson Welles

#46. I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.

Martin Scorsese

#47. One of the advantages of shooting digitally was that we had a lot of time. When you shoot, even if you do a good performance, it may get lost in the editing room. It's just one more way that a potentially good film might go astray.

William Mapother

#48. But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

Oliver Stone

#49. In real life, when you speak with each other you overlap each other, so you can't fake that. Like especially when you have no cut. In a regular film when you want people to overlap you cut it that way. It's mixing and editing.

Julie Delpy

#50. Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

John Crowley

#51. A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is.

Alan Parker

#52. I never ever see a film of mine after I release it to the public. I see it when I shoot it in my dailies and while I'm editing it, re-editing it and reshooting it and all that. By the time it's finished I never want to see it again.

Woody Allen

#53. Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

Anthony Minghella

#54. Even if I loved the script, the director has to be right because it's all about the filmmaker. It's their vision. They're the ones that go back into the editing room and reassemble the film.

Cameron Diaz

#55. Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

Joe Dante

#56. When I am shooting, I am inside the theatre, when I am in the editing room, I am inside the theatre. I always try to feel what they will feel. I see a film, not as a director, but as the audience. If I am entertained, they will be, too.

Rohit Shetty

#57. The great thing about doing physical comedy for film is that if it doesn't work you're not exposed. It ends up on the editing room floor, so it gives you a lot more room to experiment I guess. But I really enjoy doing it. I'm very comfortable tapping into my inner idiot.

Isla Fisher

#58. Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.

Ridley Scott

#59. I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.

Ricky Gervais

#60. To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

Woody Allen