Movie Editing Quotes & Sayings

I remember doing one day of work, and I was so good I ended up doing 25 days on that movie. And all of it ended up on the editing room floor. That was my first Hollywood lesson: Just because you filmed a movie doesn't necessarily mean that you're in it. — Eddie Griffin

I wish my life were a movie and I could take it into the editing room and totally cut this part out. And some other parts. Some other parts definitely need to be cut. — Susane Colasanti

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. — Neil Burger

'Under the Skin' is handsome, in a dour way, but inert - a cunning experiment that died in the shooting or on the editing table. You'll want to get the DVD, though, and not just for its study of Scarlett. Odds are that the Making-Of documentary will be far stranger and more fascinating than the movie that was made. — Richard Corliss

Whenever you take a subject you're obsessed with or that haunts you, and make a movie about it, you're converting it into work units that need to be completed. You gotta turn it into a treatment, a script, a grant application, a bunch of forms to be filled out, a shooting schedule, casting sessions, auditions, shooting, editing, music compositions, the film festival circuit, interviews even. And by the time you've finished the process you're so sick and tired by something that was once very precious to you that you're done with it. — Guy Maddin

And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work. — Charlie Kaufman

They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing. — Terry Gilliam

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. — Steve Martin

When it comes to the ratings, I don't know what the rating system is. So when it comes to me, I've learned, with the little experience that I have, that when I feel really good about a movie in the editing room, it works. And when I've felt like a movie wasn't working, it didn't work. — Tim Story

I'm so independent in writing stuff and controlling what I do. Sometimes I get calls from people asking to be in their movie, but I'm always writing or editing, and I can never get around to doing it. I'm so much more interested in my own stuff. I think I drive my agent crazy. — Chris Lilley

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours. — Peter Landesman

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it. — Mark Ruffalo

As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances. — Richard LaGravenese

The shooting of the movie is the truth part and the editing of the movie is the lying part, the deceit part — Paul Hirsch

When I watch the movie, which is I don't know how many times I've done now with editing and everything, I walk out giddy just because I feel like that's the movie that I want to see. — Thomas Tull

I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn't at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process. — Steven Soderbergh

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

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. — Noah Baumbach

My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall. — John Waters

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along. — Wes Anderson

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

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay. — Quentin Tarantino

A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity. — Simon Pegg

Once you sign on as an actor, you know, you don't go to the editing room, you don't see how they cut, you don't see how they score, you don't see how they cast the rest of the movie. — Albert Brooks

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot. — Spike Jonze

My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing. — Mort Sahl

What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you're on set. When you're on set, it has nothing to do with when you're in the editing room. And when you're in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go. — Lori Petty

I know when something is done and when it isn't. There's been times working on movies when they [moviemakers] lock in a release date and so you're stuck to that schedule. But sometimes you're still editing and you feel like you're not really done, but they're sort of releasing the movie anyway - that's kind of depressing. — Rob Zombie

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing. — Garry Marshall

You have to know what you're shooting. Don't just make your movie in the editing room and just get everything you can on the day. — Patrick Wilson

That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you. — Abel Ferrara

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. — Philip Morrison

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. — Matt Walsh

I directed a movie and now, I'm going to do the editing. — Salma Hayek

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. — Thomas Ian Nicholas

I wrote 'All is Lost' while editing 'Margin Call'. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie. — J. C. Chandor

If we had a completely found footage feel, with no editing, then we would have a twenty four hour movie and that doesn't really work either. — Daniel Stamm

Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you've shot, regardless of what the intent may have been. — Joe Dante

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. — Gregory Nicotero

You see the movie with the music and the editing and all the parts that you weren't there for when it was being filmed, and you really appreciate all the names that are scrolling by. You realize that you accomplished so much. — Diane Lane

To make a movie charming, you have to be playful on all levels and open to ideas, and you have to have an idea for how to do that within the confines of the shooting schedule and editing and all that. — Lasse Hallstrom

I've lived through the shooting of movie, the editing and every other process along the way, so it's not for me to really judge it. I'll probably look at it again five years from now to get a fresh feel for it. — Clint Eastwood

I watched a lot of movies from all over the world. The Russians were very good at editing. They were specialists in editing. The Man with a Camera, if you know that movie, is incredible. I still don't understand how it works. It's a movie with no script, no actors and still it works. It's really good. It's really about editing. — Michel Hazanavicius

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story. — Miguel De Icaza

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. — Pedro Almodovar

When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing; you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it. — Joe Dante

When you're done shooting, the movie that you're going to release when you're done shooting is as bad as it will ever be. And then through editing, and finishing the effects and adding music, you get to make the movie better again. So I'm really hard on myself and on the movie. — Barry Sonnenfeld