Director + Editor

The collaborative process of Directors and Editors

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Spike Lee’s Longtime Editor: ‘BlacKkKlansman’ Was His Quickest Cut Since ‘Do the Right Thing’

Barry Alexander Brown tells IndieWire about the pair's long-time working relationship, the important lesson he took from “Malcolm X,” and discovering that the actual David Duke was in Charlottesville.

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Kelly Reichardt on her editing process - her early process and on Certain Women specifically. From MovieMaker Magazine.

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Hye Mee Na, editor of “Red Hook Summer” and “CHI-RAQ” talks about her working process with Spike Lee.

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Spike Lee on working with his two editors - Barry Alexander Brown and Sam Pollard

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Kubrick editing "Barry Lyndon"

"This is quite priceless — previously unseen photos of Stanley Kubrick editing Barry Lyndon  in the converted garage of his home in Abbots Mead, December 1974. Many thanks to Vivian Kubrick for sharing these amazing photos with us. More can be found on her Twitter stream. An 11-minute interview with Kubrick from a conversation he had with French film critic Michel Ciment, in which he specifically discusses Barry Lyndon. One of the paradoxes of movie writing is that, with a few notable exceptions, writers who can really write are not interested in working on film scripts. They quite correctly regard their important work as being done for publication. I wrote the screenplay for Barry Lyndon alone. The first draft took three or four months but, as with all my films, the subsequent writing process never really stopped. What you have written and is yet unfilmed is inevitably affected by what has been filmed. New problems of content or dramatic weight reveal themselves. Rehearsing a scene can also cause script changes. However carefully you think about a scene, and however clearly you believe you have visualized it, it’s never the same when you finally see it played. Sometimes a totally new idea comes up out of the blue, during a rehearsal, or even during actual shooting, which is simply too good to ignore. This can necessitate the new scene being worked out with the actors right then and there. As long as the actors know the objectives of the scene, and understand their characters, this is less difficult and much quicker to do than you might imagine. —Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon" 

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Schoonmaker/Scorsese & "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Check out the DP/30 interview here.

Does she not seem like the most wonderful person? I'd love to spend a few months with her as she cuts a film, learning from her.

Some thoughts:

-It's cool to hear that Scorsese screens films for his crew before embarking on making a film. I've heard of filmmakers doing this - and of course I watch reference films before making a film, and share them with the DP and even the actors - but I love the idea of gathering the crew (not just the DP, but a number of crew members) together in a small screening room and collectively experiencing a film whose mojo we want to borrow from.

-"The film couldn't handle it..." sometimes great material - whole completed scenes - need to be cut from a film because the film as a whole cannot bear the weight of those scenes, how they effect what comes before or after them, the ripples they create. I love embracing a film as an organic creature and letting it dictate what it will accept and what it won't. It's a really neat thing. And if you do embrace it, and don't resist it, it makes cutting great moments, shots, scenes, even whole characters, much easier. 

-Schoonmaker and Scorsese don't really have conversations about an upcoming film project before production. In dailies, Scorsese will tell Schoonmaker what he's seeing and feeling, what takes work for him, if he thinks individual performances are there yet, etc. She will take detailed notes of what he's saying and share her thoughts and then will go off to create the first cut based on these conversations and notes. It doesn't sound like Scorsese makes his own notes, at least not upon first viewing. I'm a little Type A, so I tend to want to put together my own detailed, written notes. But I can see how that can get in the way of just watching a moment and experiencing it, and how detrimental that notetaking can be because you only get to see something for the first time once. Schoonmaker says Scorsese watches dailies like an audience member and I think that's what it's like during the first viewing - the director is the first audience member. It's important that the director be fully present in that first viewing. For me, I think I need to find an editor who is detail oriented, that I trust, in order for me not to take notes and to just rely on my instincts and talking with her or him. If I know s/he is really getting and understanding and noting what I'm saying, feeling, liking, hating, then I won't feel the need to try to control the details with detailed notes of my own. Notes are contol and no notes is letting go, but you have to have the right editor supporting you to feel comfortable letting go. 

-Once Schoonmaker has completed a cut and production has ended, her and Scorsese work together through the rest of the cutting of the film. She describes it as a "very intense collaboration."

-It's very important for a director to remember how to respond to a film as an audience member.

-Scorsese is very hard on himself and his own footage. He has high standards. 

-They don't screen their first assembly. Schoonmaker will sometimes cut multiple versions of a scene and then her and Scorsese go through the cut scene by scene. Then they put together a cut that they will screen for others.

-Many directors have told her that the first assembly is a very painful experience. I can relate - it's both thrilling and defeating, like wanting to laugh and cry at the same time because something is joyfully awful. 

-They usually cut from beginning to end so they can feel the film emerging. Schoonmaker will only read the script once and will then put it away and will let the film emerge to her via the dailies, let it speak to her and dictate what it wants to be.

-Schoonmaker: "He taught me everything I know about editing. My taste is his taste."

-Schoonmaker: editing is like plumbing, you put together the pieces and hope that water flows.

-Schoonmaker and Scorsese will usually screen a film about 12 times while cutting. "You absolutely need to screen the film [for others] to see it correctly." She says it takes only one audience member to be experiencing it a certain way for them to start to see it through that person's eyes. I can absolutely relate - it's amazing how moments will suddenly be too slow, too fast, or too personally revealing as soon as I sit next to someone else and watch one of my films. 

-Scorsese learned a great deal about acting when he was a kid watching movies with his friends at a theater in Brooklyn and his friends would snicker at things they saw on the screen. The snickering tuned him in to the honest and dishonest in performances.

-Scorsese will watch dailies and say "I don't believe that. I don't believe that" when watching moments of a performance.

-Schoonmaker and Scorsese will have TCM playing on a TV on mute in the room off to the side while they're cutting a film. 

-Scorsese does NOT want to be conventional. 

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O'Steen's "Cut To The Chase"

Just finished the book Cut To The Chase, about editor Sam O'Steen (The Graduate, Chinatown, etc.) It's a decent read, structured like one large conversation between Sam and his wife, Bobbie (who started out as his editing assistant). There's a good deal of gossip (and a lot of casual paternalism and giddy sexism...) and not as much working style or working philosophy stuff as I would have liked, but the segments where they discuss Sam cutting classic films and working with well-known filmmakers (Nichols, Polanski, Benton, Lumet, etc.) are the most interesting.

Regarding Director + Editor collaborations, the one consistent thread throughout the book was Sam's insistence on how often he knew what was better for a film than a director, that often a director would ask for specific changes and he wouldn't make them to see if the director noticed. If they did, he would keep the edit his way and keep screening the film until he wore the director down and kept it his way. Towards the end of the book he contradicts himself in saying if a director wanted to try something he would try it - and that on a few occasions he was surprised their ideas worked (the rest of the time, he says, his ideas were right from the start). But he also insists it's a director's medium and he wouldn't make cuts insisted upon by a producer that the director didn't want.

It seems like, if you have an editor as talented as Sam, it's great that they are engaged and fight for their perspective. But it doesn't seem right to me that at times he wouldn't even try edits a director was asking for. That seems too know-it-all, too controlling, out of line for how an Editor should behave. Part of this might have been because of the physical work editing used to take - and the toll it took on the film (since the film was being physically cut) - and Sam, having a sense something wasn't going to work, maybe didn't want to damage the film trying it.

He says in the book that he changed as an editor - maybe as the years passed he grew more open to try things the director wanted.

He had good relationships with his directors. He was well-liked. And he was sought out by these well-known, talented, great filmmakers. No doubt he helped them and was naturally gifted in the construction of a film. And - just look at the work he did. The man knew his shit. 

But, I think to make it work with an editor like Sam - someone who believes so deeply they are right and will at times not even try the suggestions of a director - you've got to first earn the trust of your director. Without that, I can't personally imagine a relationship like this working. 

So again, it comes to trust. It's amazing how the director + editor relationship isn't emphasized more in film school and as you learn and build your career in this industry. It seems to me, besides maybe the relationship a director has with a DP or actors, that the director + editor relationship is the most important. And even if the DP and actor relationships are bad, the shoot does eventually end, and the editor has such enormous influence on how the film turns out. 

Lesson: find a trusted, talented editor - and hold onto her/him tight. 

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"There's only one first time" This is so interesting. This is exactly the type of thing I was looking for in reading this book and then starting this blog. -You get to see how detailed Walter Murch's organizational system is. This is something I've thought about a lot, and through reading Murch's writings and his interviews, I've come to realize I relate a lot with the way he thinks, the way he approaches projects, and his insistence on being organized. It's inspiring to see someone who is so intelligent creatively to also be so organized. -It's interesting that he distinguishes notes from the first time he watches footage and from other times. He acknowledges you can only watch the footage for the first time once, so he records emotional responses and leaves the mechanical notes for later. He also notes that these emotional notes are the closest thing he has to the audience's reaction to seeing the film. I've often felt the pressure to either write everything down or remember every little detail upon watching footage for the first time, knowing looking at it again would never be the same. It would be helpful to use an approach like Murch's: look at the footage the first time and just write down associations and then record notes, ideas, mechanical things, etc. on subsequent viewings and somewhere else to be referenced alongside the initial viewing notes. -He watches the footage again for a specific scene before he is ready to construct that scene and takes a second series of notes that are more surgical. -He keeps all the notes in front of him as he works on the assembly, but eventually stops referencing them. This is also really interesting to me. Maybe it's the student in me, or a little bit of OCD, but I often feel like I need to keep referencing the notes or else I'll forget my original ideas, reactions, etc. But this creates a lot of pressure and often feels unnatural. I think the right approach is to take notes, let the notes and ideas become internalized, and then stay alive to the footage by responding to it day by day, only referencing the notes for specific reasons. I think you have to let the film change, and your response to the footage change, as you as a human being change. So, Murch's process: 1) Watch for the first time and take free associative, emotional notes [Usually dailies during production] 2) Watch again before constructing a scene and take more surgical notes 3) Keep both sets of notes in front of you - especially during the assembly 4) Eventually, the notes are internalized, and you just work without them From “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” by Michael Ondaatje

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Walter Murch, on reading the script before he agrees to edit a project. This to me further emphasizes how important it is to work with an editor that you trust - possibly someone who holds the most trust from you out of all your collaborators - because s/he has such an outsized influence on your film. From “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” by Michael Ondaatje

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Multiple Editors and Monthly Screenings

Walter Murch was one of four editors working on Apocalypse Now. The film was divided into four sections and each editor was responsible for a section. The editors would be in and out of each other's rooms constantly trying to stay on the same page, since the work was so complicated, it wasn't possible to clearly articulate what needed to be done. They would also screen the film monthly. Murch ended up cutting picture for a year and doing sound work for another year. 

-Knowing the film, it's fascinating to read about how they managed the cutting. I can't imagine trying to stay on top of, keep track of, or manage the process for such a massive, ambitious, complicated, epic film. 

-I wonder how often Francis looked at cuts or scenes? I wonder how emotionally and intellectually he was able to stay clear on what he needed and wanted without being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of footage?

-You really need a group of editors you can trust, maybe even more than you can trust yourself, to be able to give yourself over to their work as you try to stear the ship, especially such a large ship that was Apocalypse Now. I'd love to learn more about Coppola's daily routine and his work methods during this time. 

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Putting a film together is all about having opinions: this not that, now not later, in or out.

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From “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” by Michael Ondaatje

-This interests me, because he acknowledges that as the editor, he is aligned with the director, which is who the film belongs to. He lends the film is editorial eye, but it all needs to be in service of the film and the director's vision of the film

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The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. The director simply doesn't. To actually look at all the film the director has shot, and review it and sort through it, to rebalance all of that and make very specific notes about tiny details that are sometimes extremely significant, this falls to the editor. As it's happened, I've always done the initial assembly of the film myself. I sit with the director when we watch dailies. If he or she has something to say about a particular moment, I note it. But if I were to add up the Director's Comments column on my database, I wouldn't find a tremendous amount of information there. What's there is significant, though, and leads to other decisions. The smallest suggestion can help guide my eye to see the film the way the director is seeing it.

Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

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"It's one of the crucial functions of the editor. To take, as far as it is possible to take, the view of the audience, who is seeing the film without any knowledge of all the things that went into its construction"

Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

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This is really cool to see - especially when it's two directors working at the level that they are.

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Schoonmaker + Scorsese in the editing room.

Great, great observational stuff here. Some good tidbits about Scorsese' work methods. Watch the whole clip. 

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Editor Thelma Schoonmaker on cutting with Scorsese and Hugo

-Scorsese develops an editing concept in Pre-Production for each of his films

-They have never felt that, as a rule, editing should be invisible 

-3:22: First, Schoonmaker carves out a loose cut. Then, they work intensely together on the editing. Editing is Scorsese' favorite part of the filmmaking process and he is very involved with the editing of each of his film's.

-4:32: Schoonmaker: "My job is to translate his [Scorsese'] vision for the film always"

-5:09: Scorsese tells Schoonmaker what he wants and she tries to achieve it

-When cutting Hugo, which was in 3D, Schoonmaker cut alone in 2D in the morning and then cut in 3D in the afternoon when Scorsese joined her.

It's great to see how, after so many decades of cutting, how in love with and excited by movies she still is.