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The
edi t or shoot s no
new f oot age; w hat ev-
er he does w as i n t he
f il m al l al ong.
1Takes are stored individually for a
movieola (i.e., an upright viewing-machine);
they are stored in 1,000-foot reels for
flatbed viewing.The former obviously allows
for much faster access to a given piece of
film.
guess, in working
with this kind of direc-
tor only once. Most of the
time I get few, if any, notes, and the
directors seem to trust me to use my
abilities to select the takes and structure the sequence of
shots. (On at least two projects I had put the films into first
cut before I ever met the directors in person.) This makes the
job more difficult because more challenging, but also more
rewarding because more creative.
Different editors also work differently. Perhaps because
when I first started editing in 1982, the editors I worked with
– Roger Spottiswoode and John Bloome – cut on a movieola,
I continued to use one right up until I switched to the Avid
computer in 1995, the way most films are cut these days. I like
the Avid for the same reason I liked the movieola, as opposed
to the KEM or flatbed: the quick access to all the footage.
1
I’ve
never been one of these editors who watch the dailies and
take notes on the so-called “best” takes or readings, then build
or have their assistants build a “selects” reel and cut from
that. For one thing, typically you watch dailies at the end of
what has been a long day of editing (if you’re the editor) or
shooting (if you’re the director). Hardly the best conditions
under which to be making editing selections. For another, I’m
never really certain where I want something to be played until
I reach that point in the scene. It’s all very well to feel that a
reading of this or that line was much better in the medium
shot than in either the close-up or the master shot, but what if
the medium shot is emotionally or psychologically the wrong
place to be at that point in the scene? Perhaps the isolation of
a close-up is what’s called for or the tie-in of the over-the-
shoulder or the distance of the master. Then you’ve got to
search through the other takes and find a reading that works
or alter the cut accordingly. I like to have the fastest possible
access to all the footage at whatever point I am in the scene.
As important as individual moments are – in my opinion, they
are the very lifeblood of truly vital movie-making – scenes are
more important, and you usually have to sacrifice the inci-
dental to the overall.
Editing is a curious process of the intuitive and the intel-
lectual, the instinctive and the ratiocinative. For every deci-
sion you make has both immediate and long-range implica-
tions. There’s an old saw – one that, dull though it has
become, is alas still in too much use – that goes, once you go
in, stay in. This refers to the classic way of editing a scene,
where you begin with the masters, then move to the medium
shots, the over-the-shoulder angles, going progressively
tighter until you conclude with the close-ups. And
when you get close in, stay close in. You see a
lot of cutting like this, especially in older
movies and quite a bit of television. It’s
certainly a serviceable way to edit
movies,
it works,
and it’s not
likely to get you
into any trouble.
But it doesn’t necessari-
ly make for terribly exciting
or dynamic moviemaking,
nor does it allow you to avail
yourself of anything like the full
expressive use of the filmic language at your disposal. One of
the most valuable lessons I learned from studying Peckinpah,
for example, is how dropping back to the master shot or even
an establishing shot in the middle of scene can let it breathe,
or alternately can give it a beat that will then invest your
close-ups with even greater force and intensity.
Some editors and directors don’t like what are called
jump-ins and jump-outs, that is, going from one size to anoth-
er without an angle change or a cutaway. Yet this is one of my
favorite procedures. These are, admittedly, difficult cuts to
make work, but when they do work, you gain an expressive-
ness that you don’t otherwise have. In the movie I’m current-
ly doing, for example, Ron Shelton’s Play It to the Bone, Loli-
ta Davidovich has a scene in which her character is talking
about the things she enjoys. Ron covered the passage pretty
thoroughly, as he usually does. But there were two takes in
particular, a loose over-the-shoulder looking at Lolita past
Woody Harrelson and an isolating close-up, both from the
same angle, that contained readings that are especially effec-
tive. Lolita sustained the speech through both readings and
either take could have been dropped in with hardly a second
thought. If I had to choose one or the other, I would have
selected the looser angle because she is responding to some-
thing Woody’s character has asked her and it felt wrong to me
to play the whole speech in the isolation of the close-up. Yet I
also felt that the end of the speech is slightly more effective in
the tighter angle and I wanted to play the whole speech on
her, without cutting to a reaction and back again. So I simply
cut from the looser to the tighter angle at an unobtrusive spot.
The performance plays as seamlessly as if in one, but the shift
to the close-up gives the last part of the speech just the right
subtle emphasis, drawing us closer to the character and her
dreams, than would have been the case had I been doctrinaire
about jump-ins or, for that matter, had I worked with selects,
which would have forced me to choose one or the other take
before the cutting part of process began.
Do editors have styles of their own? I suppose they
must, but I don’t imagine they can be very well
defined ones, otherwise they’d be terribly
limited. As I think about my own, I can
state a few – preferences I’d rather
call them, as they’re nothing so hard
and fast as principles. I prefer my
cuts to be as seamless, even as
invisible as possible. I generally
like to knit the scenes internally,
which means that I prefer to have