Years ago, I interviewed a number of film editors, which was a fascinating experience for me. You can learn a lot about the storytelling process from editors; they're in charge of one of the most important and under-appreciated aspects of filmmaking: choosing not only what shots to leave in, but what to leave out. The collaboration between director and editor on a movie is crucial, because having complete freedom with no outside guidance can ruin a film just as much as having no freedom at all.

Over the history of cinema, film editing went from physically cutting celluloid on flatbed moviolas to editing digitally on Avid machines, but the most important pieces in an editor’s arsenal have always been the same: timing, instinct, patience, and personal chemistry.

Photo credit: Flickr user ahhdrjones via Creative Commons

Steven Kemper’s area of expertise in the editing room is in the action genre. He has cut a number of films for John Woo, including Face / Off and Mission: Impossible 2. Woo’s action sequences are tight and well constructed, yet surprisingly Kemper says Woo gives his editors “tons of leeway” in the cutting room. Woo storyboards his action sequences, “but very often he wings it on the set if he doesn’t get a shot, a shot isn’t working out the way he hoped or he ran out of time. None of the scenes look like the storyboards when you’re done, but you do get an idea of what he’s going for, there are focus points in the sequence that we make sure to hold on to. You end up doing much more than John originally intended. That’s what I really enjoyed about working with him, is he’s totally open to stuff.”

Working on a John Woo film, the editor has many options open to him considering Woo has multiple cameras rolling during an action scene, sometimes as many as 16 shooting all at once. Woo’s action sequences are famous for deftly blending together numerous camera angles and speeds, which breaks the monotony of typical action editing. “A lot of movies I see today, it seems gratuitous that they go to slow motion in certain spots,” says Kemper. “One of the things I worked particularly hard on, on all of Woo’s pictures is to carefully meld the over-cranked, under-cranked, and normal speed material. If you catch it at the right action, it’s almost seamless. It’s almost like you haven’t realized for a beat that you’ve gone from slow motion right back to a 24-frame shot. I found it not only challenging, but a heck of a lot of fun.”

Photo credit: Flickr user andrew_saliga via Creative Commons.

In talking with Kemper, I learned that patience is one of the most important skills for an editor. In cutting the last forty minutes of Mission: Impossible 2, Kemper spent ten weeks--seven days a week, from seven in the morning to eleven at night--editing that portion of the film. For forty minutes, the editor sifted through 12 to 15 hours of film, which he cut down to what you see in the movie. “Woo shoots so much great stuff, to not sift through every frame is a crime!,” Kemper says.

Making a deadline is one of the hardest parts of editing, especially when cutting a big event film with a release date set in stone. “It was a little intimidating because there was so much time pressure,” says Kemper. “We were getting our last optical effects while they were negative cutting, it was that tight. That’s the part of the job that sucks. There’s so much time pressure, the hours are long, you don’t even get to do things that release your stress. You don’t have time to exercise, you don’t have time to meditate, you’re not with your families at all. You come home and sleep and you go right back to work. It’s truly the serious downside to editing.”

“You don’t cut any differently for a comedy than you edit for a drama...you edit the best way to make the scene work."

Many of the best editors have worked in a number of genres, such as the late Peter Zinner, who cut Godfather I and II and The Deer Hunter. In my conversation with him, Zinner told me, “You don’t cut any differently for a comedy than you edit for a drama. You edit the way it should be put together. In other words, you edit the best way to make the scene work. A story has to play, a scene has to work.”

“All editing comes out of timing, just different timings,” says Richard Francis-Bruce, who edited Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Shawshank Redemption. “With comedy, sometimes a joke can just go on too long. It can be a beat or a few words too long, or not have enough of a gap to allow for laughter. At all these genres, I look at the material, and the material tells me how to cut it in a way. With action, obviously fast pacing is what makes it work, but you can go too fast. You can cut it so fast that you forget that the audience hasn’t seen it before. They’re being lead through this process by you for the first time, and if you cut it too quickly, they may not even know what happened in the scene.”

“Timing is what it’s all about,” says Paul Hirsch, who pieced together Carrie, Star Wars, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. “I have said that I learned more about editing from Beethoven than from anyone else. We are structuring time, and you have to have a keen sense of rhythm. In addition, storytelling depends a great deal on how you dole out information, and at what point you reveal bits of the story to the audience. Holding back certain things can heighten tension and interest.”

Many of the editors I spoke with have said you gotta go with your instincts when cutting a film. “When I’m seeing dailies, I don’t try to predetermine how I’m going to cut it,” says Bruce. “I just sit down and let my gut lead me. If I were an audience member, what would I want to see? That’s what storytelling’s about.”

“An editor should learn to never give up, to keep exploring, because you get surprises,” Robert C. Jones (The Last Detail, Bulworth) told me. “You should also not worry about making mistakes. Every time I show a first cut to a director, I know there’s going to be a thousand mistakes, but there’s also gonna be gold. And if you’re not willing to try that, and if you’re not willing to make a fool out of yourself, you’ll never do anything special.”

Kemper says the beauty of editing is “it begs you to experiment.” Kemper encourages directors to try out any idea they want, no matter how crazy, because mistakes are easy (as well as inexpensive) to recut and fix, and if they don’t like the way an experiment turns out, it won’t leave the cutting room.

Bruce also feels speed is important in editing as well. “I believe that so much of editing is first impressions,” he says. “I often find that some of the worst scenes I’ve cut are ones that take too long to cut.”

Many editors feel it’s crucial for a director to have a strong understanding of the editing process. Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked with Martin Scorsese exclusively since Raging Bull, has said that one of the reasons why Scorsese is a brilliant director is he really understands editing. “I think an understanding of editing is very important during the shooting, conceiving and writing of the film because I think all truly great directors have understood a lot about editing,” she says. “When you’re shooting, you can be like a surgeon. You can be much more incisive, you don’t have to cover everything with a master shot, a two-shot, a three-shot and close-ups. Marty’s so skilled that he knows exactly what he’s going to need and what he doesn’t, so he can cut away a lot of dross. For example, he hardly does a master shot anymore. He has an unbelievably good sense of how to cover himself, which angle and how tight, and that all comes from years of editing and understanding deeply what is going to make a performance come across or not.”

Says Kemper, “I’m surprised how many directors don’t understand the editing process, and the real disadvantage to the directors who don’t understand the process is they tend to be kind of tunnel-visioned on the idea that they took in with them when they started the movie. Any good editor will tell you that’s never the movie that comes out in the end. They’ll be scenes lifted, scenes later added on, continuity turned completely upside down and backwards. And it’s the directors who don’t understand the power and potential of editing that end up limiting their movies.”

An editor can also be an important ally when making a film. “From a political point of view, the editor has much more power,” says Kemper. “The editor has much more say, even in scheduling because producers don’t want to be messin’ with the director’s editor. I don’t like to abuse that power, but there’s times when you need more time, or I need to convince a producer he needs this coverage, and to let the director shoot the scene. So I try and get involved that way and work it through.”

"Films have been bailed out in the editing. It is the final rewrite, and you can make a big difference."

Some films in cinema history have been reputed to have been “saved” in the editing room. If an editor has a good story sense, can he or she restructure a film that was originally a mess? Can the right editor add texture and nuance? Can an editor save a film from complete disaster by snatching it out of the hands of an incompetent director?

“The editing is one of the make-or-break phases of filmmaking,” says Hirsch. “The others being the writing and the casting, and, to a lesser extent, the shooting. I say to the lesser extent because if the writing or casting is flawed, you’re pretty much dead. You can’t cut around a bad actor in a lead role. And if what they are saying is nonsense, or dull, what can you do? But if the writing and cast are strong, the shooting can be indifferent and you can still have a good picture. It’s like a chef preparing a meal. The shooting provides the ingredients. If they’re rotten, not even the cleverest cook can make the meal tasty. If they’re superb, a bad cook can ruin them with a bad recipe or overcooking. Yes, films have been bailed out in the editing. It is the final rewrite, and you can make a big difference.”

“When you hear people say someone ‘saved’ a movie, I think it was the first time a film was presented and the material wasn’t picked through and worked enough,” says Bruce. “Then maybe someone else came along who had more attention to detail and more patience and was able to find all the little gems in there. But you can’t make something unless you have it. You can’t make a scene unless you’ve got the footage. I think you’ve gotta have good stuff going in.”

When a director is open to collaboration, they can often get something fantastic from a member of their team, with the audience having no idea it was someone else’s idea. In his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Producer Robert Evans has credited Zinner with structuring the memorable ending of The Godfather where the baptism of Michael Corleone’s baby is intercut with the murder of his enemies. “Peter saved the day--he saved our ass!,” wrote Evans.

“I can’t take all credit for that,” says Zinner. “What happened was Francis was going to leave for Sicily to shoot the sequences that took place there. Before he left, we went over the stuff, and I said, ‘Francis, there’s a lot of stuff missing in the baptism.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m going to shoot some additional stuff when I come back. See what you can do. Try to put it together the way it is now.’ Coppola was very, very gifted and very open to all kinds of possibilities. He eventually makes the (final) decision, but you can play with it, and I had a lot of leeway to work on a picture like The Godfather.

“So I started to put the stuff together,” Zinner continues. “I was cutting the scene normally, cutting back and forth between the baptism and each of the people who are going to be murdered. At one point I let the priest’s voice run all the way through and just cut picture to it without any rhyme or reason. I let the priest’s voice be the soundtrack. A lot of the things that were cutaways were shot without sound because they were not complete. I put in a lot of organ music, which I had to underscore the priest’s voice. As I played with it, I was able to refine it more and more and more, so that the tempo and the tension was picked up, and I think it worked out quite well.”

Zinner worked with Coppola again on The Godfather Part II, and many directors like to work with same editors film after film. “I think it’s because you develop of short-hand way of communicating with those people,” says Bruce. “This person’s going to understand their vision and give them what they want, and they can leave them alone a lot to do their job. It’s also got to do with personality. You’ve got to be able to get along with the director and vice versa. You’re going to spend a lot of time with this person, you’ve got to enjoy their company and respect their work.”

As we mentioned previously, the physical tools are much different today, and many editors had to make the switch to Avid systems over twenty years ago. As Schoonmaker told Collider, she made the switch when cutting Casino in 1995.

“I didn’t want to do it and the producer told me I had to do it,” she recalled. When editors make the switch, Avid provides trainers that will teach them how to learn the machinery. Schoomaker’s trainer made her put a quarter in a jar every time she said, “I could do this easier on film,” but within two weeks she had it all down.

“I experiment a lot more now,” she continued. “It is faster. I can make four edits of a scene instead of one just by copying it. On film, if I wanted to show him a different edit, I’d have to take it apart, hang it in the bin, remember how I did it, recut it and if he didn’t like that, go back and remember how I constructed it before. Now I’m fearless about improvising and coming up with different ideas. So even though I was very bad about it in the beginning, I completely converted.”

With movies entering the digital age, the tools will continue to change and grow, but clearly the fundamentals of editing and storytelling will always be the same. A great editor will always be one of the most important members of a director’s team, and they can always bring a hell of a lot to the table, whether they’re working on celluloid or hi-definition video files.