American - Editor | July 12, 1943 -
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
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There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.
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Every film is a puzzle really, from an editorial point of view.
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My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.
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When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.
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Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.
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If you want to freak your cat out, stare at your cat. If you want to reassure your cat, stare at your cat, then very deliberately and very slowly blink. Like that. The cat will also deliberately, slowly blink back at you, and I almost guarantee that she will start to purr. That's a feline reassurance.
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Every film is hard work, and a few lucky people do get Oscars for what they do, and it's recognition for all that hard work on a certain level. If you didn't do the hard work, you wouldn't be standing there. On the other hand, people do a lot of hard work and don't get Oscars, so it's a mixture of glory and injustice at the same time.
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Blinking is some way of tabulating - a kind of carriage return, click, or save to disk - that helps the process of 'Okay, now change the subject.' Every time you move your eyes, there's an interruption in the visual field - you go momentarily blind when your eyeballs are moving.
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I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery.
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Sound is a huge influence on peoples' attention.
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I re-mastered 'The Conversation' a few years ago for DVD. '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. Truth be told, I couldn't.
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