[MUSIC PLAYING]
Editing is at its essential core
the distillation of the material you've
collected into a coherent story.
So you can go back to human life.
How is your day, someone ask you?
And you immediately begin to edit that
into a coherent narrative of what took place.
You do not spend 24 hours telling that person what
your day was like.
But you want to-- you hopefully have collected
24 hours worth of material in order
to be able to answer the question, how is your day.
That's all that editing is.
It's taking the seemingly random chaos of events
and ordering it into a story.
You can look at our cutting room floor.
The proverbial cutting room floor
isn't filled with bad stuff.
It's filled with great stuff that you would look and go,
wow, you're an idiot.
Why isn't that in the final film?
But if I could put it back into the final film,
I'd show you the way that wonderful scene de-stabilized
the arc of something better.
Part of what I am is in some ways a traffic cop, ultimately
deciding what's going to get into the film
and what's not going to get into the film.
And that makes it an incredible burden.
Nothing in the hunter gathering portion
compares to what takes place in the triage,
in the merciless triage that everyone
who wants to be a filmmaker will come
to have to face, that you will have to kill,
as they say in journalism, all your little darlings.
All those sentences that you think are perfectly read,
all that shot that you think as you're taking it,
oh, it's going to be in the final film.
And be willing to sacrifice them in the service of something
else that has gone places that you couldn't even imagine.
And I think it's in some ways having a kind of courage
to make sure that you permit yourself
to let it go in a direction that you didn't
think it was going to go.
There is a huge amount of humility at the end of the day
that you begin to realize this whole thing is about.
It isn't about imposing what you know.
It's about acknowledging what you don't know
and asking of the material what it might need.
It doesn't mean that you don't impose yourself.
You do.
But you've got to have an equal ingredient of humility that
permits that material to speak to you
and tell us what it needs to make it better.
We use all the time in the editing room musical analogies.
Hold that a beat longer.
Hold that sentence go beat beat.
We have adopted without really know what we're
talking about musical ideas.
Because if you think about it, Wynton Marsalis
says that music is the art of the invisible.
You can hear one note and then a second note,
and something more has happened.
And that happens with words.
It happens with images.
Music is the fastest way to your heart.
And so I think, as we begin to edit, I find it helpful--
I think you would find it helpful--
to think about what these things represent in kind
of almost musical notations.
I don't know anything about music in that way.
But I know enough--
and you know enough--
to be able to employ that.
So a shot may be an 8th note, or a 16th note,
or a 30 second note, depending on how long it's on.
It may be that that line of narration is so dramatic that
you need to, at that period, at that rest,
you would say at the end of the note--
the period after the note--
to hold that.
One beat, two beat, cut.
I often try to respect the word and try
to get to the end of a phrase or a clause,
where there might be a comma in the script, before I would cut.
That's not always the case.
But for the most part, I think that, like musical phrases,
I kind of want a pace to it.
And then I can increase the pace of it.
I can slow down that pace.
We can do different things.
What you're trying to do is reconcile a word, or at least
a tension, between the word and the reception
of those words, which is a singular oral experience,
and then the reception of the visual information.
How long it takes to read an image.
How much more meaning accrues during the duration
of that shot.
And if you, in some ways, set up oppositions
where you're kind of forcing the viewer
to choose listening over watching,
or choose watching over listening, you've failed.
So I'm just looking for that place
where you have not accentuated these moments of tension.
You want to find a pace and rhythm that permits you.
If that means cutting at the end of the phrase, so be it.
But that may be the phrase in music too.
But there are no rules.
I mean, sometimes that works beautifully.
The pace of a particular scene is
about what all of the elements are telling you.
Obviously, what the music is is hugely important to what it is.
And what's happening in the scene, what the action is.
You know, people reading at home doesn't have the same pace
as a battle scene.
And at the same time, there are moments within a battle,
or at the end, or at the beginning,
in which the pace is even more stately than somebody
reading at home.
And so you have to be open to what the scene itself deserves.
It's like, when you speak and you're telling somebody
a story, you'll find the best story tellers often
begin to lower their voices and lean back
and start to tell you a story, and that forces you to lean in.
And so if you've got the control and the mastery
of these elements, you're just inviting people to lean in.
Now, these are not MTV fast cut videos,
except I can show you the middle of the Tet Offensive
from the Vietnam War, and that sucker is really
moving as fast, if not faster, than any music video I've seen.
And that's what it told us it needed.
[EXPLOSIONS, SHOUTING COMMANDS]
NARRATOR: The fighting continued.
[GUNFIRE, SCREAMS]
We had to blow our way through every wall of every house,
one marine remembered.
It's a shame we had to damage such a beautiful city.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In the last month of editing, there
are sometimes some big and scary decisions
to make additions, more importantly,
subtractions from it.
But most of it is opening up to frames.
That's a twelfth of a second.
Opening up six frames.
That's a fourth of a second.
You can say that's imperceptible,
but when you are as engaged in the editing process with us,
it's true.
You feel it at that level.
I once was working on my very first film in our cabin,
and my editor, who was soon to be my first wife, said,
I'm going to cut one frame out of this hour-long film
on the "Brooklyn Bridge," mostly archival.
And just tell me.
And I found it.
I knew exactly where it was.
I was so anxiously but also powerfully engaged
in the subject, that I would wish
that on every single one of you, that at some point,
in some aspect of what you were doing,
that you would, either specifically
that or the equivalent of that, know the frame.
That's being the princess with the pea.
You know, however many mattresses,
you still feel that pea.
And that's the kind of sensitivity and awareness
you have to awaken in yourself.
It isn't just a job.
It isn't just a widget.
If you chose to do that, that's great.
And I can help you with some outer stuff.
But if it really wants to be something
that changes you and changes other people,
then, at some point, in some aspect
of what you're doing, you're, going
to have to say under 10 mattresses,
I didn't have a good night's sleep.
There was a pea under the mattress.
And somebody just took out a frame from my film.
And I want it back.
The adage is that you never finish a work of art.
You abandon it.
But there is a sense that you do get to a point
where you can whittle this stick down to nothing
and it ought to stop.
That the scenes are all working.
Yes, you can tinker and you can fuss.
And I've seen what's happened when you fuss too much that you
end up saying, well, let's go back
to the way we were last week because I think
we've like over done it here.
And that happens.
But I do think, in some ways, you
have to let this thing, this imperfect thing.
There's nothing will be perfect.
Go.
And just say that, you know, it's like a photo album.
Like, I can go back into the '70s
and I can see myself in these bell-bottom pants,
and this Paisley patterned shirt with big wide collar.
And you go, oh, my god, that's so horrible.
But you never take the picture out and tear it up.
It's true.
And I can look at an earlier film
and say, wow, that's still working.
Or I can go boy, I wouldn't have done that.
But I would never for a moment think of going into that film
and changing the length of that fade, or removing that fade,
or making the dissolved longer or shorter
or getting rid of the dissolved, or changing
the font on a graphic, or making it smaller.
All of stuff I've thought about as I
looked at "Brooklyn Bridge" as it was recently restored.
But it was just me.
And the audience didn't care.
They liked it.
OK.
Just-- you've won.
Declare victory.
It's OK.
Don't fuss.
And that's what you want to do.
At some point, you go, you know what, this
is what we can do right now.