“I tell the director before I start, “If you want me to be innovative, give me the chance to make mistakes and maybe we can do something interesting.”… You can play safe and leave it all in, and you sit with the director and say, “Let’s trim here, let’s trim there,” but why not give the director a challenge? That’s what’s nice about film editing: there are a lot of little discoveries you make along the trip, and you put them in. If I find an interesting wrinkle, something different that might work, I say, “If I do it the way the director wants, he’ll never see this interesting little wrinkle.” I’m not doing my job unless I’m giving him options. That’s the key to this business.”
 

Michael Kahn Interview from Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing by Vincent LoBrutto

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William Friedkin recounts a tale of how he handled studio notes on Sorcerer. This must have been an uncomfortable lunch for the editorial team:

"[Barry] Diller asked if he and [Sid] Sheinberg could see me the next day to pass along a few notes from their team. Since The French Connection experience I wasn’t keen on notes from executives. So I said okay, but I’d want to bring my editors and the writer so they could hear the notes firsthand. Diller and Sheinberg weren’t used to meeting with “below-the-title” guys, but they reluctantly agreed, thinking it was in the spirit of cooperation. It was a sham.

I told Wally [Walon Green, Screenwriter] and Bud [Smith, Editor] and the assistant editors, Jere Huggins and Ned Humphreys, to come unshaven, button their shirts incorrectly, leaving them outside their trousers, wear scruffy, mismatched shoes and socks, and generally look like homeless guys. I told them to wear sullen expressions, project indifference, not smile or nod or do anything that showed understanding, let alone agreement with whatever the executives said—just stare blankly at them while they talked. And don’t react to anything I might say or do, I added. Sheinberg and Diller were successful, high-powered executives, but I felt they had little to offer on how to improve a film I worked on for over a year. I thought that an audience’s response was worth a thousand times more than any executive’s, and that all these guys wanted to do was leave their mark on the film, like a dog pissing on a tree.

The meeting took place over lunch at the posh private dining room at Universal. Sheinberg and Diller were in suits and ties, and my guys were dressed as I had instructed them. Two waiters. Drink orders. Everyone ordered iced tea or bottled water or Diet Coke except me. I asked for a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, no glass. Shocked glances all around, especially from the waiters, who thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. When drinks arrived, I opened the vodka bottle and started glugging. Though not a drinker, I can handle booze and have only been drunk twice in my life. Diller and Sheinberg had a handful of meaningless notes, to which we gave neither visual nor verbal response. Lunch was ordered, but when it arrived, I just kept drinking from the bottle. After about fifteen minutes I fell to the floor facedown. No one reacted, so I just lay there until gradually there was silence. Then Diller turned to Wally and the editors and asked, “Does this happen often?”

“Every day,” Wally deadpanned.

I leave it to you to evaluate this incident. Some of you may find it appalling, others stupid, still others insulting and self-destructive. It was certainly all of that, but at the time, that was my nature. I was still the class clown, and it was also a dumb-ass way of coping with criticism. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way myself."
 

From William Friedkin's “The Friedkin Connection”

An apparently unusual aspect to Hitchcock’s work method was his entrusting the viewing of dailies to editor George Tomasini and script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “He never went to look at this film,” Schlom asserted. “After dailies, George and I had to come back and tell him what we thought was right or wrong. He knew what he had.” Tomasini, having worked on The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, was one of the handful of collaborators in whose taste and instincts Hitchcock placed implicit confidence. That track record notwithstanding, Tomasini was only paid $11,000 to edit Psycho.
 

From "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello

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One of the highlights from Criterion’s deluxe treatment of Blow Out is an hour long conversation between Brian De Palma and Noah Baumbach, filmed in October of 2010. Noah Baumbach isn’t the first filmmaker that springs to mind when thinking of appropriate De Palma pairings, but it’s fast apparent that he’s a genuine fan [he’s since curated a De Palma Suspense season at New York’s BAMCinématek.]

It’s always enjoyable listening to De Palma rail against conventions, clichés and trends, and this was no exception:

"When you start a movie with a helicopter shot of New York, is this an idea? Oh, we’re in Manhattan. Or these boring drive-ups, where the whole opening of the movie is a car driving up to a building. This is not an idea. Especially in the beginning of a movie where an audience is ready for anything. To waste that time with some boring geography shot mystifies me.

I’m always trying to figure out where the camera is in relation to the material. I’m always saying — and have been saying for years — that the position of the camera is just as important as what you’re photographing. A dirty word to me is coverage. Two shot. Over the shoulder. Stuff you see all the time that just drives me crazy because this, to me, is not directing. You have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material."
 

The first time I saw De Palma interviewed was in 1998 when he sat down with Mark Cousins for the BBC’s Scene by Scene movie series. There he openly complained about modern movies, their lack of craft, the absence of cinema. He grumbled about the publicity machine and the lure of celebrity. He even stated that he’d never have agreed to the interview unless he was promoting a film [in this case it was Snake Eyes.] While the latter may be true for most directors and actors who are appearing on the television circuit, it’s rare for them to actually admit it. I managed to source an online version of the interview and re-watch it. Essential viewing, if only to watch De Palma squirm at Cousins’ verbose over-analysis and inappropriate moments of honesty. At one point, Cousins actually states, “[There’s] a sort of maverick quality in some of your work. Not all of it. I think you’ve made some terrible films. I hope it’s okay to say that.”

De Palma makes numerous memorable appearances throughout J.W. Rinzler's excellent book, "The Making of Star Wars". His reaction after George Lucas screened an early cut of the movie:

“What’s all this Force shit?! Where’s all the blood when they shoot people?”
 

Perhaps the definitive source for tales of De Palma is Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, a no-holds-barred look at the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities. One of the most memorable moments in the book is when 2nd Unit Director Eric Schwab requests to shoot an establishing shot from the script — “The sky is a labyrinth of planes taking off and landing.” De Palma stated that the day he included the clichéd shot of an airplane landing in one of his movies was the day that he retired. A $100 bet was placed and Schwab began a 6 month process of attempting to film the perfect airplane landing with preparation that involved pinpointing the exact moment that the sun would align with the Empire State Building as Concorde landed on a runway.

Finally, a Blow Out related tale of brat pack rivalry as told by Quentin Tarantino:

The following test screening results from Criterion's website suggest that audiences weren’t quite ready for David Cronenberg’s betamax odyssey in 1983:

One of the featured film essays on that same page - Medium Cruel Reflections on Videodrome by Tim Lucas - mentions an interesting visual component that was present in the script but didn’t make it into the final film: video twitches. After using the Accumicon helmet, Max was to shake “video dandruff” from his head. People and objects were to twitch video throughout the story, to be achieved by dropping the resolution down to 525-lines with an electric neon-like effect:

[Michael] Lennick and his associate Lee Wilson prepared a reel of assorted video twitches and glitches for Cronenberg — “Everything from a basic white-noise glitch to complex little flashes with flecks of subliminal material in them,” Lennick says — which he did like. “It wasn’t the quality of their effects, per se,” Cronenberg explains, “but I didn’t have to see the actual twitches in context to know that they would have disrupted the film’s pacing. They didn’t gel with the surrounding footage — that’s the main reason they were cut. Michael was very disappointed, but it wouldn’t be true to portray this as him and me being destroyed by budget restrictions. I’ve not regretted their loss either.
 

Their omission no doubt makes the film feel a lot less dated when viewed today. But it’s a shame that this test reel didn’t survive in some form, just to view what might have been.

One special feature present on the Criterion Blu-ray that’s a must watch is Fear On Film, a 26 minute round table discussion between Cronenberg, John Carpenter and John Landis that’s hosted by future filmmaker Mick Garris. This was in 1982 when all three were at the top of their game. Youtube has the piece in 2 parts.

Long live the new flesh.

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I recently stumbled upon a wonderful post-production podcast called Going Postal. Until this, my go-to editing podcast was The Terence and Philip Show by Terence Curren and Philip Hodgetts. Alas, the schedule on that show is somewhat erratic, evening out to approximately one a month, and it always leaves me wanting more. Going Postal fills that gap. It’s been running since May of this year with each episode covering a variety of topics from technology and software news, to interviews with film and television editors, to reviews of current movie releases.

Episode 5 of Going Postal ("Meet or Supermeet?") covers EditFest London 2013 and includes a few cutting room stories from Taxi Driver courtesy of Academy Award winning editor Tom Rolf.

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On the "You talking to me?" scene:

"I had no idea it would take off and become a signature scene in this movie. Because when I saw the dailies, I said, “What do I do with this?” There is no reverse. There was no coverage. Essentially what you saw was almost every frame available to put together. So I had no option. And so when I put it together and showed it to Marty the first time, he went “Yeah, it works.” And I said, “What’s he talking about? It doesn’t work.” I felt no confidence in that scene."
 

He went on to speak about the repeat action from the same sequence:

"There’s a repeat. When he turns around. And then we go back and we do it again. That was Marty. That was not me. I said, “It’s going to look like a mistake, Marty.” Which, to me, it did look like a mistake. But it’s now part and parcel of the entire thing. That was strictly his contribution and it was a big one, obviously."
 

That repeat action was a huge deal for me when I first saw Taxi Driver. It was one of the first times I can remember becoming consciously aware of - and excited by - the power of film editing. It did look like a mistake. But not a mistake by the filmmakers. It looked like Travis Bickle’s mistake. In that moment, it felt like the character had taken control of the film itself.

There’s a nice write-up on EditFest’s conversation between Tom Rolf and Anne Coates here. And Premiumbeat offers a concise overview of the event with a few additional Tom Rolf quotes:

The most important talent to develop in the cutting room is diplomacy. Never hold anyone’s idea up to ridicule. Try anything and be ready to fight for what you think is right.