Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing

It's imposing my choice over yours, having the arrogance to say this is better than that. It's being a critic. It's an art form you're interpreting. I'm imposing my taste. It's a matter of choices and keeping it straight in your head. It's like having an enormous picture puzzle-1,000 pieces will make it look perfect but they give you 100,000. It's going through all of the pieces, to try to get the best parts. That's what editing is.

If a director expresses likes and dislikes about various takes while screening rushes, that helps, but no editor really likes it if they get too specific and say, "Cut from here to here at such and such a point." That's the sign of an inexperienced director. The director should pick the editor's brain by giving the editor a free hand to do a first cut. You can always change it, but it's very possible that the editor can come up with a better version than the director actually had foreseen in his mind.

Young editors will make matches on a small movement, you can't do that. You've got to make it when somebody does a broad movement. They can have a wig on and you won't know it. In Victor Victoria there was a scene where Julie Andrews has dinner with Jim Garner. She puts a cigar in her mouth and he lights it. Then we cut because she's going to cough and we wanted to be in a close-up for that. In one cut she had the cigar in her fingers and in the other cut she had it in her mouth. It was a had cut and I never saw it because of other movement in the scene. One day one of the sound fellows came to me and said, "Would it worry you if she had the cigar in her mouth now?" He was being very careful because he didn't want me to get upset with him. I said, "It would worry me to death." He said, "That's what you got." I ran to the cutting room and I couldn't believe my eyes, Blake and I never saw it. It's the secret of movement. You have to learn to recognize when you try a cheat and you get knocked out of your own seat, that it's not going to work and you can't get away with it-but you'd be surprised how much you can get away with.

In High Society the cutting seemed minimal. You used a lot of master shots; was there a lot of coverage?
A lot of the material that you were looking at in High Society was not covered. Chuck Walters directed it. He didn't print a lot of film, but he was a good director and did well with people. He rehearsed quite a bit. Because of the quality of the story and the music, it carried out pretty well. He rarely shot close-ups. In a picture like High Society, which is a people picture, not an action-filled picture, Chuck Walters played out many scenes in full shots or two shots and they played. He never went in and made close-ups. That's a pet theory of mine. I say to the younger directors that the thing to do is work on a scene and get a performance; never mind about how you are going to cover it and how it's going to get cut. Take Billy Wilder, who camera-cuts. He will stage and shoot a scene in such a way that the important action is taking place near the camera all the time; it's all on one piece of film. Then he'll cut to somebody over here, start a whole new thing and bring them over to join that person. It's all in the staging, isn't it? Another director may stage it differently.

All people who start to make movies know they can't photograph a scene, score it, write it, art direct, or set-decorate it, but they all suddenly become editors. There are some people who don't do that. They let the editor do his work; that makes the editing process a little more interesting and challenging. You're constantly dealing in personalities, politicking with them, ingratiating yourself, liking people, disliking people, trying to find compatibility. Those are all important parts of editing a film.

Does it bother you when directors try to take credit for the editor's work?
In trade papers you see constantly that such and such a director is now cutting his latest film and that always drives me up the wall. I always say, "Isn't there an editor on that film?" In the last picture that I worked on, there was an item quoting Bob Wise, bless his heart, who said, "I am now working with my editor on Rooftops."

I didn't rate one picture better than the other. You put your whole heart and soul into what you're doing at that moment.

I said to Spencer, "I've got an idea. The motion picture camera will be locked off, steel riveted to the stage floor so nobody can move it. Next to you we'll have one of those old-fashioned cameras with the big plate behind it and an artist who will sketch you. I'm only going to shoot your face, it will be so effective if we can see your face changing. There will be a long make-up table, all the pieces for your changes will be laid out and you'll be in a barber chair with wheels." Spencer was getting so excited. We went to see the director, Victor Fleming, and he said, "Harold, Spencer and I have faith in you, go ahead and do it. You have to go up and see Victor Saville, he's the producer." Saville said, "Young man, you're just the film editor on this picture, this is none of your goddamn business and I'm going to have you fired!" So I left the lot and went home. My wife Zelda said, "What are you doing home?" I said, "I've been fired." Now the phone rings and it's the assistant director and he says, "We hear you're not on the lot, stick by the phone." Fleming canceled the day's shooting, he had Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and Spencer Tracy on the set-that's an expensive day. He and Spencer Tracy went up to see Louis B. Mayer and they said, "We want Harold to do it, it's the only way, or else we have to do it the old way with the cutaways." Louis B. Mayer picked up the phone, called Ben Goetz at the London Studio and said, "Call Victor Saville and tell him you have a picture that's in bad trouble over there and that he's got to go to London tomorrow morning."

Steven Spielberg is an editor's director. So is Adrian Lyne. The early directors like George Cukor shot a nice frame and stayed on great actors. They said, "Action," they would go, and then say, "Cut." The editor takes the scissor and cuts the slates off, but the director has locked himself in and it better be good. Today, people are not going to sit there and languish over a hunk of film, even in a drama. They want energy, something that's going to motivate them. A good angle change will do that; you need pieces. That's why the editor today is more important than he was years ago, because we have more footage to work with. I hope all of the directors I work with are editor's directors by the end of the shoot, because I'm always suggesting other pieces that hopefully will make it better. It may be good, but if we can make it better by picking up pieces here and there, let's do it. After a director is through directing on the set, why shouldn't he come into the editing room and still direct? If you have enough angles and film coverage, you're not limiting options; you're increasing them. So the director can come into the editing room and still change things. You've got to have coverage for that. Any director who gets enough coverage to protect himself is an editor's director.

Do you have any theories on how to cut action scenes like this? Are there basic principles?
Yes, I do. The man who produced Ben Hur and King Solomon's Mines, Sam Zimbalist, was one of the greatest editors of action sequences that I have ever known. I learned things from him which through the years have held me in good stead, so that I could put an action scene together, assuming that I had the proper material to work with. It's got to be dramatized with the actors. You've got to hook the audience by making them pull for or against something. That's dramatization and that's the secret. It's having conflict between two people; that's a very important element in entertainment. You just don't want to look at a thing blandly. In the chariot race, it's just a bunch of chariots running around the track, but you had elements there. First of all, you have two men who were great, great friends and became great, great enemies. Then you had the sheik up in the stands and he brought the humor and the counterpoint which made that such a great sequence.
For the stampede in King Solomon's Mines you were involved with people in-danger, we were worried and concerned for them. Every time an animal jumped, it made you worry a little bit, as opposed to putting the camera on and seeing animals running through the jungle without somebody being in danger. If you can introduce that element in your sequence and dramatize it with intercutting the proper way, then you've really got something good going and that's what you have to strive for. It takes years to learn to do that.