Part of the job of an editor is to crawl their way inside the mind of the director, understand what they’re after and help bring that dream back into reality.
And maybe, if they’re lucky, set up a little birdhouse in their soul and build one of those career-spanning collaborations we all aspire to.
But how do you get inside the mind of a director, and what’s it like in there?
Well, one way is to understand what directors are like in general and then apply those lessons to your director specifically.
Everybody else on a crew goes from one director’s set to another. A director, meanwhile, lives in a lonely world of his own devising, reinventing filmmaking according to his unique obsessions, eccentricities, and fetishes.
Ed Zwick, Director
In this short review, I’ll share some of my favourite lessons for film editors from the book and offer a few thoughts on why you should read the whole thing too!
My Biggest Takeaway
The most valuable thing I took away from the book was a fresh appreciation for and empathy towards those who take on the mantle of director. It’s a tough calling.
So if you take away nothing else, pause to ask yourself these three questions about your current director:
What is behind their passion for this project?
And where do we overlap on this?
What pressures are they currently facing?
And how can I empathise with those?
How do our personality traits converge/diverge (or conflict/counterbalance)?
And how do I EQ those to bring about a harmonious working relationship?
Ed Zwick is (as you’d hope) a great writer and so the book is honest, engaging, unabashed and spills the dirt on what it’s really like to live and work in the world of show business in Hollywood.
It’s a page-turning mix of personal memoir, honest appraisal of success and failure and all of the sausage-grinding work it takes to make in Hollywood.
What’s immediately obvious is that being a director, and one who sustains a career for over 40 years, is hard.
You face pressure from all sides; from the studio and producers on the budget, from the actors on the script and performance and their fragile egos, from the crew and the weather and the creative muse, from audiences and critics, and ultimately from yourself – to make a hit, or at least a movie you still like at the end of it.
Getting anything made is a Sisyphean struggle…
He elaborates:
“I send the script to a movie star’s manager, who says, “I love the script for him.” It means her assistant read it. When the movie star’s “covering agent,” says, “I love the script for him,” it means the actor is technically available and needs an offer to read it.
When the movie star’s “responsible agent,” says, “My client loves the script”, it means the actor has notes. When the movie star’s lawyer says the same thing, it means he’s going to make the negotiations as painful as possible. When the movie star himself says, “I love the script.” It means he wants to know who is going to rewrite it.
And then comes the process with the studio. When the creative executive says, “We’re gonna make this movie,” it means she’ll try to get the VP to read it. When the VP says he’ll make it, it means he’s read positive coverage. When the EVP says it, it means she’ll take credit for finding it if the president of production likes it.
When the president of production says it, it means he needs to tell the CEO which actor is starring in it. And at last, when the CEO says, “We’re gonna make this movie,” it means it’ll get made if he still has a job in six months.” – Ed Zwick
So when you walk onto the production on day 1, it’s probably on the heels of a multi-year effort from the director to get to this point. So tread lightly and humbly and empathise with everything else the director has faced and is now facing, just so you can sit there and edit.
Align yourself with their struggles, and maybe you’ll make a friend for life.
Directors and Their Editors
One of my favourite parts of the book are portions that touch on anything to do with Post Production and working with editor Steve Rosenblum, who cut most of Zwick’s feature films.
“It’s hard to believe Glory was the first feature that my friend Steve Rosenblum ever edited. He received an Oscar nomination for it and has cut just about everything I’ve done since…
To Steve there’s no such thing as an ‘Editor’s assembly’. He believes the process is dialogical – that cutting the film is a conversation, an exchange between the way I had shot it and the way he sees fit to cut it.
He feels it’s important the he shows me the film in ways I might never have considered. He’s fierce in his convictions, occasionally wilful and contrary, but always willing to submit to my prerogative as the director once he’s had his say.”
Do Nothing
The director was afraid to tell the headstrong young actor his reaction shots sucked.
The editor said “Fuck it” and invited him into the cutting room.
“You look like a zombie,” he said, “I don’t care if you’re thinking about nothing, at least move your eyes.”
The actor is now a big star. The editor got nominated.
Hold Your Tongue
“I learned the painful lesson to wait a few seconds after saying “Cut!” before giving direction.
Too often, the soundman hadn’t yet turned off the machine, and for months to come, I was tortured by the sound of my wheedling, fatuous voice saying,
“That was great, but let’s go ahead, and this time…”
10 Seconds Makes All The Difference
In terms of stories about the power of editing in the movie making process one of my favourites is when Ed Zwick tells a story about audience testing Legends of the Fall with a preview audience, and how the 10 seconds of editing turned it all around.
“When Tristan and Susannah meet late at night in Ludlow’s study and kiss, we could hear the audience going south… Steve turned to me and said, “Oops.”
We went back to the cutting room that night. By trimming no more than 10 seconds, (so they no longer kiss) we utterly changed the audience’sattitude toward the protagonist…
When we previewed the following week with this as the only change, the audience’s embrace of the movie was unequivocal. The scores were through the roof.
Ten weeks to do a first cut, ten seconds to do the final.”
I could go on with plenty of other interesting stories from Ed Zwick’s extensive career in film and TV as explored in Hits, Flops and Other Illusions but you should just go out and read it yourself.
