I am very respectful of the relationship between the director and the DP. I have never inserted myself into the discussion of the look of the film, but I have, of course, requested specific shots.

Having worked consistently with Michael Almereyda (on Happy
Here and Now and Hamlet) and Paul Schrader (including
Auto Focus and Light Sleeper), editor Kristina
Boden maintains an open mind when any new project comes
up-even after a very full decade of experience.

If someone wants to be an editor, I would tell them to cut anything and everything that they can-whether it's their parents' wedding videos or a music video for their friend's garage band. Just get in and cut as much as possible.

Every editor's career path is different. For Jeff Betancourt,
it all started with a phone call. Still a student when he was hired to cut his
first film, Miguel
Arteta's Star Maps, Betancourt has gone on to make quite a name for himself
in the indie film world, working again with Arteta on both Chuck & Buck and

The Good Girl. From the cutting room of the comedy Harold and Kumar
go to White
Castle, Betancourt spoke with MM about his career and The
United States of Leland.

Show the rough cut every week or two to a bunch of people who haven't read the script. Then listen to their feedback about what isn't working and what isn't clear. It may be painful to hear the critiques, but get over it. Then take all the info back to the edit room and figure out what to do.

He's a veteran of such indie classics as Laws of Gravity and Star Maps.
But sometimes, locked away in the cutting room, unaware of the outside world
and surrounded by fiction and fantasy, Tom McArdle says "you do whatever you
can to keep things feeling real." Here he discusses his latest project, Tom McCarthy's
critically acclaimed The Station Agent.

If I'm lucky enough to choose, and I am at the moment, I'm going to choose what I like. That just sort of makes sense.

One might have a tough time envisioning a path to Hollywood from a Connecticut
department store, but that's exactly where editor Steve Rosenblum's
improbable career began. With 20 years and more than a dozen feature films
under his belt, Rosenblum's latest effort, The Last Samurai, is about
to hit theaters. He recently spoke with MM about his longtime
collaboration with director Edward Zwick and the nature of what he calls
"musical storytelling."

When you first put an assembly together, you put in everything the director shot. You don't try to give it too much shape yet. Then, you attack it in the second cut. So, it's like a first draft of someone's writing.

Just weeks before scoring her second Oscar for Best Editing for The Aviator, editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker made time for a group of film fans--and an MM writer--at Seattle's Scarecrow Video to discuss her craft, collaborations with Scorsese and what it's like to have spent countless hours with the likes of Jake La Motta, Max Cady, Henry Hill and Bill the Butcher.

Nothing is done until it's done. If you're satisfied with something, look at it again.

hen it comes to the craft of motion picture editing, Norman
Hollyn is one of the masters. In addition to his work in the editing
room (both as a sound and film editor), Hollyn's found an entirely separate career
teaching the dos and don'ts of his job. A current professor of film editing as
USC, Hollyn has also taken to the classrooms of UCLA and the American Film Institute—as
well as penned the book The Film Editing Room Handbook: How To Manage The
Near Chaos of the Cutting Room (the title says it all).

This month's Editing "Best Of" includes
thoughts and quotes from some of our most acclaimed editor
interviews: Steve Rosenblum (The Last Samurai),
Tom McArdle (The Station Agent), Jeff Betancourt
(The United States of Leland), Kristina Boden (Auto
Focus), Stephen Mack (Assassination Tango),
Martin Walsh (Chicago), Thelma Schoonmaker (Gangs
of New York), Carol Littleton (E.T.), Jeffrey
Ford (Shattered Glass), Dody Dorn (Memento),
Tim Squyres (Hulk), Mary Sweeney (Mulholland
Drive) and Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia)

Let the eyes guide you. People are watching the eyes of a character. Eyes are also a link to subtext. You can create your own visual conversation between characters as they have [a different] one on the surface.

While he considers himself a composer, it’s hard to ignore John Ottman’s achievements in film editing. But he edits only for director Bryan Singer, whom he met at USC Film School. Ottman has cut all Singer’s films—except for X-Men (due to a scheduling conflict)—including The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, X2 and the upcoming Superman Returns.

Start it as soon as you can and be as thorough as possible before you ever even think about shooting. Any problems before production will only be magnified-and more expensive-to solve once production starts.

USC, UCLA and NYU may still get most of the glory. But when it comes to producing some truly talented—and independent-minded—teams of moviemakers, BYU is giving even the top film schools a run for their money. Following in the footsteps of Neil LaBute and Aaron Eckhart, writer-director Jared Hess and producer-editor Jeremy Coon have taken their collaboration from the mountains of Park City, Utah to theaters across America with this summer’s Napoleon Dynamite.

Film editing is a grueling process. There's no glamour in spending months at a time shut up in a dark room with a director who's spent years struggling to bring their story to the light of day. An aspiring editor has to be realistic about what the process entails: Does the minutiae of editing work actually inspire you? Are you content to rake through countless hours of footage and piece it together into a coherent story? For me, this meticulous, rigorous form of problem-solving is the reward in itself. I get tremendous satisfaction being in the editing room, looking at the same footage over and over-and seeing something different every time.

Fresh off the Sundance screening of Joey Lauren Adams’ Come Early Morning, Meg Reticker’s latest editorial effort and ninth Park City premiere, she sat down with MM to talk about her editorial philosophy, what attracts her to the indie side of the business and why it pays to enjoy the process.

If you're lucky to be cutting the film while they're still shooting, and you feel like you're missing a shot that would help you to make a scene or transition better, go and ask the director for it. Nine times out of 10, they'll be glad you did. Cutaways and establishing shots are usually the first things to get scratched off of the day's shot list as time grinds down, but if you really feel you need something, go for it.

Duddleston has collaborated with some of the independent world's most well-known names, including Gus Van Sant and Lisa Cholodenko. Here, Duddleston speaks with MM about the misconceptions of the profession, how to play the industry game and how it all started with Revenge of the Nerds.

Don't over cut. If a project goes on too long in post it gets a smell on it that won't go away.

From rap music to survivalists, bullet-proof clothing to porn conventions, you name it and moviemaker Chris Tellefsen has probably edited it. Fresh off the success of Capote, and finishing up James Foley’s Perfect Stranger, MM talked to Tellefsen about his place in the independent film movement and why less is always more.

If you're not too tired, it can clear your mind and get some frustrations out. You also won't feel so bad about sitting in front of a computer screen all day long!

Making movies aside, the most important job of any film school student is to forge strong relationships in the business, so that once they’re out in the “real world,” finding a place in the industry won’t be such a daunting task. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 50 film school students were lucky enough to get a little networking help from one of the biggest names in the moviemaking software business when Adobe paired them up with some of the biggest names in the world of editing—for a week-long celebration of all things editing.

You have to choose your battles, so to speak, when doing lower budget films.

There's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time. Barbara Tulliver made her move to the cutting room quite by chance, starting in commercials and eventually assisting directors David Mamet and Milos Forman in the late '80s. When Mamet's regular editor was unavailable to work on Homicide, he offered Tulliver the job. Since then, she's edited a steady stream of films for the prolific director, including last year's State and Main and this year's Heist.

He will talk me through the rushes when we're having screenings at the end of the day but it's either pretty self explanatory; when you look at the material you can see what he's intending.

Though she went to film school to become a director in her own right (which she has accomplished with Me, Myself, I), it was while still in school that Pip Karmel began her collaboration with director Scott Hicks. Since then, she's returned to the editing chair twice -- both times for Hicks -- first to cut Shine, and now for his latest film, Hearts In Atlantis.

You have the courage of your convictions. When you're editing you have to make thousands of decisions every day and if you dither over them all the time, you'll never get anything done.

During her more than 50 years in the craft, editor Anne Coates has been a collaborator and ally to many of the world's finest directors including Sidney Lumet, David Lynch, Milos Forman and Steven Soderbergh. Currently on the set of Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, she talks with MM about her fairytale beginnings with The Red Shoes.

I like to put myself in the position of the audience, because they don't know any of that stuff anyway.

For the past two decades, editor Chris Lebenzon has been averaging about one feature per year, working alongside such directors as Tim Burton, Michael Bay and Tony Scott with such films as Ed Wood, Crimson Tide and Pearl Harbor to his credit. This summer, Lebenzon's most recent work can be seen in Planet of the Apes.

Though he's earned a name for himself working on big-budget action flicks like Rocky V, On Deadly Ground, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Die Hard 2, Robert Ferretti has proven his versatility by being the creative force in the editing room for such off-beat independent fare as Dwight Yoakam's South of Heaven, West of Hell and Timothy Rhys' Men in Scoring Position.