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.