Once you’ve completed the assembly and screened it for the Director and the Producers, you move from working on the film on your own, to a collaboration with the Director on the Director’s Cut. This may take the form of spending each and every day sat alongside the Director, working your way through the cut. Or you may spend most of your time working on your own, screening cuts for the Director, discussing the film and making notes, but with the Director leaving you to do the physical editing on your own.
Generally, while the assembly is a recreation of the script on screen, this stage begins (and sometimes ends too), with recreating what the director has in their head at the end of the shoot. The script rarely gets looked at beyond this point, because while during the assembly you were using the script as a blueprint, the Director’s Cut is a combination of what’s in the Director’s head, and an attempt to solve some of the problems with the film.
While some directors have a very clear idea of how they want scenes to be played, which angles they want to be on for certain moments, others shoot with the intention of finding an ideal way to play things in the edit.
They Release Director’s Cuts, Don’t They?
A quick note on what you may think of when you hear the term “Director’s Cut”. Obviously many people associate it with a version of the film which exists on DVD/Blu-Ray as a sort-of alternate version of the film to the “Theatrical Cut” which was released in cinemas.
This “Director’s Cut” is largely a marketing device and can, but doesn’t necessarily represent the Director’s “ideal cut” of the film. It may be that the studio mandated a maximum run time and changes had to be made to get down to that duration, or that there were disagreements between how certain elements should be played and the Director, not having contractual final cut, had to bow down to the Execs demands.
In terms of Post-Production, the Director’s Cut is their opportunity to work with the material (and the Editor), to create something which adheres close to their initial vision for the project, and that attempts to tackle as many issues with the story or performances as possible. The Director and Editor will often do multiple passes on the film in the allotted time. Some scenes will barely be touched while others may be completely pulled apart and reconstructed if it’s considered that the scene as scripted or shot isn’t working. Some scenes may play largely as they were in the assembly, although Directors will generally spend time looking at take choices with the Editor even if this is the case.
Working practices around the world are of course different, but generally speaking, Director’s are left alone to work with the Editor on their first pass of the film or episode. In the US for instance, Director’s get minimum amounts of time per Directors Guild of America Agreements (10 weeks for features or 6 weeks for a low-budget feature, with TV varying from 4-25 days depending on the type of show and episode duration).
Whether or not the Producers will watch the Assembly or give notes to the Director I think depends entirely on the individual working relationships, but as far as I know, most Producers tend to give little more than general thoughts before seeing the Director’s Cut.
Fixing Problems
A big part of this stage is fixing issues that become apparent once you watch the cut. Sometimes there are script issues that either weren’t solved or weren’t apparent on the page. Sometimes the shape of the film feels “wrong”, the structure is confusing, or the drama and tension seeps out during a certain section, or it takes far too long to get from one moment to another.
On one feature I edited, it became clear in watching the assembly that the structure of the middle of the film didn’t work. We had a key sequence that came quite early in the film and we didn’t really feel like we’d gotten to know the characters enough by then, then after this sequence, we had a very long and very slow build-up to the finale of the film.
In order to solve the problem, we basically took all the scenes from the middle of the film that were focused on character and sub-plots, and moved them ahead of our key early sequence. This meant that the first 40% or so of the film was now about getting to know our characters, exploring the dynamics and conflicts between them, which also strengthened our big sequence because now there were a lot more things in play once we got there. The restructure also meant that the section after the big sequence motored on nicely towards the finale because now we had stripped it back to central story scenes and nothing more.
Pacing is always going to be an issue at this stage because the cut will likely be quite similar to the assembly, but what you’re looking for here is to use your creative intuition and storyteller’s skills to identify if and where the overall shape of your film is not ideal, and figure out ways to solve those problems.
The Director’s Vision
The second key part of this stage is to create something that fits with how the Director envisioned the film. Although during Pre-Production and Production everybody is working off the script as the blueprint of the film (including the editor building the Assembly, aka Script Cut), really, the film exists in the Director’s head.
Depending on the Director’s preferences, the budget, and the type of film, various visual guides will have been created from Pitch Deck to help attract financing for the film, to series bibles for a TV show that might cover everything from visual style and tone, to music and costume design. All of these are put together as a combination of communicating the Director’s vision to the rest of the cast and crew, and giving them the opportunity to develop and refine that vision, working out the details of how it will be implemented.
As the Editor, you are in the unique position of accompanying and aiding the Director in finally transferring that vision into a tangible, living and breathing film. This can be both a blessing and a curse. The Director has probably spent months preparing to shoot, planning each scene and shot, discussing with the DP, Costume Designer, Production Designer, Assistant Director, Actors, and of course many more exactly what they want from the scene. Then, they arrive on set and the location has been moved, or a piece of grip equipment is unavailable, or an actor is uncomfortable playing the scene a certain way and all the planning goes out of the window.
Later, when the Director sits down with the Editor and look at the rushes for the scene, they struggle not to think about the things that went wrong, and how different the footage is to what they were imagining. One of the many facets of your job as an Editor is to ignore all the “if onlys”, and create something which does what the director had intended without some of the bits they thought they needed, or to create something new and different, that’s stronger and better than what was originally planned.
Most editors will stay away from the set during the shoot, simply because they don’t really want to be influenced by what can sometimes be a chaotic process. The editor, much like the audience, doesn’t really care what happened on set, they care what’s happening on screen.
Building a Relationship with the Director
This stage of the film is where you really build your relationship with the Director. Although you may have discussed things with them previously, viewed assembled scenes together, or they might even have spent time with you in the cutting room during the shoot, this is the first time you have their (mostly) undivided attention. It’s also the stage where the film is furthest from what they imagined and hoped it would be, and it’s on you and them to turn the film into something they feel comfortable showing to other people.
There is a lot of pressure on the Director at this stage. Especially if it’s early in their career, they’ll probably feel that the film HAS to succeed, otherwise they’ll never get the money to make another one. This can manifest in various ways. Some Directors can resort to micro-managing the edit, looking to finesse down to the frame before the bigger things are working. They can be overly tense, worried about all the things that need fixing, and the finite time which is available to fix. If you’ve never worked with them before they may not trust you yet, which in a more general sense means that they feel they need to be involved in everything, unable to let you experiment with trying to solve a problem in a way which is not so obvious.
You can find out about the other steps in the Offline Edit process in our article on The 5 Stages of the Edit.