So you’ve reached the final stage of the edit. The film is almost done. You’ve fixed as many problems as you can, agonized over feedback, and built up a rapport with the Director through weeks and months that have tested and stretched all your skills – and perhaps you – to breaking point. And that’s it, right? Just a little bit more polish and you can lock the cut and put your feet up? Not exactly, because it’s at the fine cut stage where the editor really earns their money.
It’s not over yet
This might sound ridiculous, but I do honestly believe that the first and last stages of the edit are perhaps the most important, even though they are the steps that are sometimes brushed over. Without figuring out what film you’re trying to make, and what the Director has in their head, the edit itself is going to be unproductive torture as you struggle to make sense of the Director’s comments and they struggle to make sense of your scenes. If you understand what the central idea of the film is, every decision you make in the edit can be about shaping the film to meet that objective.
Once you get to this final stage, the film should be the strongest it’s ever been, but it’s all too easy to sit back, admire the product of your hard work, and call it a day. What almost every film needs at this stage is a good hard shake so that all the unnecessary bits fall out, leaving a streamlined, perfectly engineered story-telling machine. And it’s your job as the editor to give it that shake.
Be brutal
At this point, you’re looking to step back and look at the film as a whole. You’re also looking to be as brutal about the film as an audience will be. Now is the time to really, really look at every single moment in the film, and ask yourself, “do we actually need this?”. Every scene, every beat, every shot, every line of dialogue. What happens if you take it out? Does the film miss it?
After all the time you and the Director have spent making the most of every moment, making sure that everything lands, making sure that we feel everything we need to feel, the film will be better and stronger than the assembly, but it will probably feel a little slow. It’s easy for the Director and Editor to luxuriate in what they’ve created, but remember that the audience will constantly be looking ahead, wondering what the answers are to the questions the story has been posing.
Challenge your assumptions
As you work through the Directors and Execs cuts, you remove the sections you and the Director don’t like, or don’t think work, you improve everything else, and you begin to come to terms with the flaws that you can’t fix. These things are good in terms of improvements to the film, and in terms of your psychological well-being in what can be a challenging job, but it can also lull you into feeling like you’ve done the work you need to, and that the film is almost there.
Even when you show the cut to friends, partners, and collaborators, all but the most honest will be polite, and will couch their comments in praise (the famous “shit sandwich”). You’ll hear people saying “this scene could be a bit faster”, and you’ll probably go “yeah, yeah, but I’m not sure what to cut”. Believe me, there is always something that can, and probably should be cut.
“Don’t get seduced by your own stuff. Don’t get high on your own supply.”
James Cameron
Find the redundancies
Redundancies are what you’re looking for here. How can you tell the story in the quickest, cleanest, most economical way possible? The audience will almost always be ahead of you, and the more laboured your telling of the story, the more frustrated they will get.
That’s not to say that telling the story fast is best, because then you’ll lose all the moments that make the audience care about the characters. Your job as the editor involves making sure that the bits which should be slow are slow, and the bits that should be fast are fast, and that ideally, you have a mix of the two. You should be telling the story at the right speed, but that right speed is probably a little faster than you think.
What you’re looking for are any moments that are unnecessary. Have we had that emotional beat before? Is there a similar joke elsewhere? Does it take too long for something to unfold? Is there a step that’s not needed?
Trim the fat
Work your way through the film with a fine-tooth comb. Look at every scene and continually ask yourself “do we need this moment?”. Even if you think that maybe you do, try just taking it out, because there’s a good chance that if there’s doubt, you won’t actually need it or miss it at all. Then once you get to the end, watch the film all the way through, making notes on anything that needs to go back in, and on other moments that you can lose.
Getting in as late as possible, and leaving as early as you can is a sensible approach to a scene. And this is what you’re trying to do at this stage. You’ve spent the rest of the edit making things work, fixing problems, making sure things make sense, now is the time to focus on the pacing.
Losing running time
It is funny how much you end up losing at this stage. The run-time of your film has probably either been slowly going down during the edit, or staying roughly the same as every chunk you lose is counter-balanced by drawing out other moments elsewhere.
Now you’ll rapidly lose minutes, as you start focusing on every moment that was written, shot, put in the assembly and then has sat there throughout the edit, unobtrusive, inoffensive and largely anonymous, until you finally look at it during the fine cut and say “actually, I don’t think we do need this”. And there goes another shot, another pause, or another line of dialogue onto the cutting room floor.
For information on the preceding stages of the film edit, check out How many stages does a Film Edit Have?