Scenes 27-1 to 27-5
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Commentary
We had some technical difficulties in the scene that meant we couldn’t get the lighting effect in every shot we wanted it in. There were a few minor problems. There always are. This was the one and only instance where when we got into the editing room, we just didn’t have what we wanted. For whatever reason, and I’m not entirely sure why it happened, but the shots here just didn’t quite come out, something was off. This is where you’re glad you have a good editor. This is going to happen, and this is where you roll up your sleeves and go to work.
I happen to love editing. I like to put the movie together like legos. I like the meticulous choices you can make that have far reaching consequences. I like working on the timing and pacing until it becomes like music. I like the discoveries you can make when working in the cutting room—finding things that you never realized were there, discovering new juxtapositions and affinities that were previously hidden from you. In every stage of the process, you get to see the movie from a new angle, and it teaches you a lot, so I like working, finally, on the movie itself—it’s a great angle.
A lot of the time however, because I plan the whole movie out so obsessively in my head, we’re just executing what I had planned. Mostly everything went as I thought it would, but sometimes what I planned just didn’t work. That’s really the fun part of editing. It forces you to discover something and you get to make the film better right then and there, for the first time, right before your eyes. Well, the whole last scene was like that. Gary and I cut it just about every which way. We shot a lot more than you see in the movie, but in the end we discovered that simplest was, in this case, best. I like to think of this as an elegant movie. It’s a simple movie. A lot happens in eighteen minutes, but it happens mostly by not happening. It could be a feature, but it isn’t crammed into a short. It’s elliptical. This ending is simple, like the movie. And, I hope, that it and the movie are also eloquent in their simplicity.