Cuts and Shadow Cuts

Apocalypse Now, qualifies as the cinematic equivalent of ice and steam, by almost any criteria...

- Schedule
- Budget
- Artistic ambition
- Technical innovation

One of the reasons for that length was simply the amount of film that had been printed...

1,250,000 feet, which works out to be just over 230 hours

The average ratio for theatrical features

Twenty to one

Once Francis said, “Action,” the filming resembled actual combat...

- Eight cameras were turning simultaneously
- Some cameras were on the ground and some were in helicopters
- Each camera was loaded with a thousand-foot (eleven-minute) roll of film

The more film there is to work with, of course, the greater the number of...

- Pathways that can be considered
- Possibilities compound upon each other and consequently demand more time for evaluation

For every splice in the finished film there were probably fifteen “shadow” splices, which were...

- Made
- Considered
- Undone or lifted from the film

But even allowing for that, the remaining eleven hours and fifty-eight minutes of each working day were spent in activities that, in their various ways, served to clear and illuminate the path ahead of us...

- Screenings
- Discussions
- Rewinding
- Rescreenings
- Meetings
- Scheduling
- Filing trims
- Note-taking
- Bookkeeping
- Lots of plain deliberative thought