Cuts and Shadow Cuts

  • While it is true that any film worth making is going to be unique, the conditions under which films are made are so variable that it is misleading to speak about what is “normal”

<<It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could<<

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

    • Schedule
    • Budget
    • Artistic ambition
    • Technical innovation

  • Just considering the length of time it took to complete the film (I was editing picture for one year and spent another year preparing and mixing the sound), it turned out to be the longest post-production of any picture I have worked on, but that may consequently spill some light on what “normal” is, or might be

  • 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:

    • Since the finished film runs just under two hours and twenty-five minutes in length, that gives a ratio of ninety-five to one. That is to say, ninety-five “unseen” minutes for every minute that found its way into the finished product
    • By comparison, the average ratio for theatrical features is around twenty to one
    • Traveling across that ninety-five-to-one landscape was a little like forging through a thick forest, bursting upon open grassland for a while, then plunging into a forest again because there were areas, such as the helicopter sequences, where the coverage was extremely high, and other scenes where the coverage was correspondingly low
    • I think the Colonel Kilgore scenes alone were over 220,000 feet—and since that represents twenty-five minutes of film in the finished product, the ratio there was around one hundred to one
    • But many of the connecting scenes had only a master shot: Francis had used so much film and time on the big events that he compensated with minimal coverage on some of these linking scenes

  • Take one of the big scenes as an example:

    • The helicopter attack on “Charlie’s Point,” where Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is played, was staged as an actual event and consequently filmed as a documentary rather than a series of specially composed shots
    • At the end of one of these shots, unless there had been an obvious problem, the camera positions were changed and the whole thing was repeated. Then repeated again, and then again. They kept on going until I guess, they felt that they had enough material, each takes generating something like 8,000 feet (an hour and a half)
    • No single take was the same as any other—very much like documentary coverage
    • At the end of it all, when the film was safely in the theaters, I sat down and figured out the total number of days that we (the editors) had worked, divided that number by the number of cuts that were in the finished product, and came up with the rate of cuts per editor per day—which turned out to be 1.47. Meaning that, if we had somehow known exactly where we were going at the beginning, we would have arrived there in the same number of months if each of us had made just under one-and-a-half splices per day
    • It was choreography on a vast scale of:
    • Men
    • Machines
    • Cameras
    • Landscape
    • 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

  • Since it takes under ten seconds to make one-and-a-half splices, the admittedly special case of Apocalypse Now serves to throw into exaggerated relief the fact that editing—even on a “normal” film—is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of a path, and that the overwhelming majority of an editor’s time is not spent actually splicing 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

  • This is true for any film with a high shooting ratio, but in the particular case of Apocalypse the effect was magnified by a sensitive subject matter and a daring and unusual structure, technical innovations at every level, and the obligation felt by all concerned to do the very best work they were capable of. And perhaps most of all by the fact that this was, for Francis, a personal film, despite the large budget and the vast canvas of the subject. Regrettably few films combine such qualities and aspirations

  • 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

<<A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: the cut—the moment of transition from one shot to the next—something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all<<