Not being precious in the edit

While finishing the second trailer for Jesus Christ, Diva, I found a joke near the middle of a longer scene that worked unusually well as a cut.

The joke lands, there is a clean punctuation point, and the trailer can immediately move into a faster sequence of music and action. It creates the kind of cliff I had been thinking about while editing the trailer: establish something, let it land, and get out.

Watching it back made me wonder why the film itself didn’t cut there too.

The original scene continues for almost another two minutes. I like the footage. There are more jokes, little character moments, and things that were fun to shoot. But watching the scene again with that earlier exit in mind made the remaining material feel different. Most of the important information had already been communicated. The scene had made its point.

The additional two minutes weren’t bad. They just weren’t necessarily making the movie better.

That seems like one of the harder things about editing: good footage can still be the footage that needs to go. There is a temptation to protect something because it worked on set, because a joke is funny, or simply because making it required effort. But the finished film doesn’t really care how difficult something was to shoot. It only knows what is on the screen.

Cutting at the joke saves almost two minutes, but more importantly, it creates structure. The scene now ends with punctuation and throws the film directly into the next sequence. What disappears in runtime comes back as momentum.

There is at least one nice consolation to being less precious about footage now: cutting something from a film doesn’t necessarily mean burying it forever.

A deleted joke can become a social clip. A longer interaction can become behind-the-scenes material. Interesting images can become B-roll, a process post, a trailer moment, or something that lives around the film instead of inside it. There are more places for material to go than there used to be.

That makes cutting a little easier.

The job of the edit isn’t to preserve everything that was good. It is to figure out what the film needs, where a scene has finished doing its work, and when moving forward is more useful than staying a little longer.