One thing that the audience, and perhaps critics, aren't aware of is that, especially in a film like 'Moonlight,' you always shoot a lot more footage than makes the cut of the film.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm always coming back with too much footage. Most filmmakers do, but I'm always surprised that it keeps happening to me.
You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.
When you're making a bigger movie, you have much bigger set pieces that require more time and more effort and more people.
When you're making a film all by yourself, that requires you to have quite a bit of a point of view in order for anything to get done.
Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.
You can finish the day's filming or the whole shoot or watch something months later and think you could have done it so much better. It's frustrating.
I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.
Other filmmakers make their movies and put them out and that's that. For me, for some odd reason, it goes deeper than that.
After making a movie, maybe you weren't able to shoot many of your ideas, because a movie is only 1 1/2 or two hours long, but TV gives you space to film a lot of things.
We talked a lot about The Best Intentions and how we could shoot certain scenes in different ways with slightly different bits of dialogue and information, so that later on, we could cut the piece more easily and it would still feel complete, even though it was shorter.
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