From left: Scorsese and Schoonmaker on 1970’s Woodstock; Schoonmaker’s second Oscar win, for The Aviator; the duo in 3-D glasses on the set of Hugo.

“It’s really Marty’s vision,” she says, using a jog wheel to move the film forward and back like a DJ cueing a record. “Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he’s an editor himself—we cut together. It means he’s constantly thinking about my problems while he’s filming. It’s wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don’t.” Schoonmaker feels so strongly about this that she has repeatedly tried to give Scorsese the Oscar she won for Raging Bull, “but he won’t take it,” she says in a resigned tone. (via Thelma Schoonmaker, The Woman Behind Martin Scorsese - Read More on ELLE.com)

Editor Matt Newman, Ryan Gosling, and Nicolas Winding Refn.

“My father was an editor. My mother was a photographer. I was brought up on an editing table. So images and editing them together has really been the basis of my understanding of film since I was little. Matt Newman, who edited Drive, also edited Bronson and Valhalla Rising with me. He’s a very important collaborator creatively for me. I shoot my films chronologically because it gives me a way to see the movie unfold in front of me in its purest form. It gives me a way to change things. It also gives the actors a little pressure, because there’s no safe haven, anything can go. When I edit the movie the first thing me and Matt do is cut the film into inconsistent, non-chronological storytelling. A completely incoherent structure, just to see what it feels like to turn everything on its head. Then you suddenly begin to discover what you can do — for example, starting a language that jumps in time. For example the dinner scene cuts together with the crooks in the park and him stealing a car. What you’re actually suggesting as a director is, “Is this happening or not?” without making a conscious decision of whether this is happening or not, which, going back to the Grimm’s Fairy Tale nature of pure fantasy, adds to the dreamlike aspect.” - Nicolas Winding Refn.

With a theatrical film, particularly one in which the audience is fully engaged, the screen is not a surface, it is a magic window, sort of a looking glass through which your whole body passes and becomes engaged in the action with the characters on the screen. If you really liked a film, you’re not aware that you are sitting in the cinema watching a movie. - Walter Murch

Editor Jim Helton on Blue Valentine’s end credits:

Let me first start off by saying that I have known Derek Cianfrance for a very long time. My friend Steve Hidinger and I actually created the title sequence for his first film, Brother Tied, back in 1998. That title sequence was all done on a dual gate 16mm optical printer at the University of Colorado in a closet inside a condemned archeology (that building no longer exists). We learned from a true master of that machine, experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon. He taught us about combining elemental and abstract images such as fire and water with more representational images through a process that he called bi-packing which involves placing two strips of film on top each other and re-photographing them which creates quite a different effect from a standard super-imposition. It is a tedious frame by frame process, but it can create pure magic. If you like the Blue Valentine title sequence, everything about it starts with Phil Solomon -check out his work. Solomon’s sound was also a huge influence; nostalgic, distant, reverberating.

Other giant inspirations for me that are a bit more obvious are Saul Bass and Maurice Binder as well as the Goldfinger titles by Robert Brownjohn. I collected their work as a college student and would sit around and watch them with my friends Joey Curtis (co-writer of Blue Valentine) and Derek Cianfrance. That was our idea of a party back then! That and some cheap Paisano wine, wonderful food, and long pink summer sunsets in Boulder.

The thing I loved about those filmmaker’s title sequences was their ability to tell an abstract story and embed images within abstractions. The abstractions seemed to create something less logical and more emotional or even poetic while at the same time leaving space for the titles (and even highlighting them). Those qualities are very central to the creation of the Blue Valentine title sequence.

I’ll start with the first layer - the fireworks. I was editing Blue Valentine alongside Ron Patane and we were just trying to get it done for screenings so we were very focused on the narrative flow of the film. However, on a late night or two, I made some room for abstraction and delved into Andrij Parekh’s beautiful fireworks footage and discovering rhythms in his camera work and the exploding light. He and Derek shot fireworks somewhere near Scranton, PA on July 4th of 2009… they threw images out of focus and sometimes even took the lens off. The film ends with a fireworks scene so it was always going to be fireworks. In the first rough cuts of the film it was just that, an abstract montage of fireworks. My first passes on that footage were all silent because I believe that if you can make something flow without music it will definitely flow with music and then you will actually have two pieces of “music” playing in harmony together. 

Read the rest of the process behind the end credits at Art of the Title

“She taught me to be a general––and if there was anyone who could teach you to be a general, it was Dede. She was a very powerful force. She also taught me to cut with my gut. Editing is much more an intuitive process than an intellectual one.  For a young editor—and it’s true for writers, painters, musicians—you have to learn to follow that inner voice.  Dede also taught me that performance is king, and to never let your audience get ahead of your story.  I had all these things drilled into me, along with a list of other people she’s mentored.  We all became storytellers.” - editor Craig McKay on Dede Allen.

Editors are the quiet heroes of movies and I like it that way. We have a very private relationship with our directors, most often conducted in very dark rooms. I’ve been with Quentin Tarantino since his very first movie and have edited every single thing he’s done since then.

We don’t work at the studios. Quentin insists on renting little private houses in LA and converting them into edit suites for the duration. It’s very civilised and enabled me to work through both my pregnancies – yes, my babies had Tarantino movies played to them in the womb, but they seem to have come out OK.

I met Quentin when he was interviewing for an editor – a cheap one. I got in touch and he sent me this script for a thing called Reservoir Dogs and I just thought it was amazing. It floored me. Scorsese was a hero of mine, especially as he used a female editor in Thelma Schoonmaker, and this script just had that tone. Later, when I found out Harvey Keitel was attached – he was the first person Quentin had approached – I was more determined to get this job than ever. I was hiking up in Canada on a remote mountain in Banff when I saw a phone box and I stopped to call LA and they confirmed I’d got the gig. I let out a yell that echoed around the mountain.

Quentin is the same now as he was then. He’s encyclopaedic, passionate, electrifying. We just clicked creatively. Editing is all about intuiting the tone of a scene and you have to chime with the director. It’s a rare, intense sort of a relationship and if it ain’t broke, you wouldn’t want to fix it. We’ve built up such trust that now he gives me the dailies and I put ‘em together and there’s little interference.

The thing with Tarantino is the mix-and-match. We do study other films and other scenes but only to get the vibe we need for our scene – like in Kill Bill when Uma [Thurman]’s facing off the 5.6.7.8’s and we looked at some Sergio Leone close-ups, to see how we wanted to cut that scene. Our style is to mimic, not homage, but it’s all about recontextualising the film language to make it fresh within the new genre. It’s incredibly detailed. There’s nothing laissez-faire about Quentin’s approach, but I know his film voice, always have done.

Music is one of his obsessions, so I’ve cut a lot of great scenes to music. He’s very specific and will play music on set all day to get everyone in the mood. I think he goes to sleep with his iPod on when we’re filming, because the music becomes the rhythm of his directing. Oddly, I don’t cut to music. I just make the scene work emotionally and dramatically, and then Quentin will come in and lay the track over it and we’ll tweak it to the beats.

That scene with Uma Thurman and John Travolta dancing in Jack Rabbit Slim’s diner in Pulp Fiction was unusual in that it was filmed to playback, to the actual Chuck Berry song. It was easy to cut in that respect, and oh my God, it was glorious. We chatted about using the long shot, the medium close-ups, and when to focus on the hands. Most editing is painstaking but this was an exciting scene to edit because it had momentum of its own and an obvious magic – it’s Travolta, dancing in front of me.

Watching Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s work, I learned how to collapse time in action but still push characters through a scene. It’s a trick to give the illusion it’s all real; that’s become crucial to us because the Tarantino thing is to make the mundane feel very spicy. It’s the illusion that time is ticking away. It’s all about tension, so you follow the emotional arc of a character through a scene, even if, as in the opening of Inglourious Basterds, they’re just pouring a glass of milk or stuffing their pipe. We’re very proud of that scene – it might be the best thing we’ve ever done. (via Sally Menke on editing all of Quentin Tarantino’s films | Film | The Observer)

Anne V. Coates (seated at right) cameos as one of Howard Hughes’s many editors in The Aviator.