That said, on their own, directors are useless. They can hire the actors and shoot the footage. But what happens after? What use is raw footage without an editor?
Every director worth their salt will tell you that a movie is made in the editing bay. Editors are the unsung heroes behind every film or TV show you love, the geniuses that make the director’s vision a reality. Consider this. It takes a Hollywood director roughly three months to shoot a movie. Do you know how many hours of footage you can accrue during that period? The first Deadpool has a runtime of 108 minutes.
And yet, they shot a whopping 555 hours of raw footage for the project, which sounds insane. But that is far from unusual. Filmmakers typically shoot three hours of raw footage for every minute of a movie. The more footage you shoot, the more options you have in the editing bay to mold the story into a form that fits your vision.
Studios employ a script supervisor who organizes the raw footage into files, highlighting the shots the director likes. The editor works with the director to assemble the raw footage into a rough cut. This is where they identify the shots they need to adapt the script faithfully, discarding the rest.
A skilled editor can easily turn a comedy into a horror or a drama into a thriller because they have so much footage at their disposal. This is why they collaborate so closely with the director. The director and the studio must agree with the editor’s cut of the film.
Sometimes, a rough cut reveals weaknesses in the narrative, compelling the studio to order reshoots. Ultimately, the studio has the final say. They decide what you see in the cinema. That said, studio producers are helpless without a skilled editor.
Editors will increase the length of a shot to enhance the tension or reduce it significantly to bolster the pace. They know how to switch between combatants in a gunfight to make the action more frenetic. When you watch a movie, it feels like the director shot the scenes in order from start to finish, which is not true. The editor creates that sense of unity and cohesion.
They also build the film’s structure, breaking the story into easily consumable acts and crafting an overall flow that makes the narrative enticing. Did you watch 1917? Everyone praised the film for feeling like a singular 119-minute shot. An editor did that. What about that brutal Frank Castle fight in the second season of Daredevil? The actors acted their hearts out, and so did the stuntmen.
The director captured the action from every conceivable angle. But then he left it to the editors to transform that raw footage into one of the most exciting fights ever seen on the small screen.
Again, you can’t remove the directors from this equation. They create the raw materials by capturing the necessary footage during the production phase. However, without a decent editor to turn those raw materials into gold, a director’s work would go to waste.
So the next time a local director tries to take credit for a film, remind them to thank their editor. Also, if you are hoping to pursue a career in film, don’t limit your options to directing or acting. Yes, directors and actors get all the glory, but editors are the real MVPs.
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