4 François Truffaut on Editing
(From Truffaut by Truffaut, Courtesy Harry N Abrams New York, 1987)
It is Truffaut’s discovery of the need to ‘mistreat’ the film in the cutting room that intrigues me. It is one thing to put the rushes together efficiently. It is quite another to transform the rhythm and form. He was always afraid of boring the audience and perhaps was too severe on some of his films as Yann Dedet suggests, but the willingness to be disrespectful of your own film is a healthy attitude in the edit suite.
I began to get really interested in editing with ‘Shoot the Piano Player’,1 because it was a pretty special film in which there was a great deal of improvisation. At the end of the shooting, after the first rough cut, it gave ...
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