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The advantage of writing and editing is that at any time you can stop what you're doing and walk around the block, or have lunch, or take a phone call, or go dig in the garden and think. At any particular moment, the editor has the freedom to interact or not interact with the material. You can alwa…

You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It'…

It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on it…

M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you…

As I began to eliminate things, I would have the feeling that I couldn't remove a certain scene, because it so clearly expressed what we were after. But after hesitating, I'd cut it anyway … forced to because of the length of the film. Then I'd have this paradoxical feeling that by taking away some…