From everything I’ve mentioned so far, it’s apparent that preplanning extends to the editing phase as well. However, one of the joys of the cutting room is that sometimes the editing can help turn a scene that isn’t working into one that does. This often involves shortening it. Other times, a shift in emphasis can make a scene more interesting. Because movies are physically larger than life-size, they tend to make the point of a scene or character clearer sooner. In Daniel, Daniel is searching for some sane explanation of the cataclysms that have overtaken his life: his parents’ executions in Sing Sing and the mental collapse of his sister. There were two scenes where Daniel visits his sister in a psychiatric hospital. The second scene, where he carries his now catatonic sister around the room, wasn’t as moving as I’d hoped. I eventually realized that nothing was wrong with the scene. The problem lay in the way the first scene between them had been edited: the scene had emphasized him. As a result, the second scene provided no new revelation about him. It seemed redundant. After the first scene was recut to emphasize the sister’s pain, both scenes played much better. She was very moving in the first scene, and we still had something new to discover about Daniel in the second.