Igor Stravinsky loved expressing himself and wrote a good deal on interpretation. As he bore a volcano within him, he urged restraint. Those without even the vestige of a volcano within them nodded in agreement, raised their baton, and observed restraint, while Stravinsky himself conducted his own Apollon Musagete as if it were Tchaikovsky. We who had read him listened and were astonished.

The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman

Most of us are searching—consciously or unconsciously—for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware—like Stravinsky— of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By the same token, someone who bore a glacier within him might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead.

You can never judge the quality of a sound mix simply by counting the number of tracks it took to produce it. Terrible mixes have been produced from a hundred tracks. By the same token, wonderful mixes have been made from only three tracks. It depends on the initial choices that were made, the quality of the sounds, and how capable the blend of those sounds was of exciting emotions hidden in the hearts of the audience. The underlying principle: Always try to do the most with the least—with the emphasis on try. You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effort you put into wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants. The same principle applies to all the various crafts of filmmaking: acting, art direction, photography, music, costume, etc.

An overactive editor, who changes shots too frequently, is like a tour guide who can’t stop pointing things out: “And up there we have the Sistine Ceiling, and over here we have the Mona Lisa, and, by the way, look at these floor tiles . . .’’If you are on a tour, you do want the guide to point things out for you, of course, but some of the time you just want to walk around and see what you see. If the guide—that is to say, the editor—doesn’t have the confidence to let people themselves occasionally choose what they want to look at, or to leave things to their imagination, then he is pursuing a goal (complete control) that in the end is self-defeating. People will eventually feel constrained and then resentful from the constant pressure of his hand on the backs of their necks.

Wherever he goes, he should try to think, as much as possible, about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the film. It is difficult, but it is necessary to create a barrier, a cellular wall between shooting and editing. Fred Zinnemann would go climbing in the Alps after the end of shooting, just to put himself in a potentially life-threatening situation where he had to be there, not day-dreaming about the film’s problems.

Then, after a few weeks, he would come down from the Alps, back to earth; he would sit down in a dark room, alone, the arc light would ignite, and he would watch his film. He would still be, inherently, brimming with those images from beyond the edge of the frame (a director will never be fully able to forget them), but if he had gone straight from shooting to editing, the confusion would be worse and he would have gotten the two different thought processes of shooting and editing irrevocably mixed up.

Do everything you can to help the director erect this barrier for himself so that when he first sees the film, he can say, “All right, I’m going to pretend that I had nothing to do with this film. It needs some work. What needs to be done?”

For instance, by cutting away from a certain character before he finishes speaking, I might encourage the audience to think only about the face value of what he said. On the other hand, if I linger on the character after he finishes speaking, I allow the audience to see, from the expression in his eyes, that he is probably not telling the truth, and they will think differently about him and what he said. But since it takes a certain amount of time to make that observation, I cannot cut away from the character too early: Either I cut away while he is speaking (branch number one) or I hold until the audience realizes he is lying (branch number two), but I cannot cut in between those two branches—to do so would either seem too long or not long enough. The branch points are fixed organically by the rhythm of the shot itself and by what the audience has been thinking up to that moment in the film, but I am free to select one or the other of them (or yet another one further on) depending on what realization I want the audience to make.