“I love editing…”

“I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.”

–Stanley Kubrick

“With a good script a good director can produce…”

“With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.”

–Akira Kurosawa

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

In 1986, I discovered the heavy metal band Metallica. I was in seventh grade and living in Saudi Arabia, of all places, when my musical world was rocked by their album Master of Puppets. A friend who had gone to the States over Christmas break lent me the tape. Although there were several music stores in Saudi Arabia, their selection was limited to mostly mainstream pop and Top 40s rock; you couldn’t wander into a store like you can in the US and discover something new or offbeat. The fact that Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian state which employs diverse and heavy-handed methods of censorship also made it difficult to find great, fresh music…

My Dinner with Andre Royo, Part II: “Beginner’s Mind”

At the start of a project I’m usually fresh and energetic, and approach the edit as if it were a blank slate. I’m eager to look carefully at all the footage, objective in my assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, open to ideas and connections as they arise, and excited to think about possible themes and storylines. Beyond that, there’s the simple joy of discovering a whole new world I don’t usually know much about, and finding, in the mass of material that passes before my eyes, images which can be beautiful and poetic, meaningful and thought-provoking, when juxtaposed with one another in creative and interesting ways…

My Dinner with Andre Royo, Part I: Prologue

My Dinner with Andre Royo is a film that was completely constructed in the editing room. In a sense, a majority of the footage can be considered “found footage,” since it was shot for a different film and an altogether different purpose. The fact that My Dinner with Andre Royo exists is completely due to its conception and creation in post-production…

“Film as Dream, film as music…”

“Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

–Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern