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When stuck, cut down to three
Cut it down to three
Rick Rubin calls this the ruthless edit. Picture an album that needs 10 songs, with 15 or 20 the band kind of likes. Instead of trimming 20 down to 10, cut the 20 down to three: the songs nobody can live without. Then ask what has to be number four. If no song absolutely has to be number four, the rest aren't going to be used, which means writing another batch of songs.
When Inception stalled
Christopher Nolan hit this wall on Inception. A few weeks into the cut, when confidence normally starts to build, the film stalled for a long time. He couldn't sleep for a couple of days and felt he had taken 200 million dollars and burned it in a bonfire.
Most of filmmaking is small adjustments, like tightening the lug nuts on a tire a little at a time. Every now and again the film gets somewhere it simply won't move past. The solution on Inception was a ruthless cut.
Why does cutting make creative work stronger?
Too many options can stall decisions. In a 2000 study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, shoppers shown 24 jams were far less likely to buy one than shoppers shown six: about 3 percent bought from the larger display, against about 30 percent from the smaller one. A short list makes each choice matter and exposes what is essential. Psychologist Barry Schwartz later popularized the idea in his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice.
How do editors rebuild a film that stalls?
Editors usually begin with an assembly cut that contains nearly everything that was shot. They then trim in stages toward a fine cut, deciding at each stage what the story cannot do without. Films are commonly shot with far more footage than ends up on screen. A final cut is often much shorter than the first assembly.
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