times read about in the press—tend to inflate this
ratio of unused to used footage to extremes.
Perhaps the best-known extreme example is
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
Working for two years, Walter Murch and his edito-
rial team eventually shaped 235 hours of footage
into a (mostly) coherent movie that runs 2 hours
33 minutes (resulting in a ratio of unused to used
footage of just under 100 to 1). Sifting through the
mountain of footage to find the best shots, making
thousands of little decisions along the way, Murch
and his team gave narrative shape to what many
people at the time—including, occasionally, Cop-
pola himself—considered a disaster of directorial
self-indulgence. Twenty-two years later, Coppola
asked Murch and his team to restore 49 minutes
that they had originally cut; that version, known as
the “director’s cut,” was released in 2001 as Apoca-
lypse Now Redux.
Clearly, the creative power of the editor comes
close to that of the director. But in most mainstream
film productions, that creative power is put in serv-
ice of the director’s vision. “One gives as much as
possible,” says film editor Helen van Dongen, “as
much as is beneficial to the final form of the film,
without overshadowing or obstructing the direc-
tor’s intentions.... The editor working with a great
director can do no better than discover and disclose
the director’s design.”^3
Consider, for example, the challenges faced by
David Tedeschi, the editor of Martin Scorsese’s
Shine a Light(2008), which documents two Rolling
Stones concerts in New York. Robert Richardson,
the director of photography, supervised eighteen
camera operators and dozens of camera assistants
and lighting technicians. The editor was faced with(^3) Helen van Dongen, qtd. in Richard Barsam, “Discover and
Disclose: Helen van Dongen and Louisiana Story,” in Filming
Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story”: The Helen van Dongen
Diary, by Helen Durant, ed. Eva Orbanz (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1998), p. 86.
Editing thousands of feet of footage for Shine a
Light A remote-controlled, crane-mounted camera (right)
was one of eighteen cameras used to record a 2008 Rolling
Stones concert for Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light(2008).
The editor, David Tedeschi, met the overwhelming challenge
of creating a record from the thousands of feet of footage
recorded by those cameras. The result is one of the most
vibrant, yet intimate, rock movies ever made.
THE FILM EDITOR 343