· 1 min read
Cutting for breath
Coverage tells you what you can cut to. It never tells you when.
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Tomas Reig
The first assembly of anything is a coverage problem: this angle, then that angle, because those are the angles we have. The film only starts when you throw that logic away.
Where the cut goes
Watch the performance with your eyes closed. The places you want to cut are almost never the places the dialogue ends — they are where the actor takes a breath, or conspicuously does not.
Four versions, deliberately
On a scene that matters we build four full edits before choosing: fastest possible, slowest possible, one that favours the person speaking, one that favours the person listening. The final cut is usually none of them, but it could not have been found without them.