THE EDITOR
The Editor is the second most important person on a feature film. Without a good editor to tie up the loose ends at the end of production, to structure a complex story, or sometimes to save the movie, you may end up with nothing, literally nothing.
At the end of every production, the Director and the Editor should sit down and discuss the entire project. They should look at all the rough assembly of sequences or interlock of all the rushes. Then they should seriously and honestly assess just what they have in the can.
Was the intent of the script captured successfully on film? Is a significant part or the whole concept missing? Did the Director shoot something a little different than what the story was all about? How much of the "original" can be saved?
If the film captures the intent of the script, then the editing is straightforward. The editor follows the Script Girl notes, which are the interpretation of the Director!
If the project is complex in nature, let's say it uses: parallel construction, major-minor construction with a vehicle sequence, many flash-back or flash-forward sequences, surrealistic associations, or some other involved narrative or technique; then, the editor has to rework the sequences and editorial elements into the most revealing and at the same time compelling cinematic construction.
The job of the Director during production is a lot more eclectic with such scripts, since directing can concern itself with capturing the essence of each scene and not with the overall structure of the whole movie. That aspect is best left for the editorial phase.
Some of the best directors with huge budgets end up producing editorially botched-up movies. Ironically, the directors who come from acting backgrounds or who have no formal training are less likely to screw up the editorial structure of a movie, since they tackle only stories with linear construction and if a script is complex, they either simplify it or abandon it. Of course, such directors will never make any artistic movies, but from the point of view of the studios they are more "safe."
More frequently than ever, the Editor has to doctor and save most features that are shot nowadays.
I don't want to go too deeply into why more and more films are poorly shot, but suffice it to say that so few directors have the chance of making more than one movie, what with the difficulty of raising funds and the avalanche of directorial hopefuls, that most directors are ill-prepared for the task of capturing the intent of the script, let alone maintaining consistency of vision.
The Editor's task then is generally creating a new and interesting structure for a succession of sequences which hopefully have a certain relevance to a central story or character. The Editor has to doctor the mistakes and make the sequences "play" within the new framework.
Occasionally, by luck combined with incredible ingenuity, an Editor will get a flash or a brainstorm and manage to discover a new "angle" or intrinsic structure in the content of a production, and out of all the
melange of shots and sequences, most often through the creativity and skill of "material-starved" actors, the Editor will not only save the picture but cut it into a gem with dazzling facets.
Only if you're an observant film maker, who happened to experience such a thing, from production through final cut, can you identify such an example in a successful film release. Because it's rarely the Editor who gets the credit. The directors, the producers and the stars share in the success of big hits, yet in my mind most movie successes are due to editorial genius.