“Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.”
- Francis Ford Coppola to his daughter Sofia

Full transparency: getting through the rough cut of my first feature, Wild Boys, was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my filmmaking career.

Facing terabytes of footage waiting to be watched, cataloged, and edited is daunting.

Today I’m sharing the mistakes I made, the lessons I learned, and the tools you can use to get through your rough cut without losing your mind.

We’ll talk about:

• The mistakes I (and probably you) make when editing rough cuts
• How to embrace the process and get out of your own way
• A method for getting the first cut together

Rough cuts are mountains to climb, but not insurmountable ones. Once you understand the pitfalls and the tools that help you avoid them, rough cuts can seriously help you make your vision come true.

Let’s roll.

Can you handle the truth?

Rough cuts are the hardest part of editing for me.

Staring at a blank timeline is like staring at a blank page.

Terrifying.

To me, editing has always been about trial and error. I rarely get an edit right on the first try. I’ll edit a scene, feel pretty good about it, then watch it the next day and go: what was I thinking??

But it’s still some of the most important editing work you do.

Throughout the process of putting together your rough cut, you get to know the film. You figure out the actors’ quirks, who’s good on take one, who needs four takes to get into a scene, and so on.

I find this to be true even when I’ve written AND directed the film.

I discover so many things in the rough cut process. It’s like meeting an old friend and seeing them in a whole new light. You think you know everything there is to know about them, but they keep surprising you.

On the flip-side, one of the most brutal parts of editing a rough cut and watching all your dailies is how it reveals your directing. I can’t count how many times I’ve been like “Morten you idiot.”

It shows your victories as well as your failures.

And that’s actually a great thing.

It allows you to get better, and it shows you the areas of the film that need the most work in the next cut.

This getting-to-know-you phase can be awkward, painful, and frustrating. But it’s essential to get through it so you can progress to the next phase of the editing process.

Some editors thrive in this phase and love the discovery process, I just want to get to the version of the film that’s in my head. That makes watching this rough, unpolished, and oftentimes bad version of the film hard as hell.

I talked a few weeks ago about the struggles I had with editing Wild Boys. The rough cut was a huge hurdle in that process.

It’s very easy to get in your own head when you’re piecing together your footage, and what lands on the timeline isn’t what you’d imagined. I got myself stuck for months at a time because I was convinced my movie was terrible.

I needed to remind myself of the truths about rough cuts:

• It’s bare bones. You’re focused on piecing the story together. The rough cut is often missing a lot of music, sound effects, visual effects etc. This makes the viewing experience very different from seeing a finished film.
• It’s your first go at a cut, and you haven’t figured out the rhythms, the tone, and everything else that goes into a finished film.
• There are so many options, and you want to get it right; it can feel impossible to make choices. But making choices and moving on is the name of the game.

Rough cuts are about taking small steps and making progress. It’s essential to avoid some of the big mistakes that trip editors up.

Avoid the rough cut traps most filmmakers fall into

Editing is an immersive process and it’s so easy to get sucked into it and lose yourself to the world. You get tunnel vision and end up doing a bunch of work that doesn’t end up in the film.

But the rough cut is only the first cut.

Like a writer, you’re going to go through many drafts of your story before it’s in a shape to show to anyone. But the importance of getting the story down is essential.

Think of your rough cut as your vomit draft. It’s a sandbox of ideas, trials, and errors. You’ll get a lot of stuff wrong, but you won't know what, until you’ve tried.

The magic of modern editing is that you can cut and recut endlessly (not that you should). You get to try crazy ideas, unexpected takes and shape performances through lots of testing.

But a lot of editors and filmmakers get stuck in a rut in the rough cut because they make some common mistakes. I should know; I’ve made them all.

The first mistake is getting caught up in the details. You start cutting a scene, and you obsess over continuity, or lighting differences, or you get hung up on the way an actor says a line.

You’ll get to all that stuff, but now is not the time.

When you get caught up in the nitty-gritty, you lose perspective of the film as a whole. You end up spending tons of time on stuff that won't matter in the long run.

You also rob yourself of any momentum you’ve built.

I read this quote from entrepreneur Ben Chestnut on the importance of momentum this week:

"Never sacrifice momentum. I might know a better path, but if we've got a lot of momentum, if everyone's united and they're marching together and the path is O.K., just go with the flow. I may eventually nudge them down a new path, but never stop the troops mid march."

This resonated so much with me regarding the creative process in general, but it felt especially relevant to our discussion of rough cuts.

The second mistake goes hand-in-hand with the first one, our old enemy: perfectionism. I’ll gladly admit I’m a recovering perfectionist, and there are still times when I let the perfectionist in me out to play. But rough cuts are not the time.

When you chase perfection on the first cut, you’re just holding yourself back from completing your shitty first cut.

The third mistake is falling in love with the work you did on set. You spent hours on this complicated dolly shot, or tons of money on a special effect and you do everything to fit the shot in the film. When it comes together it doesn't fit, and you know in your soul it needs to go.

This is when you need to be ruthless.

You do not serve the work that was done on set. You serve the story. You have to do whatever is right for the story at every turn. Break free from what it took to shoot something, especially if you were there on the day.

Trying to jam a shot into the cut that makes it worse is never worth it, no matter how cool the shot is.

The fourth mistake is the lack of rhythm and pacing, specifically letting every moment breathe.

Often rough cuts are long, and that’s part of the game, but that doesn’t mean you need to make every moment linger like it’s the most important beat of the film. When everything breathes, it takes away the effect of staying in a moment. Instead, you’re left with a cut that’s bloated and boring.

Cut to the pace and rhythm you feel is right for the film.

You might not get it right, but at least you’ll have a cut that’s more intentional and dynamic than if you let everything be too long.

The last mistake might seem counterintuitive, because it often makes your cut seem better than it is. It’s relying on temp music to carry your film.

It’s tempting, I know.

Slap on that epic track from Gladiator, and all of a sudden, that drab scene feels grand and emotional. That’s the problem, though. When you rely on music to do the heavy lifting, you take away from the other elements of your film.

This might sound crazy, but I edited the rough cut of Wild Boys without any music, other than some montage moments. When you use temp music to drive the emotions of your story, it tends to cover up weaknesses in your editing, performances, and shot selection. These are the exact things you want to test when watching a rough cut, and you want to be aware of them.

Forcing yourself to watch the film without added music helps me focus on the editorial choices I’ve made.

How to put the pieces together

Every editor I’ve worked with over my 15+ years in post production has a different approach to editing. Different preferences, different techniques, and different ways of putting together their first cuts.

I’ve tried a lot of different methods, and I’ll share what works for me.

I learned this one from major blockbuster editor Eddie Hamilton (Mission Impossible franchise, Kingsman, Top Gun: Maverick +++).

He gets to a version one of a scene as quickly as possible. It’s all about getting clips in the timeline so he can start comparing and contrasting and working with the material. He usually uses the takes marked by the director as their favorite (circle takes), and edits a rough assembly of the scene. He then watches all the footage, takes notes and starts refining the scene.

This approach has a few advantages:

• It avoids the empty timeline conundrum. You know which takes you’re going with, and you know this is a rough draft of the scene.
• By putting together a version of the scene before you watch all the dailies, you kind of know what you’re looking for in the footage. You’ve seen the takes marked as the director’s favorite and have an idea of which other pieces you need. You also have a standard to judge the other takes against.
• It creates momentum. You always know how to start assembling a scene, and you can get out of your analysis paralysis and start cutting.

The second tool I find helpful are selects sequences. These are separate editing timelines where you gather all your favorite takes, bits, dialog deliveries, reactions etc. You can do this while watching dailies, or after. It’s a neat way of not having to go through all the footage every time you’re looking for something.

The third tool is giving yourself the gift of a fresh perspective.

With the way editing works these days you can cut as many versions of a scene as you want. I’ve found that it helps my creativity to try at least two or three different approaches to a scene. I purposefully edit the scene differently to try new things and perspectives. I change the pacing, the shot selection; I’ll even try different character POVs to see what it does to the scene.

The best editing ideas often emerge from trying something I’m convinced won’t work.

The last tool is to keep the train rolling. The worst thing you can do in the rough cut stage is start obsessing over a scene. You have to gather some momentum and keep it going. Know that you’ll always be able to go back and finesse it later. Now it’s time to get something in the timeline so you can see the film in a bigger context.

One last bonus tip: always duplicate your sequences. New day? Duplicate your sequence. Trying a different approach? Duplicate your sequence. Whenever you're making changes, and you're making a new version of something. Duplicate your sequence. It will help you immensely when you need that old version of a scene that you cut three months ago.

And cut!

That does it for this week. Here are the key takeaways I want you to bring with you into your directing career from today:

• Get clips in the timeline and get your first version together before you can start second-guessing yourself.
• Don’t get caught obsessing over the details.
• Remember you’ll have time to finesse later.

As always, thanks for reading.

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