Once a movie wraps up filming, it needs to be cut, recut, scored, tweaked, test screened, etc. During this process, how many times does a director sit through full screenings of the film or partial screenings of segments?
I can’t imagine sitting through watching the same film 4 or 5 times in a month and I imagine the director has to go through way more than that. Do directors ever get sick of the film before it releases? I expect by the time it’s opening night, the director ends up knowing every line of dialogue because they’ve seen it so many times already.
Well, I have a similar issue when writing a novel or short story: I have to read it many times before its ready.
When it’s your own work each viewing or reading will show things that you need to fix, and show if what you fixed the previous time actually works. So you don’t get tired of it.
Not always that many times in proper order and sometimes very few as a complete movie.
Peter Jackson watched the finished Return of the King for the first time at the premiere. Elijah Wood asked him what he thought and Peter said, “It’s good. Yeah, it’s good.”
Funnier story if you listen to Elijah tell it on the DVD.
There’s a recent movie, What We Do in the Shadows, it’s a really funny comedy that I highly recommend. The co-directors, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi were on an episode of the Nerdist podcast, and said something about watching the movie hundreds of times as they were working on it and editing it and getting it all together. They sound very hands-on, and they wrote, directed, and starred in the movie and it’s their baby, so they might have watched their movie more times than other directors. But I think a director for hire at a studio would still watch their movie they directed many, many times.
Well, he had seen the movie many times, but was still finalizing the special effects shots days(hours?) before printing the final cut.
The studio has a release date, but they also have a delivery date. Peter Jackson actually had a wrap and final party and called the miniature people during the party to get another shot. Return of the King barely got released…so to speak. It was minor changes to us, but mattered to him.
The final final final cut that we have all seen was only seen by him at the premiere. I’m sure nothing happened that was shocking, though. He’d supervised all final shots at various points and watched many cuts of the movie.
So he may have only seen the final, final cut of the movie once, which is not so surprising. But I’m more interested in how many times the director’s seen any cut of the movie, no matter how rough. If there are directors who are watching their movie over a hundred times over the course of making it, that sounds like a personal hell to me.
Well, individual scenes, hundreds of times. You work out the editing with the editor and then any FX. You need a full cut of the scenes with score to have the score recorded. Full ‘versions’ of the movie, a hundred would probably a lot. But again by that time, they’ll have seen parts of it many many many times.