Paul Hirsch received the Academy Award for his editing work on Star Wars in 1978. In 2005, he received his second Academy Award nomination for Taylor Hackford's Ray. He is the only person to ever win the Saturn Award for Best Editing twice. He is the author of A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away.

PAUL HIRSCH

The thing about trailers is it's all about rhythm, and I had played the drums, so it came very naturally to me to pick up on the idea of film editing as musical interpretation. It's a little misleading because the things that I learned in trailer editing don't apply to feature editing.

And when I first got my chance to do a feature film, I realized that I really went into it with great confidence. I was 23 years old and I said I thought to myself, yeah, I can do that. And not knowing what I didn't know.

My father being a painter would always talk about being faced with the blank canvas, like a writer is a blank page. And he sort of elevated those arts to a higher level than the interpretive arts, which I suppose is valid, but on the other hand, if there weren't a Horowitz to interpret Beethoven, what good would Beethoven be? You have to have an interpretive artist to bring what's on the page to life, you know? So there's a place for both in the world of art.

I think that editing is an interpretive art. You look at the material, and then you react to it. You make decisions about what do I want to reveal at the beginning of the scene? And what do I want to save for the end? And how do I want to build to a particular impact?

Or if you look at all the dailies for a scene, you find these moments. You think, how can I use these moments to best advantage? What's the best way to present this? Whether the intention is comedic or dramatic or horrific. Whatever you're trying to achieve, you're trying to get the maximum effect from the material by eliminating what's not necessary and highlighting what you keep in the most effective way.

Your question about how do you look at a scene over and over and over and make decisions about it is a little bit like those games they used to have in the newspaper. They would say, what's wrong with this picture? And you'd look at the picture, you'd say, "Well, the cow is on the roof.” Or the cat has two tails. Or the bicycle has only one wheel, whatever, you have to find the things that are wrong with the picture. And editing to a certain extent is like that. You watch the film, and you wait for things to strike you as wrong. What's wrong? You're looking for things that–No, this is too long and this is too short. This moment doesn't land. I didn't understand that. Or this is awkward. You look for things that worry you, that bother you, and eventually, you run out of these things.

Being a director, for instance, unless you're one of the privileged few, is like running for office for the rest of your life. You're constantly campaigning and trying to convince people to have confidence in you, give you money and give you a job. Whereas as an editor, I was able to go from project to project without too much... I mean, I used to go maybe six months without a job at the longest, but I'm happiest when I'm busy.

I could save the studios millions and millions of dollars every year by instituting a simple rule, which is when you're looking at visual effects shots, you would not be allowed to stop on a frame. You'd just have to see it in motion, because once they stop and look at the frame, then they start picking up all these details that have nothing to do with the function of the shot in the context of the cut, and they a lot of time and money polishing things that the audience is never aware of.

As Herbert Ross used to say, "You only get one opportunity to see the picture for the first time.” We have to concentrate on the details down to the very frame that we decided to cut on. And we have to concentrate as well on the entire experience. There's the micro and the macro. You have to keep a balance between the two considerations. Very important lesson I learned on the very first film I did, which is that even if you edit each scene beautifully, it doesn't mean that the film overall is well-edited because there's a totality to the experience.

I sometimes compare it to a meal. No matter how good the food is, eventually, the audience gets full and they don't want to eat. They don't want anymore. You have to balance the momentary experience with the overall.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

When you became involved with Star Wars, were you aware of the phenomenon it would become?

HIRSCH

No, none of us did. I mean, I thought it was a wonderful picture and I was excited to be on it. And part of it, I don't know any other picture that has had that kind of impact that it has. It's odd. You know, I've thought about this a lot because I think the James Bond pictures, there have been many more James Bond pictures franchise over 50 years old, and Bond has had an impact on the culture, but not in the way that Star Wars. I just find of Star Wars generates the kind of passion and it's universal. It seems to be across nations, different cultures are all caught up in the phenomenon. It comprised so many different genres. In one, there was the Western with the shootout in the saloon and the Indians and the attacking the wagon train in the past. And there was Robin Hood and the sword fights in the castle and rescuing the princess. And there was World War II fighter plane war movies from the South Pacific. And there were all these movies jumbled up, cut up, and stir-fried. It's something fresh. Watching the movie, you were watching all the movies you'd ever seen in your life. It's so much more complicated now with the digital tools and how to describe it, I mean, there are so many ways you could push and pull the material.

It gets very complex. You can slow things down. You could speed things up, you could change the image. You can erase things in the image, all sorts of things you can do that were not traditionally part of editing. When I spent 25 years cutting film, and I spent another 25 years working on computers, putting the images digitally, and in the first 25 years when you got a film, that was it. The art was to make the most of it through deciding when to begin the sound and in what context to put it. Then it becomes much more complicated when you have all these other factors or dimensions that you have to take into consideration.

There have been these occasional shocks to the business when sound was introduced, when television came along, when videotape came along, when DVDs came along, that all these new platforms, ways of seeing film changed how the business works. And pandemic aside, we're going through a period now where people are largely abandoning theaters to a great degree and turning to streaming as a way of seeing films. And everybody's getting on Netflix. I mean, it's accelerated by the pandemic, but this is a trend that was happening already where people now have 65-inch televisions in their homes with great resolution, high def and sound systems, and that rival anything you see in the theater. So theaters react to a shrinking audience by raising their prices, which is exactly the opposite of what is logical. So De Palma used to talk. You used to predict that movies would someday be like opera when you would have a very small but passionate audience and the performances would be very expensive. But then most people wouldn't care at all about it, and it was supported by this small, intense, passionate group of supporters. And I think that's that seems to be on its way to coming through the kids today. I don't think they care about movies at all. I think they care about influencers on social apps and YouTube. But this is what's making the culture that you can sort of tell that you're getting aged out of the culture by. I like to do crossword puzzles and I'm seeing clues about things I know nothing about, a character in a video game. The kids today are shaping the culture in ways that have not too much to do with movies. I don't know what the future is for movies as an art form. We really don't. It's changing. There are these new forms like, series that people like to binge on where you can have a story that takes many hours to tell. When they're good, they're great. When they're not, they're forgettable. I just don't see where the business is going.

I studied Western Civilization at Columbia University, and I never dreamed that the Enlightenment, which produced the philosophers who dreamed up the United States Constitution, would be under attack in this country, that you would have to mount a defense of the principles of the Enlightenment against concentrated rejection by vast segments of the population. It's very disturbing to me.

When they release films on streaming, there is no event. It just suddenly is there and, it's not like, "Let's go see the new movie on Friday night." It's just they've changed the entertainment experience into a utility like electricity or water. You turn on the tap and there. There's no excitement about the event. They're going to have to find some way to make it an event because otherwise, it's just wallpaper.

To me, art is the whole point. I mean, of all the pursuits that people can engage in, everything else is survival. Yeah, you think about it, it's all just... which is important. You have to eat. You have to stay healthy and protect yourself from the elements and all the other pursuits that people engage in. But all that stuff is geared just to survival. The arts represent what you can do, given the life that you're protecting with all those other pursuits, what do you do with it? You make art. I mean, that's the whole point. If you don't make art, there's no point to life, you know?

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Tea Prerodovic. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.