“I tell the director before I start, “If you want me to be innovative, give me the chance to make mistakes and maybe we can do something interesting.”… You can play safe and leave it all in, and you sit with the director and say, “Let’s trim here, let’s trim there,” but why not give the director a challenge? That’s what’s nice about film editing: there are a lot of little discoveries you make along the trip, and you put them in. If I find an interesting wrinkle, something different that might work, I say, “If I do it the way the director wants, he’ll never see this interesting little wrinkle.” I’m not doing my job unless I’m giving him options. That’s the key to this business.”
 

Michael Kahn Interview from Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing by Vincent LoBrutto

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William Friedkin recounts a tale of how he handled studio notes on Sorcerer. This must have been an uncomfortable lunch for the editorial team:

"[Barry] Diller asked if he and [Sid] Sheinberg could see me the next day to pass along a few notes from their team. Since The French Connection experience I wasn’t keen on notes from executives. So I said okay, but I’d want to bring my editors and the writer so they could hear the notes firsthand. Diller and Sheinberg weren’t used to meeting with “below-the-title” guys, but they reluctantly agreed, thinking it was in the spirit of cooperation. It was a sham.

I told Wally [Walon Green, Screenwriter] and Bud [Smith, Editor] and the assistant editors, Jere Huggins and Ned Humphreys, to come unshaven, button their shirts incorrectly, leaving them outside their trousers, wear scruffy, mismatched shoes and socks, and generally look like homeless guys. I told them to wear sullen expressions, project indifference, not smile or nod or do anything that showed understanding, let alone agreement with whatever the executives said—just stare blankly at them while they talked. And don’t react to anything I might say or do, I added. Sheinberg and Diller were successful, high-powered executives, but I felt they had little to offer on how to improve a film I worked on for over a year. I thought that an audience’s response was worth a thousand times more than any executive’s, and that all these guys wanted to do was leave their mark on the film, like a dog pissing on a tree.

The meeting took place over lunch at the posh private dining room at Universal. Sheinberg and Diller were in suits and ties, and my guys were dressed as I had instructed them. Two waiters. Drink orders. Everyone ordered iced tea or bottled water or Diet Coke except me. I asked for a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, no glass. Shocked glances all around, especially from the waiters, who thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. When drinks arrived, I opened the vodka bottle and started glugging. Though not a drinker, I can handle booze and have only been drunk twice in my life. Diller and Sheinberg had a handful of meaningless notes, to which we gave neither visual nor verbal response. Lunch was ordered, but when it arrived, I just kept drinking from the bottle. After about fifteen minutes I fell to the floor facedown. No one reacted, so I just lay there until gradually there was silence. Then Diller turned to Wally and the editors and asked, “Does this happen often?”

“Every day,” Wally deadpanned.

I leave it to you to evaluate this incident. Some of you may find it appalling, others stupid, still others insulting and self-destructive. It was certainly all of that, but at the time, that was my nature. I was still the class clown, and it was also a dumb-ass way of coping with criticism. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way myself."
 

From William Friedkin's “The Friedkin Connection”

An apparently unusual aspect to Hitchcock’s work method was his entrusting the viewing of dailies to editor George Tomasini and script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “He never went to look at this film,” Schlom asserted. “After dailies, George and I had to come back and tell him what we thought was right or wrong. He knew what he had.” Tomasini, having worked on The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, was one of the handful of collaborators in whose taste and instincts Hitchcock placed implicit confidence. That track record notwithstanding, Tomasini was only paid $11,000 to edit Psycho.
 

From "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello

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"I really enjoy editing the most... It’s the part I have the most control over, it’s the part I can deal with easiest. I can sit in my editing room and figure it out. I can solve problems that can’t get solved any other way. It always comes down to that in the end. It’s the part I rely on the most to save things, for better or worse. Everybody has their ace in the hole—mine’s editing."
 

From “The Making of Star Wars” by J.W. Rizler.

I recently stumbled upon a wonderful post-production podcast called Going Postal. Until this, my go-to editing podcast was The Terence and Philip Show by Terence Curren and Philip Hodgetts. Alas, the schedule on that show is somewhat erratic, evening out to approximately one a month, and it always leaves me wanting more. Going Postal fills that gap. It’s been running since May of this year with each episode covering a variety of topics from technology and software news, to interviews with film and television editors, to reviews of current movie releases.

Episode 5 of Going Postal ("Meet or Supermeet?") covers EditFest London 2013 and includes a few cutting room stories from Taxi Driver courtesy of Academy Award winning editor Tom Rolf.

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On the "You talking to me?" scene:

"I had no idea it would take off and become a signature scene in this movie. Because when I saw the dailies, I said, “What do I do with this?” There is no reverse. There was no coverage. Essentially what you saw was almost every frame available to put together. So I had no option. And so when I put it together and showed it to Marty the first time, he went “Yeah, it works.” And I said, “What’s he talking about? It doesn’t work.” I felt no confidence in that scene."
 

He went on to speak about the repeat action from the same sequence:

"There’s a repeat. When he turns around. And then we go back and we do it again. That was Marty. That was not me. I said, “It’s going to look like a mistake, Marty.” Which, to me, it did look like a mistake. But it’s now part and parcel of the entire thing. That was strictly his contribution and it was a big one, obviously."
 

That repeat action was a huge deal for me when I first saw Taxi Driver. It was one of the first times I can remember becoming consciously aware of - and excited by - the power of film editing. It did look like a mistake. But not a mistake by the filmmakers. It looked like Travis Bickle’s mistake. In that moment, it felt like the character had taken control of the film itself.

There’s a nice write-up on EditFest’s conversation between Tom Rolf and Anne Coates here. And Premiumbeat offers a concise overview of the event with a few additional Tom Rolf quotes:

The most important talent to develop in the cutting room is diplomacy. Never hold anyone’s idea up to ridicule. Try anything and be ready to fight for what you think is right.
 

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"I love editing.  I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing a film to edit."
 

Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander Walker.