The Key Element to Cutting a Good Film: “Emotion”

When faced with the same footage, for a truly excellent editor, editing is never just arranging and combining shots; it is arranging and combining emotion.

In previous videos/articles, I’ve mentioned more than once the “Six Rules of Perfect Editing.” Today let’s break them down in detail.

The Six Rules of Perfect Editing:

1. Emotion (51%)

2. Story (23%)

3. Rhythm (10%)

4. Eye-trace (7%)

5. Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%)

6. Three-dimensional space continuity (4%)

These are the “editing bible” proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now).

Look at the relative weight of these six rules:

The least important last three (eye-trace | two-dimensional characteristics | three-dimensional continuity) are exactly what we usually call “editing technique” or “editing theory”: the relationship between eyeline and camera direction, hard cuts, the rule that shots mustn’t “jump,” match cuts, action continuity cuts, and so on—a whole set of academic theories straight out of textbooks.

In contrast, the top three most important rules have nothing to do with these technical requirements.

So what exactly does “emotion,” which ranks first, refer to? One example will make it clear:

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot where, after a series of twists and turns in his life, the protagonist stands on a boat looking at the sea. This medium shot lingers for a long time.

Editor Walter Murch explained his thinking when cutting this shot:

“As long as you can imagine his thoughts continuing with the sea, that’s how long the shot can last.”

That is emotion. That is the most important function of editing—narration.

Take Requiem for a Dream, for example, even with its “rabid, fragmented” editing style (the film breaks records with around 2,000 shots, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film has only 600–700 shots), it still contains “long takes” that linger for quite some time. To maintain the overall style, the editor could have insisted on a relentlessly high-speed cutting pace; wouldn’t inserting a lingering shot destroy the rhythm?

—The editor is absolutely prioritizing the character’s emotion. True emotion can only be captured by a camera that keeps rolling.

In fact, Walter Murch’s “perfect editing” rules aren’t just for feature films—they apply to all kinds of editing projects.

We often focus too much on “technique” and neglect the most primitive “emotion” that the footage conveys to the audience.

According to strict academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and selecting footage must follow common principles such as “the shot has to be stable, no shake, the face must be clear, the composition must be perfectly proper...” But in practice, if you really want a film’s emotions to come across accurately, you often have to break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, when the main character exits the frame, he accidentally bumps the camera, causing the image to shake—but the editor deliberately kept it.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot lingers for several seconds before the dialogue begins (according to typical editing practice, it would very likely have gone straight into dialogue from the start).

These are all editing choices that preserve emotion.

So what excellent editors seem to pursue is turning the question “Where do I cut?” into “What if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard the saying that good editing is storytelling—telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading a textbook, flat as water and utterly emotionless, you’ll likely forget it immediately, maybe even start yawning. But if someone tells the same story with exaggerated facial expressions, big gestures, rises and falls in tone, and spit flying everywhere, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it will still grab your attention.

That’s why a skilled director can still make something decent out of a painfully mediocre script—because they know how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If someone watches a film and says it’s good, it’s because something in it moved them emotionally. That’s what I’ve been repeating above: “Good editors are all storytellers.”

Back to the opening statement: “For a truly excellent editor, editing is about arranging and combining emotion.”

Using a set of shots to build a montage sequence that expresses “anger” is relatively easy.

But suppose a feature-length film contains not just “anger,” but also segments of “joy,” “sorrow,” “pleasure,” and so on. To fuse all these emotional segments into a single coherent work is extremely difficult.

For a 15- or 20-second short video, the primary goal is simply to convey one emotion.

That’s why being good at cutting short videos doesn’t mean you can necessarily cut a feature film, let alone a theatrical movie.

The reverse, however, does hold true.

And that is why, to truly learn editing, you must start with film theory.

Stripping away some technical aspects, any good film will be led by at least one emotional throughline—or by several emotional throughlines intertwining with each other.

Let’s say we’re editing a film whose core theme is “sadness,” and in the bin we have two pieces of footage to choose from—both shots of someone sobbing:

Shot ① Normal filming, technically flawless.

Shot ② Slightly out of focus, shaky, but the crying is much more heartfelt.

From a technical perspective, Shot ② is a so-called “bad shot.”

But if you want the film to be good, you still have to choose Shot ②.

As long as the camera has recorded it, regardless of whether “Cut” was called or not, in the edit suite, not a single second of footage is truly “waste.”