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

Given the same raw footage, for a great editor, editing is never just arranging and combining shots, but arranging and combining emotions.

In earlier videos/articles, I’ve mentioned more than once the “Six Rules of a Perfect Cut.” Today we’ll break them down in detail.

The Six Rules of a Perfect Cut:

1. Emotion (51%)

2. Story (23%)

3. Rhythm (10%)

4. Eye-trace (7%)

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

6. Three-dimensional space of action (4%)

These were proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and are considered a kind of “bible” of editing.

Look at the weight of each rule:

The three least important ones (eye-trace | two-dimensional plane | three-dimensional space) are exactly what we usually refer to as “editing technique” and “editing theory”: for example, the relationship between eye direction and camera direction, match cuts, avoiding jump cuts, continuity cutting, action matching, and so on — a whole set of academic theories you’d find in textbooks.

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

So what exactly does the top-ranked and most important element, emotion, refer to? One example makes it clear:

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

Editor Walter Murch described 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 hold.”

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

Even in a film like Requiem for a Dream, with its “rabid, fragmented” editing style (the film has around 2,000 shots, while a typical 60–90 minute film usually has only 600–700 shots), there are still “long takes” that linger for quite a while. To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have insisted on staying at a high cutting speed and avoided any long holds at all — wouldn’t inserting a long shot ruin the rhythm?

— But the editor is prioritizing the character’s emotion. Genuine emotion can only be captured by a running camera.

In fact, Murch’s “perfect cut” rules don’t apply only to films; they apply to all editing projects.

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

According to rigid academic theory, selecting takes is the editor’s primary task, and the selection must follow common rules like “the shot must be stable, no shake; the face must be clear; the framing must be proper…” But if we really want a film’s emotion to come through accurately, we 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 it to shake, but the editor deliberately kept the take.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot holds for a few seconds before the dialogue starts (by normal editing conventions, it’s very likely the dialogue would have started right at the opening).

These are all examples of preserving emotion through editing.

So it seems that what great editors pursue is turning the question of “where to cut” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard that good editing is about telling a story, about using shots to tell a story. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story in a flat, monotonous tone, like reading a textbook, you’ll likely have no impression of it at all, maybe even start yawning. But if someone tells a story with exaggerated expressions and gestures, varied intonation, spittle flying, then even if the story itself isn’t very good, it will still be engaging.

This is why a good director can still make an extremely mediocre script turn out not too bad — because they understand how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If someone has watched a film and says it’s good, there must be something in it that touched them emotionally. This is what people mean when they keep saying “a good editor is a good storyteller.”

Back to what we said at the beginning: for a great editor, editing is about arranging and combining emotion.

Using a set of shots to edit together a montage sequence with a clear emotional tone of “anger” may be relatively easy.

But in a feature-length film, the emotional themes involved are not just “anger”; there may also be passages of “joy,” “sadness,” “pleasure,” and so on. It’s extremely difficult to fuse all these emotions back together into a single work.

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

This is why being good at editing short videos does not mean you can edit feature films, let alone theatrical films.

The reverse, however, does hold.

This is also why, to truly learn editing, you must start from film theory.

Putting aside some technical aspects, a good film must be guided by an emotional through-line, or several emotional through-lines woven together.

Suppose we’re editing a film whose theme is “sadness.” In the bin there are two takes of a character crying that we need to choose from:

Shot ①: A standard take, no technical flaws.

Shot ②: The focus is soft, the image shakes, but the crying is far more intense and genuine.

From a technical standpoint, Shot ② is a so‑called “bad take.”

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

As long as it was captured by the camera, regardless of whether someone called “cut” or not, in the edit bay, not a single second is truly a “waste shot.”