"I often shoot with scissors in my eyes"
About this Quote
It sounds like a grotesque one-liner until you remember who Allan Dwan was: a director who lived through cinema’s adolescence, when film grammar was still being invented in the cutting room. “I often shoot with scissors in my eyes” is a brag disguised as self-mockery, and it neatly compresses the director’s central paradox: the camera records, but the movie is made by choosing.
The image is deliberately violent. Scissors don’t just “edit”; they cut, sever, mutilate. Put them “in my eyes” and Dwan turns craftsmanship into bodily instinct, suggesting a way of working where judgment is fused to perception. He’s not discovering the film in post; he’s pre-editing while he shoots, composing shots with the cut already imagined. That’s classic old-Hollywood efficiency, the discipline of directors who had to deliver on time, under studio constraints, often with limited takes. The line carries a faint note of defiance toward any romantic notion of the director as a poet of endless footage. Dwan implies that freedom isn’t more material; it’s sharper intention.
There’s also a sly, professional subtext: directors who “shoot for the edit” protect themselves. If you control coverage and pacing in production, you’re less vulnerable to producers, editors, or studios reshaping your work. Coming from a prolific journeyman with a long career across silent and sound eras, the quote reads like hard-earned pragmatism turned into aphorism: vision, literally, is a cutting instrument.
The image is deliberately violent. Scissors don’t just “edit”; they cut, sever, mutilate. Put them “in my eyes” and Dwan turns craftsmanship into bodily instinct, suggesting a way of working where judgment is fused to perception. He’s not discovering the film in post; he’s pre-editing while he shoots, composing shots with the cut already imagined. That’s classic old-Hollywood efficiency, the discipline of directors who had to deliver on time, under studio constraints, often with limited takes. The line carries a faint note of defiance toward any romantic notion of the director as a poet of endless footage. Dwan implies that freedom isn’t more material; it’s sharper intention.
There’s also a sly, professional subtext: directors who “shoot for the edit” protect themselves. If you control coverage and pacing in production, you’re less vulnerable to producers, editors, or studios reshaping your work. Coming from a prolific journeyman with a long career across silent and sound eras, the quote reads like hard-earned pragmatism turned into aphorism: vision, literally, is a cutting instrument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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