"We talked a lot about The Best Intentions and how we could shoot certain scenes in different ways with slightly different bits of dialogue and information, so that later on, we could cut the piece more easily and it would still feel complete, even though it was shorter"
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There is a quiet kind of ruthlessness in Bille August's description of planning for The Best Intentions: not changing the story, but pre-building escape hatches. He frames it as flexibility, yet the subtext is control - the director anticipating the edit suite as a battlefield where time, money, and attention will demand sacrifices. The trick is to make those sacrifices invisible.
What makes the line work is how it reveals cinema as a modular art without saying the ugly part out loud. "Slightly different bits of dialogue and information" are not just coverage; they're narrative redundancies engineered so that when a scene is amputated, the body doesn't bleed. It's a director admitting that coherence is often manufactured twice: once on set, once again in post, with the second pass constrained by runtime, pacing, and the imagined impatience of an audience.
The context matters. The Best Intentions is intimate, character-driven material (with Bergman DNA), the kind of story where small exchanges carry moral weight. In that territory, shortening isn't a technical trim; it's an ethical decision about what inner life gets preserved. August's approach is essentially pre-emptive compassion toward his own film: if the distributor, festival slot, or broadcast format forces a leaner cut, the emotional logic still lands.
Underneath the pragmatism is a modern truth about filmmaking: the "final" version is rarely the purest one. It's the one that survives.
What makes the line work is how it reveals cinema as a modular art without saying the ugly part out loud. "Slightly different bits of dialogue and information" are not just coverage; they're narrative redundancies engineered so that when a scene is amputated, the body doesn't bleed. It's a director admitting that coherence is often manufactured twice: once on set, once again in post, with the second pass constrained by runtime, pacing, and the imagined impatience of an audience.
The context matters. The Best Intentions is intimate, character-driven material (with Bergman DNA), the kind of story where small exchanges carry moral weight. In that territory, shortening isn't a technical trim; it's an ethical decision about what inner life gets preserved. August's approach is essentially pre-emptive compassion toward his own film: if the distributor, festival slot, or broadcast format forces a leaner cut, the emotional logic still lands.
Underneath the pragmatism is a modern truth about filmmaking: the "final" version is rarely the purest one. It's the one that survives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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