The Deepest Cuts

Assembling a movie is a bit like emergency room triage: Some scenes survive no matter what, a few hang on for dear life, while others are pronounced dead on arrival. It’s that middle category -- one day the footage is in the cut, the next day it’s out -- that can dictate how well a film turns out.

The five filmmakers nominated for this year’s best director Oscar gathered for the Envelope Roundtable last month to discuss the complex process of moviemaking -- an often forthright conversation about the forces that can bring movies together and also tear them apart. The directors specifically talked about key sequences they wanted to include -- and then abandoned -- in their movies, and why they believe their films are particularly personal and political.

Following are edited excerpts from our chat with Kathryn Bigelow ( “The Hurt Locker”), James Cameron ( “Avatar”), Lee Daniels (“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”), Quentin Tarantino (“ Inglourious Basterds”) and Jason Reitman ( “Up in the Air”). To see the full transcript and video clips, go to TheEnvelope.com.

-- John Horn

Were there scenes in your movies that you desperately wanted that you realized just didn’t work?

Daniels: I had a scene with Precious when she was in the incest survivors meeting. And . . . she says to this group of people that have been sexually abused by their parents that she liked it. She says, “I don’t know when it began, I think I was 12 or 13, but I started having orgasms when my dad was raping me, and I’m embarrassed about it. . . .” I thought it was really powerful . . . but I thought it was simply too much, and it would just turn the audience off, so I cut it.

Reitman: Two lines. They’re just two of my favorite lines I’ve written and I cut them for rhythm. It was at the end of this kind of exhaustive wedding sequence that was 17 pages in the script. . . . And there was this line right at the end of the wedding, and it was George talking to the sister that didn’t get married and he said, “God, can you believe she’s married? She’s just a kid.” And his sister goes, “Actually, she’s 37, she’s just squeaking by.” And I just loved those lines. . . . I watched the movie with an audience. No one had to tell me. I just kind of felt . . . yeah, we need to get to the next morning. And it broke my heart because I just loved those lines.

Cameron: It was an epiphanal scene for me when I was writing the script, and when I wrote it, I actually kind of welled up myself. It’s a scene at the end where the warrior that Jake has had to prove himself to, Tsu’tey, the guy that’s . . . keeping him out of the clan and the whole Na’vi experience, is dying after the battle. . . . Jake goes to him and he hands him the baton of leadership and says, “You have to lead the people,” as he’s dying. Very, very powerful, emotional scene and again, the rhythm -- it just messed with the rhythm of the ending. It just felt like there was one dramatic beat too many. . . .

It had to come out completely, and that was the one scene that we finished all the way through the [special effects] Weta process because nobody could imagine the scene not being in the movie. Nobody. All the effects people came to me and said, “I can’t believe you’re cutting Tsu’tey’s death.” They were all invested in the scene. So, I actually had it out and I put it back in. . . . Then it got right down to the end where the final decision had to be made and I said, “No, it’s coming out.” Kathryn, is there a scene you lost?

Bigelow: No.

Daniels: Come on!

Cameron: You didn’t have the budget to shoot more than what you had.

Reitman: That’s actually every frame shot you’re seeing.

Tarantino: I had a piece of dialogue I was extremely proud of when Brad’s character Aldo and the Little Man are brought in to deal with Landa. The way the scene originally started after the Nazis leave, Landa goes, “Italian? Really? What were you thinking?” And Brad goes, “I speak a little Italian.” He goes, “I speak a little Tagalog, but I wouldn’t begin to presume I could pass for Filipino. Chico Marx is more convincing. If you had shown up in women’s attire, it would’ve been more convincing.” When I wrote that, I thought that was the funniest . . . and I was so proud of myself, and I dropped it. It was just -- the scene just kind of worked better without it. Are your movies reflective of what was going on in the country when you made them, what was going on in your lives personally, politically?

Bigelow: For “Hurt Locker,” very much so. This is a movie about an incredibly unpopular war. It’s the longest military engagement in United States history, and I felt the invasion of Iraq was a deplorable act, and I wanted to do something. I didn’t know what -- either go into Baghdad and be a human shield or make a movie.

Reitman: I’m glad you chose the one you did.

Daniels: I think as African Americans, we all want to aspire to be [ President] Obama, and I think that in that aspiration, we forget the Preciouses of the world. We don’t want to look at her because she represents what we don’t want to be. . . . It was about the timing of Obama combined with me really looking at my own prejudices, at obesity and people that were darker than me, and I had some issues.

Reitman: I felt as though I was making a movie that was very personal, that had to do with my fears in life, and I was making a movie about a man who was trying to figure out who and what he wanted in his life. And I wrote it over the course of getting married and becoming a father and becoming successful in my work, a job that puts me in planes all the time, takes me around the world and makes it very tricky to figure out how to have a family, how to feel connected to a community. I felt as though I was making a movie about that. . . . However, by the time I was directing this movie, we were in one of the worst recessions on record, and all of a sudden this whole other element of the film became a mirror.

Cameron: I think what everybody here does in common, myself included, is we make personal films. And it’s hard to visualize “Avatar” maybe from the outside as a personal film, but to me in a funny way from my perspective, it’s my most personal film because it so accurately reflects my childhood -- as a kid who was both an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy and comic books and constantly conjuring all these images in my head before there were VCRs and I could just watch any movie any time I wanted. . . .

There was very little imagery out there at the time. You had to make it up yourself, and as an artist I was always drawing all these things, so all the stuff in “Avatar” was stuff I had been drawing for years as a teenager. . . . And then as a scuba diver sort of discovering the endless bounty of nature’s imagination underwater, which is really, ultimately, almost unfathomable. So “Avatar” is all of that, all sort of distilled down into one movie. The story was written 15 years ago, and certainly there was a strong environmental consciousness then . . . but it’s obviously on our minds a lot more now as this sense of a coming day of reckoning . . . that we really have to deal with this.

Tarantino: I had this situation on “Basterds” where . . . I can honestly say if the war in Iraq wasn’t going on, I never would’ve [consciously] thought about this -- because I’m sure I would’ve had the characters do this regardless -- but how do they go and fight the Nazis? They attach bombs to themselves and go into the theater prepared to blow themselves up.

Now, I think if the Iraq war never happened, I would’ve exactly come up with that entire thing.

But the fact that they’re actually fighting it as terrorists was not lost on me once I came up with the idea. People don’t bring that up that much, but I actually think that’s an interesting thing.

john.horn@latimes.com