5 Indian Film Editors Reflect On The Invisible Architecture Of Their Craft

Both Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand have called film an editor’s medium — and it’s not hard to see why. While cinema is perceived as a purely visual artform, how a story feels is ultimately achieved in the editing room. From the Soviet Montage Theory that likened editing to an alphabet that organizes visual 'syllables' into meaning, to Hollywood’s continuity system of invisible cuts that preserve and provide temporal coherence in a narrative, editing styles have become a creative storytelling tool of their own.

For many editors, there’s one pivotal film that awakened them to this power. Not just a favourite, but a formative text that shifted their understanding of timing, rhythm, emotion, and the invisible architecture behind every frame. We spoke to five Indian editors about the one film that changed the way they think, feel, and move through a story. What follows is a deep dive into the pulse of cinema through the eyes of those who shape it.

For Tanya Chhabra, known for editing Kennedy (2023), Black Warrant (2025), and Khauf (2025), it was Run Lola Run that rewired her perception. She was still in college when she saw it, and it was here she became viscerally aware that editing wasn’t just about keeping things moving, but thinking and feeling in real time. "There’s a moment early on, when Lola first hits the street and the tempo kicks in, where you realize the cuts are breathing with her. The rhythm is doing the storytelling. That was the first time I clocked how a cut could carry intention, urgency, and even philosophy without using a single word," she shares.

What stayed with her, is how the film embraced repetition without falling into monotony. Each iteration of Lola’s run, despite echoing the same plot beats, felt emotionally distinct. “Time felt elastic,” she says. “It could tighten or expand based on emotion, not just chronology.” It taught her that pace is less about speed and more about pulse.

She now approaches every scene like a piece of music, listening for its tempo, anticipating its downbeats and silences. Run Lola Run gave her permission to break away from linearity if the emotional arc calls for it, to play with time, and to honour emotion over exposition. Whether editing a feature film or a two-minute ad, Tanya returns to that insight: cuts don’t just show performance — they shape it.

Nitin Baid, the editor behind Gully Boy (2019), Masaan (2015), and Raazi (2018), noticed that in a lot of films, any experiments with structure would come at the cost of emotional detachment and even something that would overpower the narrative. However, Nicolas Roeg's Don’t Look Now was different. “It’s a rare horror film that thrives on the tension the edit creates," he notes. While many films that play with form end up distancing viewers, this one drew him deeper. “The editing feels almost cubist in style," he shares, "fragments of time, space, and emotion scattered in ways that seem disconnected until the final image clicks into place."

The film, to him, plays like a temporal jigsaw organizing slowly but organically. “It’s a constant play of time and rhythm,” he insists. The edit offers glimpses of the end at the beginning, leaving breadcrumbs to the complete picture. "Don’t Look Now is such a potent example because it never sacrifices emotional immediacy for structural play. It’s horror rooted in grief, disorientation, and premonition and the way it is edited is reflective of all these words," he explains. "The ability to create so much movement — or even stop time — with a cut, and how to show less to have a greater impact, is something this film really taught me."

Shweta Venkat, who has edited acclaimed films like Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Newton (2017), and Kalank (2019), found her awakening through Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama. “The quiet nature of its principal character seeps through the entire film,” she recalls. Here, performance and script dictated the pace, not plot. The tension was in the silences, glances, and the attraction between the two characters.

Anupama showed her how much could be said without speaking. And more crucially, how editing could hold space for emotion to bloom. “Nothing happens, yet many things do,” she says. The film’s treatment of time — how it holds on shots and lets the viewer marinate in the moments, taught her how to handle emotion gently.

This sensitivity continues to shape how she engages with rushes, which refers to the unedited raw footage captured during a shooting day, picking up on the hints the cinematographer is trying to point at. Anupama became her blueprint for balance; for stories where no single element like script, music, or pace overpowers the other.

When Aarti Bajaj, who is known for her award-winning work on films like Jab We Met (2007) and Black Friday (2004), saw Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, she was 21 and on the cusp of graduating — thinking about a career in print. But something in that film shifted her trajectory entirely. “It drew me toward the visual medium,” she says. Not just because of what it showed, but how it moved.

The film by Vittorio De Sica, an anthology of three stories, could’ve felt disjointed. But it didn’t. “There was a steady emotional flow,” she says. Each story felt different in tone and character, but something deeper held it all together — an emotional rhythm. Having grown up on louder, faster Bollywood films, this quiet film hit differently. It was expressive, yet grounding.

That pacing, and permission to take your time, continues to influence Aarti’s work. “It’s not just about cutting scenes together — it’s about guiding the audience’s feelings,” she explains. Sound, too, isn’t an afterthought for her. It’s part of how she shapes the cut.

Over the years, Aarti’s process has become about getting to the heart of the matter, driven by an awareness of rhythm and a deeper connection that can’t really be explained. This is a sensibility that is honed by an "inner sense of timing, an understanding of human nature" as she puts it. The editor believes that films with strong concepts often falter because they haven’t been shaped with care.

Namrata Rao,the editor behind Ishqiya (2010), Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), Love Sex aur Dhoka (2010), Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015), and Kahaani (2012), had many early influences — from Malena to The Untouchables — but if she had to choose just one, it would be Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. She remembers watching it shot by shot, dissecting every frame in film school. “It was very clear that if you cut with good rhythm, even ‘wrong’ cuts work,” she says.

She points to a sequence early in the film — three consecutive cuts, all on the same axis but with varying magnifications that introduce her not just to the villagers and the setting but their minds and emotional spaces. The wisdom of the old man everyone turns to for advice is felt through the same effect outside his house, with a wheel and flowing water, before he even appears. This wasn't encouraged in the editing textbooks from Namrata's student years but it worked in the film.

She also highlights how Kurosawa's shots become the language through which he told the story. The jump cut from the front view of the old man to the side accompanying the line "we will fight!" brought drama and anticipation. The match cuts of a villager falling to the ground after all his rice is stolen reflected helplessness. The feet stomping/sticks landing as motivations to cut when the women of the village come together to beat a bandit, alluded to a newfound courage. Even the focus on the aftermath of a fight instead of the action, conveyed the futility of violence.

What the editor realised about the film was that the sum of its parts were larger than the parts themselves, which allowed the story to work on a subconscious level. "Any good edit aims to do that — create meaning with visuals that goes beyond the visuals." It’s this understanding that she’s carried into her own work, where she illustrates that the power of a cut lies not in its sharpness, but in its sensitivity. Namrata absorbed a lot from Seven Samurai, like cutting on movement to create seamlessness, employing sound to carry a cut, or using magnification for drama rather than exposition. But above all, she infers, “There is just one rule in editing: there is no rule. Do what the story wants you to do."

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