Am I an artist? To quote Bill Clinton, it depends what the meaning of is is? Is I an artist? Historically, editors have been very wary of that self-description, because we exist in the shadow of the director. And, if we start getting an inflated idea of our abilities and our power, we lose, nobody will hire us. You know?
So, I think the short answer is, yes. What we do is certainly the equivalent is... certainly the equivalent of what other people who are called artists do, but we are not the ultimate controller of the film. There are people who can override our decisions. The director, and there are sometimes people who can override the director, which is to say, the producer, or the studio. So, the editor is several orders of magnitude down from that. And, I think generally speaking, we – we as a culture – we recognise that unless you have some degree of ultimate authority, you're not a real artist. So, in that sense, editors are not artists, because we are working with a given structure that is not ours. But, we inhabit that structure so thoroughly, that I think sometimes we achieve in moments things that can stand on their own alongside other forms of art, and things that are uniquely achievable by the craft/art of montage, which is the construction of images that move in time accompanied by sound. So, it's a complex question, and it deserves a complex answer because there's no... there's no short answer to it.
