Long Takes/Pre-Production Vs More Scenes/Editing

(From The Avid Yahoo User's Group)

Long takes need rehearsals and cannot be changed much in editing if not enough coverage is shot.

Some directors (HITCHCOCK for example) deliberately shot long takes without coverage in many cases so that the producers could not recut their movies (a kind of subversive final cut).

However, the more coverage you shoot the easier you can save a scene in editing -- and for younger, less experienced directors it's easier to create a scene in editing than through pre-production staging/blocking.

There seems to be a divide nowadays between a minority filmmakers (mostly European, art house and indie filmmakers -- best Hollywood example is M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN) which use lots of long takes (blocking/staging) and filmmakers who center their storytelling on editing. A perfect example for the latter is CHRISTOPHER NOLAN.

One could probably argue that editing itself hasn't gotten faster over the last decades, but more directors relied on editing to tell their stories than in the 50s and earlier. Therefore we have a higher shot length average than we used to have.
[Exactly!]

As for me, I see myself more as composing scenes from shots, rather than creating cuts.

I like that.