Editing American Beauty (1999 film) (section)

===Editing===
''American Beauty'' was edited by [[Christopher Greenbury]] and [[Tariq Anwar (film editor)|Tariq Anwar]]; Greenbury began in the position, but had to leave halfway through post-production because of a scheduling conflict with ''[[Me, Myself & Irene]]''&nbsp;(2000). Mendes and an assistant edited the film for ten days between the appointments.<ref>{{harvnb|Lowenstein|2008|p=270}}</ref> Mendes realized during editing that the film was different from the one he had envisioned. He believed he had been making a "much more whimsical,&nbsp;... kaleidoscopic" film than what came together in the edit suite. Instead, Mendes was drawn to the emotion and darkness; he began to use the score and shots he had intended to discard to craft the film along these lines.<ref name="kemp 25-26">{{harvnb|Kemp|2000|pages=25–26}}</ref> In total, he cut about 30 minutes from his original edit.<ref name="chapter 19" />

The opening included a dream in which Lester imagines himself flying above the town. Mendes spent two days filming Spacey against [[chroma key|bluescreen]], but removed the sequence as he believed it to be too whimsical—"like a [[Coen brothers]] movie"—and therefore inappropriate for the tone he was trying to set.<ref name="chapter 2" /> The opening in the final cut reused a scene from the middle of the film where Jane tells Ricky to kill her father.<ref name="chapter 1" /> This scene was to be the revelation to the audience that the pair was not responsible for Lester's death, as the way it was scored and acted made it clear that Jane's request was not serious. However, in the portion he used in the opening—and when the full scene plays out later—Mendes used the score and a reaction shot of Ricky to leave a lingering ambiguity as to his guilt.<ref>{{harvnb|Mendes|Ball|2000|loc=chapter 20}}</ref> The subsequent shot—an aerial view of the neighborhood—was originally intended as the plate shot for the bluescreen effects in the dream sequence.<ref name="chapter 2" />

Mendes spent more time recutting the first ten minutes than the rest of the film taken together. He trialed several versions of the opening;<ref name="chapter 1" /> the first edit included bookend scenes in which Jane and Ricky are convicted of Lester's murder,<ref name="chapter 12">{{harvnb|Mendes|Ball|2000|loc=chapter 12}}</ref> but Mendes excised these in the last week of editing<ref name="chapter 1" /> because he felt they made the film lose its mystery,<ref>{{cite magazine|date=July 7, 2000 |title='Beauty' mark: DVD due with 3 hours of extras |magazine=The Hollywood Reporter}}</ref> and because they did not fit with the theme of redemption that had emerged during production. Mendes believed the trial drew focus away from the characters and turned the film "into an episode of ''[[NYPD Blue]]''". Instead, he wanted the ending to be "a poetic mixture of dream and memory and narrative resolution".<ref name="kemp 26">{{harvnb|Kemp|2000|p=26}}</ref> When Ball first saw a completed edit, it was a version with truncated versions of these scenes. He felt that they were so short that they "didn't really register".  Mendes and he argued,<ref name="kazan 35" /> but Ball was more accepting after Mendes cut the sequences completely; Ball felt that without the scenes, the film was more optimistic and had evolved into something that "for all its darkness had a really romantic heart".<ref name="wolk" />