Toward the end of the editing process on Julia, Fred Zinnemann observed that he felt the director and the editor, alone with the film for months and months, could only go ninety percent of the way toward the finished film—that what was needed for the last ten percent was “the participation of the audience,” whom he saw as his final collaborators. Not in the sense that he would respond to them blindly, but that he felt their presence was helpful as a corrective, to keep certain obsessions from becoming corrosive and to point out blind spots that may have developed through over-familiarity with
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