One of the things I think I said in (an) interview was that I thought Ionesco’s essays about playwriting were really essays about film editing. I remember that it was comforting to me that some of the things that he wrote about how he constructed his plays were precisely elaborations about the issues I was confronted with in editing the movies. And the experience of being at the place and shooting the film, rather than trying to figure out in advance what the themes were to be. The associational issues that he dealt with as he was writing plays just spoke to me.

It was technical issues of construction, and a relationship between how he was constructing his plays and the way I was trying to construct my movies. It didn’t, say, solve a problem in the editing of Welfare, but it made me comfortable with the way I was proceeding to try and solve the problems, knowing that somebody I admired was dealing with similar problems. It was like having a good conversation with a more experienced person about issues that concern me.

I don’t even particularly want to summarize (one of my films) because if I could summarize it in 25 words or less I shouldn’t have made the movie. But it’s the idea of creating a feeling that the sum of the parts adds up to more than the specific encounters.

Frederick Wiseman
from an interview with Nicolas Rapold (2008)