American Beauty was edited by Christopher Greenbury and Tariq Anwar ; Greenbury began in the position , but had to leave halfway through post @-@ production because of a scheduling conflict with Me , Myself and Irene ( 2000 ) ( in which Chris Cooper also starred ) . Mendes and an assistant edited the film for 10 days between the appointments . 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 , [ ... ] 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 . In total , he cut about 30 minutes from his original edit . The opening included a dream in which Lester imagines himself flying above the town . Mendes spent two days filming Spacey against 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 . The opening in the final cut reused a scene from the middle of the film where Jane tells Ricky to kill her father . 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 . The subsequent shot — an aerial view of the neighborhood — was originally intended as the plate shot for the bluescreen effects in the dream sequence .