Tony talked to me one day at Beaconsfield Studios. His work with Nic Roeg and Neil Jordan is envied and admired, but in his distinguished career he has also worked with some other mavericks from Sam Peckinpah to Dusan Makaveyev and the unique Stanley Kubrick.
I was born in Paddington, London. My mother was a nurse, my father was a film cameraman, and my grandfather, whom I never knew, was Charlie Chaplin’s press agent. So there’s a sort of history of the film business in the family.
As a child I didn’t have any ambitions in that direction, except that I went to the cinema quite a bit and loved westerns. My grandmother took me – it was an enormous local Odeon with a restaurant and a giant auditorium. I can’t say that I ever had a great love of movies, but enjoyed going to see them.
I went to King Alfred’s School in North London, but I didn’t do very well academically. I decided I wanted to be an engineer, I don’t know why, except that the overriding feeling was not to follow my father, who by then was a Film Operations Manager at the BBC working at Ealing Studios.1
So I rebelliously said I want nothing to do with my Dad, but unfortunately I didn’t get the grades that would have allowed me to get into the kind of engineering I was interested in. So I was stuck at home at the age of sixteen, with my father and mother getting really fed up with me.
My father’s job brought him into contact with independent documentary film companies, that the BBC contracted to make television programmes. One of these companies offered to take me on for a summer job. So I went to a small documentary company in St. John’s Wood run by Marcus Cooper. I became the Tea Boy and Cable Monkey for the sound department, which was one man plus me!
The companies main business was making government documentaries and I think that was my downfall. They were secret and because I was young and because my father had been a paid-up member of the communist party, I wasn’t given security clearance. I had to leave, but by then I think I was bitten.
While I was there I used to hang around the cutting room.
It was run by a very friendly and welcoming woman called Dot, or Dorothy. I suppose, if I think about it now, what made me attracted to editing was the fact that there was this warm person who, when not busy, was quite willing to talk about what she was doing. Her assistant was easy going. It seemed like a nice place to be.
Anyway I had to leave, and I went to work for Athos films, for something like four years. They gave me the opportunity to go through an entire film from beginning to end (driver, camera assistant, spark and assistant editor), which looking back now was invaluable. Even though I enjoyed it I wasn’t committed yet. I didn’t have any great passion.
While I had been working at Athos films, one of the editors, Teddy Darvas2 was offered a Boulting Brothers film called ‘Rotten to the Core’,3 he knew I wanted to move on, and he introduced me to his sound editor, John Poyner.4 I became an assistant sound editor. I stayed with John when he later did the sound for a film directed by Charles Crichton.5 I remember Charlie sitting down at the Moviola and cutting a sequence himself, and it was probably the first time I realised what an editor could do, certainly in a dramatic sense anyway. You could see how he made it an enjoyable emotional experience for an audience. A smile came to your face when you saw the sequence. Essentially he made it up out of ‘documentary’ footage.
After that I carried on being an assistant sound editor on several features, but I didn’t really feel that sound, as an end in itself was particularly interesting to me. Also at that time sound wasn’t considered to be that important.
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Probably the first time I became interested in film editing was when I worked on a film with Ann Chegwidden,6 called ‘Daleks Invade the Earth’.7 Ann was wonderful in that she let me sit behind her on a high chair, watch and ask her why she did things. She didn’t say Oh, shut up leave me alone, she was very open about it and almost pleased to be asked. I was probably rather arrogant in those days and I really didn’t think there was anything unusual in my prompting or prodding her. I started to become aware of technique.
By now I was an avid Paris Pullman8 devotee. From my days at Athos my cinema going was developing and by now I was seeking out the more interesting movies. I remember the seasons of Bergman at the Everyman.9 I used to be depressed for weeks after that! I am still haunted by ‘Summer with Monica’. That’s not to say that I was particularly critical. I still loved westerns. Even now I feel it’s one of the saddest passing of genres. I used to love going to westerns on a Sunday afternoon.
After having worked with Ann I started to think ‘this is really what I want to do’. The next important phase was when I met up with Norman Savage.10 He had cut ‘Doctor Zhivago’,11 and typical of those times when someone is nominated for an Oscar, nobody then offers you a job. It seems to go hand-in-hand. People obviously thought he was too expensive so they didn’t call him. As a fill-in he was going to do sound editing on ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye’12 which Russell Lloyd13 was cutting. Les Hogdson14 was the main sound editor and Norman was going to do spot effects, and took me on as his assistant.
Meeting Russ Lloyd and seeing how he worked was a real eye-opener. I would arrive early in the morning but Russ would already be there working away with the film, and John Huston15 wasn’t around. He would do a cut – smoke his pipe – look at it again – think about it and put it back together. I realised he was building a film. It sort of dawned on me that an editor could work on his own, can actually do things unprompted by a director, without outside influence. Of course, I knew editors worked on their own a lot of the time but there was something in the way that Russ worked that was more to do with him putting something of himself in to the film. His style was very imaginative.
The other thing I learnt on that film was how you could build a sound track. I don’t know whether you remember, but there is a sequence when Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor are riding horses through a forest. Les Hogdson had gone out with a portable recorder and actually recorded horses galloping through forests, hitting bushes, over different surfaces all for real and then fitted each individual hoof beat. It gave the sequence an incredible vitality that coconuts and leaves on a Foley stage just wouldn’t have achieved. It was like the difference between a polished piece of work and something which just had sound. From that point on I began to understand how sound could be an equal to the pictures.
After that I moved on to do three or four films with Norman Savage, of which ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’16 was one of those defining moments I think for me. I remember we were working in a cutting room with Ronnie Neame17 and there’s a scene in the film where Jean Brodie is talking to her students and telling them about Florence. She’s standing by the projector and showing them some slides. The idea was that whilst she was telling them about the place, she was really going in to her head. Every time we cut away from Maggie Smith it broke the mood. I said to Norman and Ronnie, why don’t we just jump-cut or dissolve from one shot of her to the next instead of cutting away to the class to change angles. They liked the idea and it stayed that way in the film. It made me realise again that the purpose of editing is to create a mood, an emotion. I remember at the time I was doing what assistants normally do, rewinding film or putting trims away and Ronnie turned round to me and said ‘Oh, shut up and concentrate on what we’re doing!’ In a sense I think he was asking for help really, and not necessarily complaining, but asking me to join in.
The second one of those defining moments was when we were cutting ‘Ryan’s Daughter’18 with David Lean. There was a scene near the beginning of the film when Rosie, played by Sarah Miles, is running off down the beach, to meet the school-teacher’s role played by Robert Mitchum. She’s wearing this rather drab old mans cardigan and in order to look more beautiful she discards it to show off her pretty blouse underneath. She hides the old cardigan in a shipwreck that is lying on the beach. There were two shots. The first was a big establishing shot of the beach and this wreck, with the little figure of Rosie walking along the sands and disappearing into the wreck. Then there’s a closer shot with overlapping action where she comes into the wreck hides her cardigan and walks out, in this lovely blouse to meet Robert. David wanted a continuity cut of her arriving at the wreck and cutting as she enters it. I said why don’t you let her disappear into the wreck in the long shot so there’s a mystery about what she’s doing, and it’s a surprise when she comes out in just the blouse. He wouldn’t have it. He insisted on doing the continuity cut. The difference is one creates a mystery and one just shows what happens. It pointed up again this worm in my head saying you can do two things here and one does one thing and the other does something else.
They never went back to that scene. David was quite pig-headed and I think even if he thought it was a good idea, he probably wouldn’t have done it, because I’d said it. He was a little bit precious about his own ideas. He claimed that he used to listen to the fireman, the doorman and the projectionist, but I don’t think he ever did.
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The real crunch came when I met Nic Roeg. The editor of ‘Don’t Look Now’19 was Graeme Clifford.20 He had worked for Robert Altman on a film called ‘Images’.21 He was looking for an assistant and we met and I got the job. Nic was very much a free spirit. There were no rules. He was totally open to suggestions from any quarter. He would embrace things where other people would run screaming in the opposite direction. A perfect example from ‘Don’t Look Now’ is a scene where Donald Sutherland thinks he sees his dead daughter, but it’s really the little beastie in the red mac. He just had to walk through a little palazzo and cross a bridge. They arrived on the location and Nic noticed that there was a doll, floating along the canal and there was a little child’s glove on a windowsill. He made those two things the central point of the scene, which of course it was – the loss of the child. That was pure chance. He would never close the door to anything that might help him.
To me coming from someone like David Lean who would not shoot unless it was in the script this was extraordinary.
You probably remember the controversy over the love scene in ‘Don’t Look Now’. Julie Christie was very worried about it when she saw the film before it was released and at that time she was very close to Warren Beatty, and he must have seen it as well. He advised her, I think, that she should put pressure on Nic to change it, because it was too revealing, and would damage her career. So Nic agreed to her request that he look at the sequence again. By that time Graeme had already gone off back home to America, so Nic asked me to look at it and go through the material to see whether I felt that I could do anything. I worked on it for about two or three days and it seemed like a pack of cards. You’d take one thing out and it just knocks everything else to pieces. I struggled with it for a while and it very plainly wasn’t going to be what it should be in the film. Another problem was that the mix to the scored music meant that I was trying to change it but keep the same length. So we showed it to Julie and she acknowledged that it wasn’t like it should be so it ended up being the way it was intended, but I think that was what cemented my relationship with Nic.
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Working for Kubrick was an entirely different experience. I was very much a pair of hands. There’s no point in trying to pretend otherwise. I don’t know what it was like for those who worked with him prior to my being hired for ‘Barry Lyndon’22 but I suspect it was much the same. Having said that I was there and did contribute. I don’t think Stanley was the perfectionist he is made out to be – a perfectionist sets out with an image of what he wants. Stanley didn’t know what he wanted – his search was for knowledge. He covered himself by the number of takes or the length of time he took to edit a scene. He finds out what he wants by eliminating what he doesn’t want. I don’t really believe that’s perfection. That’s not to say it isn’t a valid way of making films. In fact it patently is. It was just his way of approaching the thorny question of creativity.
He was fascinating in that he was tenacious. For instance, the duel scene in ‘Barry Lyndon’ towards the end of the film took six-and-a-half weeks of cutting and re-cutting before we stopped. Six days a week, long days, we cut it and cut it and cut it and cut it. The interesting thing was, and I don’t know whether it’s true of the other films, that we never ran the film as a whole. We’d work on a reel and run that reel, but we’d never run the whole film. His method of working was quite strange, and now as an editor of some experience, I just don’t understand how he maintained a clear view.
After the film was released and received appalling reviews and box office Stanley rang me up with a proposition. All the way through the editing we had joked about telling the story backwards. When things started to get tense one of us would say why don’t we just tell the story in flashback. He really rang up about six months and wanted to experiment with telling the story in flashback like we joked about. So I said I’m sorry but I’m busy! (laughs).
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Then there was Peckinpah. I got a call from Sam to work on ‘Cross of Iron’.23 I’d already worked with him as an assistant on ‘Straw Dogs’24 and during the post-production became the third or fourth editor. Early on in the shooting period of ‘Straw Dogs’ the original editor, Norman Savage, left the film without having cut a frame. He and Sam were like oil and water, they just weren’t able to mix. Which left Sam in a very awkward situation as far as the backers were concerned because for an editor of such high profile to walk off sent them the wrong signal. So Sam was persuaded that he had to show the backers that the film was alright. It wasn’t enough to just send them some dailies; we had to cut a sequence. So I had to cut a sequence very early on in the shooting. Sam had got a cold and he came into the cutting room one weekend, eating raw onions! We worked literally through the night cutting a sequence to ship off to ABC the backers. It was the first pub scene when Dustin meets all the strange locals. From that point on I couldn’t do any wrong really. I didn’t continue editing, at that stage anyway. Another editor came on and he subsequently left also! Then at the stage that we were shooting on location in Cornwall and doing the interiors at Twickenham Studios it was obvious that the amount of footage coming in was too much for one editor. So I also cut sequences – fairly uncomplicated sequences but I used to cut things just to keep ahead of the dailies. I think we got on quite well Sam and I. He was quite appreciative and obviously I was loving it. Cutting a Sam Peckinpah film, even if it was only short sequences, it was great!
So ‘Cross of Iron’ came up. Sam called me out of the blue, and said I’m doing this film in Yugoslavia and I want you to be the editor. You can imagine, I just ran. I said yes please! In fact it gave me a way out of working with Stanley, because once the film was finished with Stanley it didn’t mean the work was finished. It just went on and on, checking prints for China or Japan or wherever. Or he would send you out to check out the theatre that was going to run his film. Quite instructive actually, because then cinemas were appalling places technically speaking. I went to check out the ABC in Fulham Road and they had a third of the light on the screen that they should have had. One speaker was dead, just appalling. When I pointed it out to the chief technician he said well, so what!
Peckinpah was another huge leap. It taught me a lot about how to, organise a cutting room, because of the sheer amount of material. It taught me the importance of writing notes and also planning the editing. You can imagine a battle sequence; five cameras, several takes over two or three days, inserts and pick-up shots, second unit shots. You had to have a very good idea of what you are aiming at. Otherwise you could set off on a path and reach a stonewall and have to start again. Desperately depressing, when you’ve started to cut a sequence and realise it’s taken completely the wrong direction. So working with Sam made me realise how important it is to know what it is you are trying to achieve, before you start. I found that if you take too long to get your first edit of a scene together you’ll lose it. You can’t look at multiple choices every time you want to make an edit. I found it best to crash a sequence together as quickly as I could, just so that I had a rough idea of what I was getting, and that the direction that I had decided on was the right one.
Sam’s thing was that film is a montage. I mean the whole film is a montage. I think you kind of gather the point of view as one goes on rather than through a character in a particular scene, it’s more by osmosis. As far as ‘Cross of Iron’ it’s more the character played by James Mason or David Warner, rather than James Coburn,25 that gives the point of view of the film. Sam loves details – shooting multi-cameras there is always a camera on somebody’s hand or something seemingly insignificant. The same is true of Nic. That’s what makes it difficult to determine the point of view. Sam had learnt to place a lot of trust in the editing process, he would cover a scene with a loose idea of how it should look, but not a fixed idea. The editor would have to search the material – find a way through and Sam would either say yes that’s great or keep trying. Once a scene was together in a rough cut Sam would know exactly what to do. He was very astute and bright in that respect. He was a very good editor in terms of editing as storytelling.
We had all seen ‘The Wild Bunch’26 and been completely bowled over by it. If an editor walked away from ‘The Wild Bunch’ and thought he knew everything, he should just start again. It was just startling the effect of that film. I had never cut normal speed cameras and slow-motion cameras together, certainly in the way Sam required. I found that when mixing various speeds you often needed something to kick off that change of speed. So if you take something which is quick or sharp or fast violent action and lead into slow-motion from it, it gives it a launch. It launches it off and makes it appear even slower in a sense. It makes it more obvious rather than slipping into it unannounced, and being only aware that it is slow motion after a moment or two. So the impact of the cut became stronger just by virtue of the fact that you are going from something violent to something much slower.
Cutting the battle scenes made me aware of sound and how it’s very necessary to work with the full knowledge of the effect of sound. Of course, you cut with the imagined sounds in your head but it’s amazing how incorrect you can be. In your imagination you say ‘bang’, its quick but the sound of an explosion is actually quite long. As soon as I started to apply sound tracks to the battle sequences, however rudimentary they might be, I immediately realised that I was making things too short, particularly explosions.
It was quite interesting because I hadn’t cut extended battle scenes before, and I always remember the German producer who called me Mister Lawson, saying ‘Mister Lawson, have you ever cut a vaw film bevore?’ (laughs).
The battle scenes also point up another aspect of editing in the wider sense, the linking of actions. You can combine similar actions together by never allowing the action to be completed. By using a visual link you can extend and emphasise. The battle scenes becoming flowing, one action leading naturally to the next. A kind of continuity of action making a satisfying visual experience. In the wider sense it is something you should be looking for within the structure of the story – to link the ideas and themes. To think about how you move from one scene to another, at what point in a scene you enter or leave. Would a change in the order explain the story more directly, by eliminating would you be bringing ideas closer together? Look for the links. If you don’t you are working with your eyes closed.
It was also one of the times where I used music a lot. It wasn’t always music for the film but music for the head, as an aid to concentration and engagement. If Sam heard loud music coming out of my room, at that time it was probably ‘Pink Floyd’, he would say ‘well if Tony’s working we can leave him alone!’ (much laughter). Anyway it was great fun working with Sam. Definitely a formative experience.
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To say that Nic Roeg and Sam Peckinpah are similar would be totally wrong, but in many ways they are quite alike. The style, their attitude to film-making. I had stayed in touch with Nic Roeg and he came to one of the screenings of ‘Cross of Iron’, afterwards he was very generous, he said: ‘My God did you do that?’ So ‘Bad Timing’27 came up and luckily his delayed start date meant that I could cut the film. I think if I could have a film on my gravestone that would be the one. It was an editor’s film, definitely, even if I look at it now I think, did I really do that?
Nic Roeg directing Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell in ‘Bad Timing’ (Reproduced with courtesy of itv pic (Granada Int’l)/Lfi))
At that time I was very arrogant you know I believed the editor could do anything. It didn’t matter what problems there were in the script, what problems came up in the shooting, the editor could fix it, no problem. So I breezed into it. I’m sure I thought this is going to be great! Although it doesn’t bare any relation to the shooting script, nevertheless the finished film is very much in the same spirit. It was always meant to be hoppity skip all over the place. That was a given, but nevertheless an enormous amount of structural work went into the final film, that is not represented in the script. If there’s any lesson, and there certainly was for me, it’s to be absolutely fearless in throwing the film up in the air and reconstructing it in another way, if you feel that’s necessary.
Again, the need to be organised became very important. We used to have long discussions about structure. We used what would now be a computer but in those days was a kind of ‘scandex’. It was literally a one line description of each scene, and we used to move them about. They were on little sticks and you could pull it out of its position and put it somewhere else. We used to spend lots of time just moving bits of paper essentially, around before we tried editing. In those days to structure an edit on film was very time consuming and if you set off in the wrong direction, there was a lot of wasted time.
Nic would terrify me by inviting all kinds of people to early screenings and I remember a rough-cut screening which was quite long, must have been over two hours, and we had a full theatre. You can imagine, my first film for a director; his agent was there, Theresa28 was there. I thought my God this is mad; we’re going to end up with egg on our faces and it’s going to be my fault. But he loved getting people to talk about the film. I don’t think it quite prepared us for the adverse reaction when the film came out. Now of course everyone says did you work on that fantastic film?
He taught me how to use the other side of my brain. To look at something and say, yeah that’s alright but supposing we did something completely outrageous, going with a wing and a prayer and just trying something. I can’t stress too much how important that experience and that film were.
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The next thing, which was important from a technical point of view, was a film called ‘Dragonslayer’,29 which introduced me to the problems of working on a special effects film. It wasn’t digital but the effect would be the same. There were lots of shots where you had to imagine what was happening. That’s one of the hardest things for an editor. In an effects film you have to imagine the action and still construct a scene without it. One of the lessons I learned on ‘Cross of Iron’ was if you don’t have all the elements for a scene don’t cut it. In a special effects film you don’t have all the elements and you still have to cut it. Seeing films like ‘The Matrix’ its obvious that people have managed to surmount the problems. Certainly I was aware that if I cut a sequence with blue screen imagining what was going on it would end up slow and boring. Crudely animated drawings were used to indicate the action and ‘plot’ the scenes. I cut a sequence with these ‘animatics’ that would stretch anyone’s power of imagination, just so that we could work out what was necessary. In those days they reckoned each shot cost $20,000 to do the optical work. I found it a nightmare. Digital technology has made it easier but just as costly.
Then Nic again with ‘Eureka’,30 which was a clash between independent cinema and Hollywood – not entirely a happy marriage. Amazing material, fantastic scenes, and very enjoyable, but the final film was a kind of compromise. We had a version, which was about ten minutes longer that was a much better film. Given the nature of the film, ten more minutes was not going to turn people away but made a big difference to the story and the way it played out. One of the things that always bothers me is that if somebody employs somebody like Nic Roeg they must have seen his body of work. Then to expect him to turn in a polished Hollywood type film is just ridiculous. Why not just let him get on with it. Nic’s got a very particular way of seeing.
‘Manifesto’,31 with Dusan Makaveyev32 would be the next one worth talking about. He’s very undisciplined as a director. I don’t mean that in a bad sense, because he just allows things to happen in front of him. He has a very loose attitude to the script and he enjoys improvisation and getting into the process of the actor–director relationship and working through things. A very intuitive director, and in the editing he showed me that you sometimes don’t know what you do until you’ve done it. Then you look at it and look for the patterns and the tendencies and then you polish them, bring them out. That’s what he did. When we were editing he’d take a cassette of the film away at night – he was a terribly bad sleeper – so in the middle of the night he would run the film. In the morning he’d come in and point out things that he’d noticed about the film that made him realise what he was trying to achieve, without knowing.
He also came out with some very strange things that you couldn’t really use. For instance, one day he came in and he told me that he had counted the number of animals in the film; so many dogs, so many cats, so many horses, so many chickens. So I said ‘well what can we do with that?’ and he said ‘oh, nothing I just thought it was interesting!’
On a more serious note, he would come in, in the morning and say did I realise that a character was such and such, and perhaps we should look at the performance and shift it to make it more interesting, to take advantage of it. He allowed actors to take liberties with the script and wasn’t overprotective towards it then later saw that it was playing into his hands and that he could use it.
It’s the same sort of thing that Nic does, where he’ll arrive on the set or location, see something and take advantage of it. Dusan would do that in a rather more introspective way, but he had no problem with ignoring the script. Simon Callow33 who was in the film, wrote a book after the experience called ‘Shooting the Actor’.34 Dusan’s approach rubbed up against Simon’s view that the script is the bible, whereas Dusan believed the script is the notes.
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‘Two Deaths’35 is the next film I want to touch on. It was made for BBC films from a novel. It was shot on 16 mm, which I hadn’t touched for years. As you know 16 mm film equipment is miserable. I couldn’t use a Moviola because it destroys the film physically, so I ended up with a Pic-sync, which is a Heath Robinson contraption which should be thrown away and a Steenbeck, which is really only a viewing machine. Bumping up against this alien technology made me question every editorial decision I made. Because it’s so fucking difficult to make an edit I was saying to myself why do I want to cut here? It made me go right back to the basics; why do you edit, what is the point, things that I had forgotten in a sense. It made me totally re-examine the process and ask myself why am I doing this? I enjoyed it because of that getting back to the basics. It happened again when we converted to electronics.
After that came ‘Michael Collins’,36 which I came on to after the film had been cut and they had had some previews. I had a phone call from first Stephen Woolley,37 and then Neil38 called me. He wasn’t convinced he had got the best out of the film and didn’t know how to proceed. He didn’t feel confident that the editor he was working with could help, so he asked me if I would go and have a look at it. One of the hardest things as an editor is to see what you’ve done and alter it when you believe that it’s not correct.
We persuaded Neil to shoot some extra scenes, and we did quite a bit of restructuring and happily the preview figures were greatly increased and everybody was very happy. It’s really the editor’s nightmare in a sense; how to retain your objective point of view. In the final stages of a film you get lots of voices coming at you, outside pressures to conform to some preconceived idea of what the film should be and it’s really hard to retain your objectivity.
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There are three or four critical moments for an editor. The first one is obviously when you see the dailies for the first time. It is the only time you see them with fresh eyes. You set up a lot of thoughts and feelings about the material at that stage and you have to hang on to them. I make quite a lot of notes, either at the rushes screening or immediately after and again when I look at the material immediately prior to editing.
The second critical moment, and it’s critical in two ways, is the first cut screening. It’s critical because you have to remain totally open to your emotions and feelings about the film, because you are never going to be in that position again. It’s also critical because it’s the moment of greatest danger, from a political point of view for an editor because this is what you have been working on all by yourself for the last several weeks. If it doesn’t look good or the producer or director doesn’t like it you are in a very difficult and dangerous situation. You’ve got to be able to think clearly and make constructive criticism.
The next one is when you reach a fine cut. That’s the time when it’s too late to say this could be shorter, we should take out this scene, or turn the whole thing into flashback. That’s a critical time when you’ve locked the film down and you’re saying that’s the film! It’s all to do with that thing of trying to retain an overview. It’s really hard.
There’s a period at around about the director’s cut, like ten weeks after the shooting, when you’ve become familiar with the film. A time when I must stop looking at the edits and start looking at the film. So you’ve got rid of the technology in your head, and you’re looking at story. I find that I have to get through the boredom factor. I have to become bored with the film in order to be able to forget the film, to be able to see it with fresher eyes. I look at my watch and say Oh god we’ve got another hour of this, I can’t sit here. Then once I’ve done that I can then see it again. I re-engage with it, but it means I’ve forgotten how much it took me to get to that stage.
The editor’s conundrum, I think this is the key to editing. The dilemma, the paradox for an editor is that you’ve got to constantly surprise people with the construction of the editing, and yet you’ve got to satisfy their desire to be obvious. So you’ve got to give them what they want and you’ve got to surprise them. That’s the key to almost all aspects of editing, to make it look surprising and yet obvious.
I remember when I first started editing I’d worry a cut. I’d spend a whole morning on one edit. By the end of the day I’d moved on fifty feet (thirty seconds) or less and completely lost any sense of what the scene should be doing, I was so tied up with finding the right frame. That’s what you’ve got to forget about. The editor shouldn’t worry about frames. You’ve got to worry about the story and the emotional feel of the scene. You mustn’t worry about continuity in any shape or form. It’s a red herring.
There’s a lovely story that Dusan told me about his film ‘The Coca-Cola Kid’.39 There’s a scene where one of the actors has a cigarette, which just keeps going from one hand to the other, because of the rest of the continuity and of course nobody ever notices. If you cut the scene in the correct emotional way and tell the story properly nobody’s going to give a damn, whether the cigarette is here or there. On ‘Insignificance’,40 which I cut for Nic, there is a scene where Michael O’Neil is undressing and he takes off three socks!
(Both dissolve into guffaws of laughter)
1. Ealing Studios – Formerly the home of Ealing Films, Michael Balcon’s company which produced a whole generation of top British filmmakers and movies after the Second World war.
2. Teddy Darvas – Editor active in 1960s and 1970s.
3. Rotten to the Core – Directed by John Boulting. One of Charlotte Rampling’s early films (1965).
4. John Poyner – Sound editor – Oscar for sound effects on ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967), Robert Aldrich.
5. Charles Crichton (1910–99) – Editor then director, from ‘Lavender Hill Mob’ (1951) to ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ (1988).
6. Ann Chegwidden – Editor, cut ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1964), for Roger Corman.
7. Daleks Invade the Earth – 1966.
8. Paris Pullman – Former art house cinema in London’s Kensington.
9. Everyman – Repertory cinema in Hampstead, London.
10. Norman Savage – Editor short but distinguished career between 1963 and 1972.
11. Doctor Zhivago – David Lean, from Boris Pasternak’s novel (1965).
12. Reflections in a Golden Eye – John Huston. Based on Novel by Carson McCullers, 1967.
13. Russell Lloyd – Editor, worked several times with Huston.
14. Les Hogdson – Sound editor from early fifties.
15. John Huston (1906–87) – Writer, actor, director – Oscar 1949 for ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’.
16. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Ronnie Neame, starring Maggie Smith, 1969.
17. Ronnie Neame – Distinguished cameraman who became a director.
18. Ryan’s Daughter – David Lean, 1970.
19. Don’t Look Now – Nicolas Roeg, from the story by Daphne du Maurier, 1973.
20. Graeme Clifford – Australian born editor who became a director.
21. Images – Robert Altman, with Susannah York, 1972.
22. Barry Lyndon – Stanley Kubrick, based on novel by Thackeray, 1975.
23. Cross of Iron – Sam Peckinpah, 1977.
24. Straw Dogs – Sam Peckinpah, 1971.
25. James Mason, David Warner and James Coburn – The kind of disparate collection of talents that Peckinpah seemed to thrive on.
26. The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah, 1969.
27. Bad Timing – Nicolas Roeg, 1980.
28. Theresa Russell – Born 1957, starred for Nicolas Roeg several times after ‘Bad Timing’.
29. Dragonslayer – Matthew Robbins, 1981.
30. Eureka – Nicolas Roeg, with Gene Hackman, 1986.
31. Manifesto – Dusan Makaveyev, 1988.
32. Dusan Makaveyev – Born 1932, Belgrade, director of many anarchic/comic films with dark undertones.
33. Simon Callow – Prolific stage and film actor.
34. Shooting the Actor – Still available as a Picador original.
35. Two Deaths – Nicolas Roeg, 1995.
36. Michael Collins – Neil Jordan, 1996.
37. Stephen Woolley – Born 1956, producer, well known for his successful partnership with Nik Powell.
38. Neil Jordan – Born 1950, director/writer, won Oscar for original screenplay for ‘The Crying Game’ (1992).
39. The Coca-Cola Kid – Dusan Makaveyev, 1985.
40. Insignificance – Nicolas Roeg, 1985.