One of the honors of my career thus far was being asked to write the narration (read by Diane Lane) for the tribute reel played at Anne Coates’ Lifetime Achievement Oscar ceremony.
From Lawrence of Arabia to 50 Shades of Grey is a hell of a run. (When asked what she thought of 50 SHADES, she said, “I think it could have been a bit more raunchy.”)
Anne Coates was responsible for one of the most famous cuts in cinema history – which mainly came about because they didn’t have the right technology on site to create the intended dissolve. But when director David Lean and Coates saw the cut, they thought: “Is there any reason we CAN’T just leave as is?”
And then, AFTER that famous cut, comes an equally famous dissolve, from the sun rise to the dunes:
Speaking of Lawrence of Arabia, another startling choice was in the almost as famous entrance of Omar Sharif’s character:
David Lean, an editor himself, said that Anne Coates was the only editor he worked with where he saw her first pass on a sequence and didn’t want to change anything because it was how he would have done it.
In my humble opinion, her editing of the romantic sequence in Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Sexual tension made manifest. The tension is in the performances for sure, but the cutting helps it land. Because, as you notice, there’s no sex. But it is as sexy as it gets, due to how they cut, and use flash-forwards to see where the characters are going. There was a lot of discussion between Coates and Soderbergh on putting together this sequence.
Watch this clip here of The Elephant Man. Watch for what comes at around the 1:30 mark.
There are a couple of things that are so masterful here. We get glimpses of the “elephant man” but it is in that excruciatingly slow push-in to Hopkins’ face where the empathy is born. (This is also masterful because Hopkins’ one trembling tear falls just as the camera gets at its closest vantage point. Genius.) Stella Adler always used to say (and it’s a difficult thought, people resist it): “Talent is in the choice.” I think there’s a lot of truth in it. True talent is revealed in the choices an artist makes. This is an amazing choice. She said repeatedly that so much of her work came from an actor’s performance. Good actors create a rhythm – the rhythm is already present. She was known as an actor’s editor. She didn’t make unnecessary cuts. She was about the performance. And so here, with Hopkins – there was not only no need to cut back and forth between the elephant man and Hopkins’ face – such cutting would ruin what was happening in Hopkins’ performance.
Coates’ work is so legendary and so respected, Scorsese cast her as an editor in THE AVIATOR, briefly seen going through a mountain of film, wearing a teal-green/silver dress.
Attention must be paid.
“In a way, I’ve never looked at myself as a woman in the business. I’ve just looked at myself as an editor.”
Rest in peace.
