Announcement: Editor Anne Coates: Lifetime Achievement Oscar

I suppose I can mention this now, since my draft is in and there have been conference calls with the Dudes in Charge, and the train has most definitely left the station:

I have been asked to write the narration for the tribute reel that will play for editor Anne Coates at the Lifetime Achievement Oscars awards ceremony in November. You can see a list of the recipients here. (I also wrote the narration two years ago for Gena Rowlands’ Lifetime Achievement Oscar, which was read by Angelina Jolie.) The Oscar video dudes like my work and I was so pleased to be asked to pay tribute to Anne Coates!

Coates is a 90-year-old artist whose first job as editor, the first time she got full screen credit, was in 1952 with Pickwick Papers (although she had been second editor on the legendary The Red Shoes) and just last year she edited 50 Shades of Gray. (In her opinion, that last one should have been “raunchier.” She’s not wrong.) Of course she is most known for what is one of the most famous and celebrated cuts in cinema history in Lawrence of Arabia: going from a closeup of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to the sun coming up over the desert. I have seen Lawrence on the big screen, and that cut – so breath-taking and so audacious at any size (TV screen, laptop, whatever) – is quite literally mind-blowing on the big screen. It’s RADICAL. How do you even begin to make the choice to do a cut like that? (Incidentally, they initially cut it like that because of a technological issue: they wanted it to be a dissolve but they had to wait a bit to see the result of that, due to the technology of the day. In the meantime, though, Lean and Coates both looked at that super blunt cut and thought: “Huh. It works really well like that, too, though, doesn’t it?”)

Editors go through entire careers without creating a cut that becomes as famous as that one.

In real time:

Along the way, she has edited Becket, The Horses’ Mouth, Murder on the Orient Express, The Elephant Man, Chaplin, In the Line of Fire, Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Unfaithful … and What About Bob?, and the inclusion of that film in that list makes me love her all the more. She has worked with legendary directors: Powell and Pressburger, John Ford, Jack Cardiff, Richard Attenborough, Peter Glenville, Wolfgang Petersen, Sidney Lumet. She loves working with younger directors, new names, those bringing energy and risk-taking into the profession. David Lynch. Steven Soderbergh. The seduction scene in Out of Sight is a masterpiece, and that is due in part to how Coates and Soderbergh decided to put it together, not to mention the choice to do these little freeze-frames. Sexy!

But of course, Anne Coates will go down in the history books for her Oscar-winning edit of Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The director David Lean was an editor himself, and he took a look at one of the first scenes she edited and said that she was the only editor he worked with where he saw what she did on her first pass and thought to himself: “That’s exactly how I would have done it.” It was a tremendously challenging job, with – literally – miles of footage of camels crossing the desert.

Another famous scene is the entrance of Ali (Omar Sharif), one of the most memorable character introductions in cinema history.

Coates is a rare one in that she believes that if you don’t need to cut, then don’t freaking cut: let a scene play out in one if it works. Initially they were going to cut away from Ali a couple of times during his legendary approach but then they saw how well it worked to just have him materialize, over an excruciatingly long period of time. You do not know if he is benign or malevolent. Maurice Jarre did the famous sweeping score of Lawrence, but there is no music playing beneath the scene. Nothing. We sit. And watch. And wait. Again: bold. Audacious. Radical. And RIGHT.

Speaking of her belief that if a scene CAN play out in one, then LET it play out in one: witness the slow push-in to Anthony Hopkins’ face when he first sees The Elephant Man. Lynch/Coates had talked a lot about how to “reveal” the Elephant Man, and this is a key moment. But instead of showing us the Elephant Man fully, Lynch stays on Hopkins, moving in closer, closer, closer, and at the closest point, a tear falls down his cheek. (THAT is acting technique, my friends.) Lynch was smart enough to know that the entire thing is about Hopkins’ reaction. Everything we need to know is on his face. And Coates – known as an “actor’s editor” for how well she takes care of performances (leaving them alone, for the most part, if they’re good), loved that choice. Look how beautiful.

I am thrilled to have been asked to pay tribute to this genius. So far there has been no word on who will read the script I’ve written, but the actress they have approached is an exciting prospect for me. Hopefully I will have given her something beautiful to read.

Congratulations to Anne Coates!