Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/309120
37 MAY-JUN 14 / CINEMONTAGE by Hanks, suffers the "death" of Wilson, the imaginary friend that's kept him sane, the audience had to be made to care about a volleyball. "I was determined to make that as honest and direct as possible, and not be manipulative; an audience would sense that," Schmidt says. "They'd find it very phony. I had a great, very genuine performance from Tom — and from Wilson too! There was never an easy sequence, especially in the second half. It was always, 'How do I make this interesting?'" Schmidt almost turned down Pirates of the Caribbean (2003). "I said, 'I don't want to edit a movie from some stupid ride at Disneyland!'" he reveals. "Stephen Rivkin and Craig Wood had already cut 85 percent of it and it was very good. I thought, 'Why am I here?' But they needed help those last three months. The schedule was impossibly tight." Director Gore Verbinski asked each editor to go through the entire movie and make any changes they wanted. They then voted on whose scene worked best. "It was a very interesting idea," Schmidt concedes. "Sometimes you had to swallow your ego. We were very tense going into it, but we relaxed and started laughing and it ended up being a lot of fun. Gore did a wonderful job directing, and getting the material to make the action sequences so exciting — and on a movie I originally didn't want to be involved in! Afterward, I felt like somebody was watching over me." Zemeckis' next film would be CGI- animated. "Once Bob started making his motion capture movies, it was a great opportunity to move up my assistant, Jeremiah O'Driscoll. Bob didn't feel he needed me for Polar Express (2004), and I was happy not to have to spend two or three years on a project, starting out editing storyboards and pre-visualizations." Schmidt went into an early retirement. "I didn't know that's what was going to happen, but I was perfectly comfortable with that." Following the animated films Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009), Flight (2012) was Zemeckis' first live-action film in 12 years. And he got in touch again with Schmidt. "I was relaxed in my retirement, but I couldn't say no to Bob," the editor recalls. "I worked as an additional editor for five weeks — eight- hour days, no weekends. I wasn't in charge, didn't have the responsibility. It was just fun to be back with Bob, Jeremiah and [additional editor] Evan Finn." Looking back, Schmidt has very few regrets. "I was very lucky to have worked with great directors who gave me some amazing film to work with. But success didn't come quickly; I didn't edit my first feature, Marathon Man, until I was 38, as an additional editor to Jim Clark, 10 years after I started in the business. It took 14 years to get a solo editor credit on the TV movie The Jericho Mile, and 15 years to Coal Miner's Daughter, my first solo feature. "Along the way, I turned down films, left films, and made choices that were very personal to me," Schmidt adds in conclusion. "People told me that was unprofessional, that word would get around and I'd never work in this town again. Sometimes I was out of work for three or four months, but then a film would come along that was so good it was worth taking those chances." f Arthur Schmidt, right, receives the ACE Career Achievement Award from director Robert Zemeckis at the ACE Eddie Awards in 2009. Photo by Peter Zakhary/Tilt Photo Arthur Schmidt at his home in Sherman Oaks, California in November 2013. CineMontage_May-Jun_14-3b.indd 37 4/16/14 2:36 PM