CineMontage

Winter 2015

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26 CINEMONTAGE / WINTER 2015 by Michael Goldman T he Academy Award nominees for Film Editing this year exemplify the importance of the collaborative role of the editor in shaping a director's vision. William Goldenberg, ACE, won an Oscar and an ACE Eddie Award for Argo in 2013, and has now been nominated five times for each award after this year's honors for his work in partnership with Norwegian director Morten Tyldum crafting the nonlinear, low-budget, English indie film, The Imitation Game. The other previous Oscar nominee is Joel Cox, ACE, Clint Eastwood's longtime editor and also a former Oscar winner and now a three-time nominee, to go along with four Eddie nominations and one victory (Cox's Oscar and Eddie were for 1992's Unforgiven). Cox partnered with Gary Roach, ACE, a first-time Oscar and Eddie nominee, to cut American Sniper, the controversial adaptation of the memoir penned by late Iraqi War veteran Chris Kyle. The others are also first-time Oscar nominees. Sandra Adair, ACE, who has one previous Eddie nomination to her credit, spent 12 years culling through footage of the same actors alongside her longtime colleague, director Richard Linklater, to put together Linklater's acclaimed coming- of-age story, Boyhood. Barney Pilling, ACE, paired with Wes Anderson for the first time and ended up creating a quirky, razor- paced comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Tom Cross expanded on the work he had done on a Sundance-winning short called Whiplash, about a music student's clash with a sadistic music teacher, for director Damien Chazelle — and ended up seeing the feature version win Sundance again and catapult into Oscar consideration. Following is some insight from these editors about the work that earned them recognition this awards season. Peer recognition still humbles the veteran Cox. "After all, editors see editing differently from other people," he says. "To have them recognize your effort is overwhelming." Cox feels that colleagues appreciated his and Roach's ability to highlight Eastwood's agenda on American Sniper to simultaneously juxtapose the emotional cost of what Kyle went through both in combat and in his personal life. "Clint felt this movie would be made in the editing room, in the sense that he was shooting a lot of coverage, and we would have to go through it all and decipher it, almost like the way a potter molds a raw piece of clay," Cox says. "The basic format, the way to adapt [Kyle's book], was pretty much decided by the screenwriter [Jason Hall]. The hardest part is always bringing the film down to a playing time that we Oscar's Favorite Film Editors William Goldenberg.

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