David Lean as Editor

Introduction

Clive Donner is the director of The Caretaker (1963), Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), What's New, Pussycat (1965) and Alfred the Great (1969). He began his career in films as an editor, and worked as an assistant editor on David Lean's films Oliver Twist (1948), The Passionate Friends (1948) and Madeleine (1949). Here he remembers how Lean worked.

"David Lean's cutting room was always a place of quiet calm, well organized with a sense of a monk's cell about it. Geoff Foot was his editor and for two years I was Geoff's first assistant, working on The Passionate Friends and Madeleine. When the daily rushes came from the laboratory to be synchronized in the cutting room, David expected them to be in script continuity order, more work for me but much easier to go straight to the cans of film and quickly take out exactly what David asked for. He remembered every shot he had made in the film.

After we screened Geoff's first rough cut, work began in the cutting room. The moviola had spools for the picture alongside spools for sound, both moving through at normal projection speed - but it wasn't fast enough for David. He always had a 'silent head', a third small moviola through which he could run only one track, but run it backwards and forwards at a tremendous speed. He would superimpose the picture track and the sound track on top of each other, the sound track running down the left hand side perfectly in synch with the film. He knew the dialogue so well in his head that he could virtually 'read' it from the sound frames. He worked rapidly, sometimes stopping to think for minutes on end, or going out of the cutting room for a cigarette.

As he absorbed a sequence, Lean would start to fine-tune it. A lot of time and effort would be put into looking through the available material, including outtakes, and sometimes we would refer to the continuity notes which contained information he had passed on to Maggie Shipway, the continuity girl (later Maggie Unsworth). Everything would be examined to see if there was more to be got out of a fresh idea, rebalancing the footage. While all this was going on, Geoff Foot sat on a high stool on Lean's right side, watching and monitoring and suggesting possible alternative ideas, although it has to be said that most of the time there was complete silence - apart from David swearing, if something hadn't worked or didn't match. 'Swearing is so boring', he would say, but it didn't stop him using it to let off steam. I would stand close to his right elbow, with a bunch of possible cuts and outtakes in my hand. I watched his choice of them - and watched him - closely, finding great satisfaction in anticipating what his next move might be, so that all he had to do was hold out his hand for the next pieces of the puzzle, which I put into his hand without him having to ask. His concentration was total.

I found these sessions of anticipating what he was going to do some of the most illuminating and rewarding work we ever did together. He rarely paid compliments, but when now and again he did, it usually amounted first to a long look and the famous Lean Stare, before - with no change of expression - he would say, in that English schoolboy way of his, 'jolly good!' That was it. For me, it was a magical time".

Clive Donner

David Lean worked as an editor on many films before receiving his first director credit on In Which we Serve, and this section offers a closer look at just some of them.