Anne V. Coates

Anne Voase Coates OBE (12 December 1925 – 8 May 2018) was a British film editor with a more than 60-year-long career. She was perhaps best known as the editor of David Lean's epic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Coates was nominated on four other occasions for the Oscar, the other motion pictures being Becket (1964), The Elephant Man (1980), In the Line of Fire (1993) and Out of Sight (1998). In an industry where women accounted for only 16 per cent of all editors working on the top 250 films of 2004, and 80 per cent of the films had absolutely no women on their editing teams at all, Coates thrived as a leading film editor. She was awarded BAFTA's highest honour, a BAFTA Fellowship, in February 2007 and was given an Academy Honorary Award, which are popularly known as a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, in November 2016 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Quotes

• We had mostly pilots in the hospital, [...] and kids who had been playing with bombs they found on the ground and stuff. Pretty harroing, actually but it was intriguing for me just to be meeting other people (en) it opened my mind to communism and things like that which shocked my family.
  • "The hand that rocks the cradle", The Independent (London, 19 November 1998), p. 12
  • Coates worked as a nurse before she was able to enter the film industry, a career choice her family opposed; her uncle, J. Arthur Rank, eventually relented.

• But I was taught, or I must have heard it somewhere, that as it became a more important job, men started to get in on it. While it was just a background job, they let the women do it. But when people realized how interesting and creative editing could be, then the men elbowed the women out of the way and kind of took over.
  There were some wonderful women editors who helped inspire me to go into editing in England. In a way, I've never looked at myself as a woman in the business. I've just looked at myself as an editor. I mean, I'm sure I've been turned down because I'm a woman, but then other times I've been used because they wanted a woman editor.
  • "Walter Murch Interviews Anne V. Coates (Part I)", editorsnet.com (1 May 2000); reproduced at "Walter Murch Interviews Anne V. Coates", FilmSound.org

• Women are mostly mothers and directors are mostly children, so the two go very well together.
  • "The cutting edge of films", Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia, 27 November 2005), p. C3
  • Coates was interviewed in Vancouver.

• [Asked: "How did your famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today.
• [T]here were only certain jobs open to women. Things like hairdressing didn't really interest me. I might have been interested in photography, but women couldn't do that in those days. I found the most interesting job a woman could do, other than acting, was editing.
  • "‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Film Editor on How ‘Fifty Shades’ Could Have Been Sexier", The Hollywood Reporter (7 January 2016)

• I used to have to get my courage up to offer my ideas to David Lean, but that improved as time went on. He used to say to me, "That’s a ridiculous idea, I’ve never heard of such a thing." And I would feel awful. But then he would come up to me a day or two later and say, "You know that idea you had, it's not exactly that but it's close.” It was always worth putting up the ideas. I'm not crushed if they don't want to use them, it's a point of view.
• [On out-takes during the filming of Becket featuring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, two notoriously heavy drinkers] Oh, on the beach, they were having a real problem sitting on their horses. It’s a beautiful shot of the beach and I go from a very long shot of galloping into a big head. I had fun with it, but it was difficult. Because they were flubbing their lines, we had to shoot over two days. The clouds are there one day but not the next, and nobody notices that because the actors are so magnetic. The horses were perfectly well behaved, but it was mainly the boys who were trouble.
• When I first came in I wanted to be a director and then later on I had opportunities to be a director and turned them down, because I was married to a director. I never edited for my husband. He did ask me to, but I think if you're there all day working on something, you want to be able to go home and say, "I just worked with that idiot director and guess what he did today!" You can't do that if you’re married to him.
  • "From Lawrence of Arabia to Fifty Shades of Grey, Anne Coates is Hollywood’s premiere editor", Los Angeles Times (10 November 2016).
  • Coates was married to Douglas Hickox from 1958; the couple later divorced.

About Coates

• Jolly, chatty and extremely competent, she is an attractive, hearty person, the sort who can work all day and still have enough energy left to enjoy the evening. Anne taught me women often make better editors than men. They have more patience.
  • Ronald Neame (with Barbara Roisman Cooper) Ronald Neame: An Autobiography: Straight from the Horses Mouth, Lanham, Maryland & Oxford, UK: Scarecrow Press (2003), p. 163