Elliot Graham

Elliot Graham (b. 1976, Claremont, California) is an American film editor whose work on the film Milk (directed by Gus Van Sant-2008) was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing and for the American Cinema Editors Eddie Award.

In 1999, Graham received bachelor's degrees in history and in film from New York University. Graham's first editing credit was for The Last Minute (2001), which is an independent film that was written, directed, and edited by Stephen Norrington. Graham was initially hired to assist Norrington with editing, but ultimately shared the editing credit. Graham subsequently worked on two films with director Bryan Singer, X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006); he co-edited these films with John Ottman. Graham also edited the pilot for the television program, House (2004), which was also directed by Singer.

Several critics have written about the editing of Milk, which intermixes archival footage from the era of the film with footage of the actors.

The challenge was to incorporate so many archival sequences without weighing the story down -- use too much, and the film could start to feel like a documentary. "The trick with the stock footage was when to use it and how much of it to use," Graham says, pointing to the sequence in which Milk and his colleagues await the results of California's Proposition 6 vote as one that makes inventive use of historical records. Here Graham keeps cutting back and forth between news footage from Election Day, with person-on-the street interviews and poll numbers, to Sean Penn and the other actors sweating it out. —Winnipeg Free Press story