List of Film Director and Editor Collaborations

This list of film director and editor collaborations includes longstanding, notable partnerships of directors and editors. The list's importance is that directors and editors typically work together on the editing of a film, which is the ultimate step of filmmaking during which the dozens or hundreds of hours of raw film "footage" are pruned and woven into the final film. Film critic Walter Kerr has argued that editing is comparable in its importance to directing itself, and should be credited as such; he wrote "At the very least, it seems to me, the editor's credit should be rescued from its place near the bottom of the list, an area we may call Oblivion. And I don't mean the editor should be given a mere half-a-leg up, nudged one inch higher in the Pantheon of creative people who do things. The best he ever gets now is fourth or fifth spot, somewhere after the principal photographer and two or three screenwriters. Second position is where he belongs, and no lower, if we're still going to hold him to also-ran status." Quentin Tarantino has been quoted as saying, "The best collaborations are the director-editor teams, where they can finish each other's sentences," and that his own editor, Sally Menke, was his "only, truly genuine collaborator."

Crediting the editing of a film is made more difficult by the fact that the relative contributions of the director and the editor vary enormously. At one extreme lies the old Hollywood studio system; as described by Lizzie Francke, this was the "period when the editor was often left to his or her own devices in the cutting room. The pressures of production turn-over during the hey-day of the studio system often meant that the director could not be around to supervise since they were on to their next production." Editors such as Margaret Booth (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios) and Barbara McLean (20th Century Fox) worked nearly autonomously. At the other extreme lie "auteur" directors who personally edit their own films. Akira Kurosawa both directed and edited many of his best-known films (cf. Seven Samurai (1954), Kagemusha (1980)); Hiroshi Nezu, Kurosawa's production chief, was quoted as saying, "Among ourselves we think that he is Toho’s best director, that he is Japan’s best scenarist, and that he is the best editor in the world." The Coen brothers are a contemporary example of filmmakers who produce, direct, and edit their own films; they humorously credit "Roderick Jaynes" as the editor of their films.

The following list of notable director and editor collaborations does not attempt to parse the relative contributions of the individuals. The collaborations on this list have each extended over a decade or more, and have produced at least one film nominated for an Academy Award or BAFTA Award as best film, for best directing, or for best editing; one such film is noted for each collaboration. The restriction to Oscar-nominated or BAFTA-nominated films does exclude most directors and editors whose films are not in English. The dates listed for each collaboration are based on searches of the Internet Movie Database.