Full Name James Clark Name Jim Clark | Role Film Editor | |
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Spouse Laurence Mery-Clark (m. 1961) Movies Madhouse, Every Home Should H, Rentadick, The Plot of the Fuma Clan, Baoh Similar People Robert Quarry, Natasha Pyne, Chris Menges, Fernando Ghia, David Puttnam | ||
Jim Clark (24 May 1931 – 25 February 2016) was a British film editor with more than forty feature film credits from 1956–2008. Clark has also directed eight features and short films. Among his most recognized films are Midnight Cowboy (as creative consultant-1969), Marathon Man (1976), The Killing Fields (1984), and Vera Drake (2004). In 2011, Clark published Dream Repairman: Adventures in Film Editing, which is a memoir of his career.
Contents
Early life
Clark was born in 1931, and grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire.
Career
Clark moved to London, and in 1951 he began work as an assistant editor at the legendary Ealing Studios. Subsequently, Clark worked as a freelance assistant editor on two films directed by Stanley Donen and edited by Jack Harris. When Harris declined the opportunity to work on Donen's subsequent film, Surprise Package (1960), Donen gave Clark the job. As Clark later wrote,
It was a fairly bad movie and probably would have finished my career before it had started, but luckily Stanley got another film, The Grass Is Greener (1960), which he also asked me to edit. The cutting of the two films overlapped, which was great training for me. Soon after, I was asked to cut The Innocents (1961) starring Deborah Kerr, which has since become a classic story-driven, supernatural horror film. It was very hard to cut, but that film really put me on the map.
He received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for the editing of The Killing Fields (directed by Roland Joffe-1984); he received a second BAFTA Award for editing The Mission (Joffe-1986). Clark was also nominated for BAFTA Awards for his editing of the films Vera Drake (directed by Mike Leigh-2004) and Marathon Man (directed by John Schlesinger-1976). In 2005, Clark received the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award.
Responding to a question about the major influences on his editing, Clark said
Looking back over many years, the American cinema of the 40s was very important to me, along with Hitchcock films and early British comedies with actors like Will Hay and George Formby. Music has also played a major role; it influences the rhythm of my editing. The pacing of a film and its dialogue have a lot to do with music, and the act of going from one shot to another has always fascinated me - when and how you do it, the reason for an edit.
As a director he was responsible for Rentadick (1972) and Madhouse (1974) starring Vincent Price.
Personal life and memoir
Clark lived in Kensington with his wife Laurence Méry-Clark, also a film and television editor. They married in 1961 and had three children. In 2011 Clark's autobiography Dream Repairman: Adventures in Film Editing was published, receiving warm reviews from The Guardian and The Observer.