Appreciation: From ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ to ‘Out of Sight,’ film editor Anne V. Coates operated on razor-sharp instincts

When the director David Lean and his editor Anne V. Coates were first processing the footage from “Lawrence of Arabia,” they had already envisioned a key visual transition early in the film: a stately, dreamlike dissolve from one shot to the next. But when they screened the dailies, they saw the two images in sequence, one right after the other: first Peter O’Toole blowing out a match, then a direct cut to a staggering desert horizon.

The cut was so striking in its immediacy and impact, they knew it had to stay.

“We decided to nibble at it, taking a few frames off here and there,” Coates told me in a 2010 interview. “David looked at it and said, ‘It’s nearly perfect. Take it away, Annie, just make it perfect.’ So I took two frames off, and he said, ‘That’s it.’ Visually it was so effective and dramatically so right.”

Thus was born the most literal “match cut” in film history, and one of the greatest cuts in film history, period.

Had the British-born Coates done nothing more than “Lawrence of Arabia,” which earned her an Academy Award, her place in the annals of great film editors would be secure. But when she died Tuesday at 92, she left behind a body of work that, in its sheer versatility, emotional coherence and visual dynamism, simply takes the breath away.

Coates, who in 2016 received an honorary Oscar and a Career Achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., was equally adept at editing comedies (“Out to Sea”), historical dramas (“Becket”), political thrillers (“In the Line of Fire”) and, last but not least, sex scenes (take your pick: “Striptease,” “Out of Sight,” “Unfaithful” and, yes, “Fifty Shades of Grey”). Her personal favorite titles among her more than 50 feature-film credits included a few lesser-known ’60s British dramas such as “Young Cassidy” and “The Bofors Gun.”

But it was “Lawrence” that towered over her résumé, the one that she invariably wound up talking about the most. During our 2010 sitdown for an installment of the “FilmCraft” book series, she acknowledged a frightening moment early in the production, when Lean asked her to show him and the crew a scene she had just finished cutting. She was too nervous to watch it, but when it was finished, Lean — who had been an editor himself before he turned to directing — paid her a compliment she never forgot: “I think that’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen a piece of film cut exactly the way I would have done it.”

Coates didn’t always get along so swimmingly with her directors. A wickedly funny and filter-free raconteur, she happily recounted her arguments with David Lynch over some of the more unusual sound effects he used in “The Elephant Man,” or the times she urged Steven Soderbergh to restore a key scene that the producers had wanted excised from “Out of Sight.” At one point, too, she told Soderbergh she felt they had overworked the movie’s intricate, time-shuffling structure.

“I like to have a few little arguments with the director,” she said. “It’s nice to have one or two areas where we’re not on exactly the same wavelength.”

She loved working with Adrian Lyne on his adultery drama “Unfaithful,” mainly because he encouraged her to experiment. When Coates found that Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez’s crucial first love-making scene simply wasn’t working, she decided to intercut it with a later one in which Lane takes the train home after her liaison, trembling with guilt and ecstasy. The result was a cutting-room coup, an electrifying memory sequence that became the emotional centerpiece of the movie.

The particular deftness with which Coates navigated sex scenes, and the delight with which she talked about them (“I tried to make ‘Fifty Shades’ a little more sexy,” she admitted to The Times in 2016), is especially delicious in light of how she got her start in the film industry. When she expressed an interest in a film career, her father, the famed film entrepreneur J. Arthur Rank, assumed she had been seduced by the industry’s glamour and celebrity, and eventually found her a job at a production company specializing in religious films.

If he was trying to curb or contain her passions, it didn’t work. Coates quickly learned the tricks of the trade, including projection and sound recording, and landed a job at London’s Pinewood Studios.

She swiftly joined a long line of women who have, over the past century, distinguished themselves in film editing — a field that, while historically dominated by men, has proved significantly more receptive to women than careers in directing and cinematography. Over the years the ranks of noteworthy editors have included Margaret Booth, Barbara McLean, Verna Fields, Dede Allen, Thelma Schoonmaker, Sally Menke, Margaret Sixel and countless others, including Coates and her daughter, Emma E. Hickox.

Coates took a highly instinctual, improvisatory approach to her art. Unlike her contemporary Walter Murch, whose books lay out his film-editing methodology in rigorous detail, she said she could never fully articulate why she decided when and where to make her cuts.

“Generally speaking, I just cut the way I feel,” she said, adding, “I’m also known as an emotional cutter.”

It may seem odd to talk about emotion in film editing, at least for those who assume the art of assembling motion pictures comes down to threading a bunch of scenes together and making sure the whole thing doesn’t run too long. But talk to most editors and they will tell you the most challenging part of the job isn’t technical but emotional. It isn’t cutting together a hyperkinetic action sequence or jumping around in time; it’s ensuring that the performances feel coherent from shot to shot.

Coates considered herself very much an actor’s editor, and her work is studded with marvelous performances to prove it: O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Becket,” John Hurt in “The Elephant Man,” Robert Downey Jr. in “Chaplin,” Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” Diane Lane in “Unfaithful” and pretty much everyone in “Murder on the Orient Express.” That consistency of performance and emotion comes as close as anything to defining her modus operandi.

“People often ask me if I have a style of editing. I usually say I don’t,” Coates told me, with the sort of needless humility that her remarkable career belied year after year. “But one day my daughter said, ‘Oh, yes, you do. We were studying it in class.’ So perhaps I do.”

justin.chang@latimes.com