Fine Cuts: Interviews on the Practice of European Film Editing, 2nd Edition

17Tony Lawson

Tony talked to me at Beaconsfield Studios. His work with Nic Roeg and Neil Jordan is envied and admired, but in his distinguished career he has also edited with some other mavericks, from Sam Peckinpah to Dušan Makavejev and the unique Stanley Kubrick.

TL: I was born in Paddington, London. My mother was a nurse, my father had been a film cameraman, and my grandfather, whom I never knew, was Charlie Chaplin’s press agent. So there’s a sort of history of the film business in the family.

As a child I didn’t have any ambitions in that direction, except that I went to the cinema quite a bit and loved westerns. My grandmother took me—it was an enormous local Odeon with a restaurant and a giant auditorium.

I went to King Alfred’s School ...