In the past, to become a filmmaker, one had to get hired in the studio system. Writers, costume designers, assistant directors, production designers, and even actors were able to parlay their resume into calling, “Action!” Film school directors overtook them and make up a lot of the directing body today, although numerous directors didn’t go through film school and it is so much easier for newbies to self-finance and direct their own projects. These are figures who don’t come from the studio pipeline or from film school. It’s a long way from where some of the best filmmakers started, from the ground up. The five names below got the directing gig through the studio pipeline working in another part of the film process: film editing. Arguably the most important job in an entire movie aside from directing and writing, the editor has the ultimate task of assembling a worthy picture, making them prime candidates as future directors.
Hal Ashby
Ashby was one of the best-known directors of the 1970s with multiple critically-acclaimed films including Harold & Maude, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There. Having moved from Utah disillusioned with his Mormon upbringing and a high school dropout, Ashby got a job in film editing, assisting for major Hollywood studios in the fifties with directors William Wyler and George Stevens before Norman Jewison hired him to be his lead editor in The Cincinnati Kid and In The Heat Of The Night which earned Ashby an Oscar. Jewison then helped Ashby to get his first directing job with 1970s The Landlord, joining New Hollywood’s list of breakouts.
Charles Crichton
In a twelve year span, Crichton edited over fifty films, most famously the royal historical drama The Private Life of Henry VIII, the sci-fi classic Things To Come, and the Technicolor fantasy The Thief Of Bagdad, all produced by Alexander Korda. Then, in 1944, Crichton got his big break with the war film For Those In Peril. He had a solid career through the sixties with hits including The Lavender Hill Mob and Hunted before his career floundered to where he was doing corporate videos. When he became friends with John Cleese of Monty Python fame, the two worked on A Fish Called Wanda which won an Oscar for Kevin Kline’s crazy performance and earned Crichton a Best Director nomination, letting him retire on a high.
John Glen
Glen is widely known for directing all five Bond films made in the 1980s featuring Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton in the lead role, from For Your Eyes Only to License To Kill. Prior to that, he was the main editor of the series starting with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to Moonraker, while also serving as a second unit director for a few non-Bond films including The Italian Job and Superman (1978). In directing the Bond features, Glen put his trademark with an animal motif that comes as a scare jump to Bond while getting close to his target, using his expertise in his past editing to add tension and a brief relief in Bond’s mission to get his nemesis.
David Lean
Lean is widely known for his Academy Award-winning epics that are considered among the greatest films of all-time. Both The Bridge On The River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia earned him Best Director Oscars and had a major influence on future directors including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, George Lucas, and Christopher Nolan. Prior to directing his debut feature, In Which We Serve (1942), the teenage Lean was hired by Gaumont Pictures to work in various jobs before he rose to editing in newsreels and later for major features, including Pygmalion (1938) and 49th Parallel (1941). However, Lean would go back to editing his own work with his last picture, A Passage To India, which earned him another Oscar nomination.
Robert Wise
With four Oscars to his name, Robert Wise is one of the most successful directors thanks to films like The Day The Earth Stood Still, I Want To Live!, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music. While the last two films that gave him those Oscars are musicals, Wise touched on numerous genres including horror, war, and sci-fi; he also directed the first Star Trek picture featuring the original cast of the TV show. Prior to his directing debut in 1944, when Wise was asked to take over The Curse Of The Cat People, he was an Oscar-nominated editor having worked on Citizen Kane. Wise also edited The Magnificent Ambersons, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and, as a sound effects editor, Wise worked on the musical Top Hat (with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and the John Ford-directed drama The Informer.
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