A cut above the rest
A good editor is vital for the success of any film. Skilled in storytelling, they need to share the same vision as the director but have an objectivity the director may have lost by the editing stage. Good editors also bring something new to a film, which the director may never have thought of - a breath of fresh air that gives life to a picture.
Oral Ottey has spent the past 30 years doing just that in a prolific career that spans both major television drama and high profile features to prime-time documentaries. The editor of features such as Bhaji on the Beach and Plunkett and Macleane, fell into editing in a way that could only have happened 20 years ago.
He came to London from Jamaica as a 12- year-old in 1965, to be with his parents whom he hadn’t seen since he was three. Although he would have preferred sunny America to grey England, Oral settled into London life remarkably well and by the age of nineteen had begun on his chosen career path: to be an architect. Film was furthest from his mind when he went to an agency for a trainee position with a firm of architects. With the position having gone, the agency offered him an alternative job, as a trainee assistant editor. This for him was only a temporary position “Whilst I was working I’d be looking for other opportunities and would sneak off for meetings at architect firms. Meanwhile I was being promoted". The company after two months asked him to move up to Manchester to their head office to be an assistant editor and within a year he was a fully fledged editor working on news and magazine programmes.
All this might sound easy - and in those days getting into film and television was, compared with today. But this was the early seventies when the sons and daughters of migrants from the Caribbean were facing prejudice. Was racism a problem for Oral? “There’s always a doubt when you walk in, they think ‘can he do the job?' It’s not said, but it’s meant I have to try harder to prove myself and for me that’s not such a bad thing".
With Manchester now his home Oral became staff editor at Granada Television and soon started editing the well respected Disappearing World series, which looked at how modern life was encroaching on traditional worlds. He also contributed to the World in Action series, including the Emmy Award-winning, 28 Up. These were serious prime-time documentaries sadly lost from current mainstream television.
His first foray into television drama was cutting the filmed inserts for Coronation Street and then drama series like Brass. His biggest TV drama was C4’s landmark serial, GBH, starring Robert Lindsay, which was a huge success with both critics and audiences. Other television drama includes two series of Cracker, for which he received a BAFTA nomination and won an RTS Best Drama Editing award, An Evening with Gary Linekar and Prime Suspect 2.
His first feature was Bhaji on the Beach, working with the then first-time feature director Gurinder Chadha. He found he learnt a lot and noticed differences between television drama and feature films. “I learnt certain rules like pacing and how long a shot should stay on the screen.” Oral, being used to cutting for television where the pace is a lot quicker, found that when his first cut was projected on the big screen it felt too quick.
He then went on to edit other features such as Jump the Gun and Twin Town. He says that he doesn’t like the snobbery that exists between television and feature films, but chooses his work on a project by project basis with a good strong script being the deciding factor. He sees his job as making sure he “keeps audiences in their seats.” When he starts editing he doesn’t just do an assemblage of the rushes as is protocol, instead he goes with his instinct and puts together an edit out of what he sees from the rushes, sometimes dropping things. He says “Putting together the rushes is the hardest part, it’s like walking into an open space and trying to fill it. Once it’s together the film talks to me, scenes will tell me if they’re working or not working.”
Having spent the majority of his career editing on film, Oral encountered the world of new technologies when asked to cut Prime Suspect. He was told that he would have to cut on Lightworks but hadn’t a clue how it worked. On the Saturday and Sunday he went on a course to learn the system and on the Monday was in the cutting room with rushes ready for editing. “I thought, Oh my God my career is over. When I arrived on the Monday the only thing I knew how to do was to turn the machine on!" Oral didn’t have a permanent assistant so he found himself learning how to use the computer on the job.
He says that cutting non-linear allows him to experiment because it’s fast. This is good for experienced editors like Oral but there’s now a whole generation of editors who haven’t had the creative training on film and have learnt to cut not by thinking about what they’re doing but by trying out a hundred different options on the much faster non-linear systems. Oral agrees saying: “You lose thinking time on Lightworks or Avid”.
Oral is now in the position where he has built a huge body of work and commands a reputation where directors and producers seek him out for projects. The renowned director Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, Badlands) was watching the Atlanta Olympics and decided to make a feature film about the Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie. During research he happened across some of Oral’s Disappearing World documentaries on Ethiopia. and found them so wonderfully crafted that he asked Oral and the director Leslie Woodhead to make the film. Called Endurance, the film opened in America in May last year and stars Haile himself and his family. Premiere Magazine described it as a “strangely delicate, beautifully crafted film.”
Plunkett and Macleane, made by Working Title was the first feature on which he really felt the pressures of needing a commercial hit at the forefront and it’s where he learnt the most about marketing. On the £10 million film, Working Title had problems with its director, the typical scenario of the director’s vision conflicting with the production company’s commercial aims for the project. It meant that Oral and Eric Fellner of Working Title finished the edit of that film. Oral was flattered to find that he was the first editor to have lasted the course with a company allegedly notorious for firing editors.
To say Oral’s career has been varied is an understatement. He has made award-wining documentaries and dramas and still has an enthusiasm for editing that is inspiring. “When the passion goes then it’s time to get out,” he says. Oral has just finished cutting Circus a feature financed by Columbia Tristar, starring John Hannah and Eddie Izzard, which he describes as “Pulp Fiction meets The Long Good Friday set in Brighton”. And what of the future? “I hope to continue editing for as long as I can but if that’s not to be then I’ve always had a dream of one day setting up a guest house in Jamaica, cooking breakfast and dinner. If I can’t entertain people in film then I’ll entertain them in another way,”
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