Michael Kahn | |
---|---|
Born | New York City, U.S. | December 8, 1930
Occupation | Film editor |
Years active | 1964–present |
Michael Kahn (born December 8, 1930) [1] is an American film editor known for his frequent collaboration with Steven Spielberg. His first collaboration with Spielberg was for his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind . He has edited all of Spielberg's subsequent films [2] except for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which was edited by Carol Littleton. Kahn has received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Film Editing, and has won three times—for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Schindler's List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), which were all Spielberg-directed films.
Kahn was born to a Jewish family on December 8 in New York City. While his birth year has been reported as 1935, Kahn said in 2015, when asked if he was 80, that his age at that point was "closer to 85." [1]
Kahn has edited digitally since at least Twister (1996), though he continued to edit on film with Spielberg long after most editors had stopped doing so. [3] [4] In 2008, Kahn acknowledged that "people find it hard to believe that Steven and I still edit film on a Moviola and a KEM. [But] Steven feels film got us where we are today and he loves the smell of it and feel of it. We started that way and both really enjoy it." [5] George Lucas remarked "Michael Kahn can cut faster on a Moviola than anybody can cut on an Avid." [6] However, since The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011), Kahn has edited Spielberg's films on an Avid machine. [7]
Kahn equaled the record for the most Oscar wins (three) in the Best Film Editing category, shared with Ralph Dawson, Daniel Mandell, and Thelma Schoonmaker. Furthermore, he had eight nominations in that category—a number surpassed only by Schoonmaker. All of Kahn's Oscars came from his work on Spielberg's films, which included Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Schindler's List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
He has received six nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Editing, winning for Fatal Attraction (1987) and Schindler's List.
Kahn has been selected for membership in the American Cinema Editors (ACE). [8] In 2011, he received the Career Achievement Award of the American Cinema Editors. At the ceremony, Steven Spielberg said of editing: "this is where filmmaking goes from a craft to an art." [9] In November 2013, Spielberg created the Michael Kahn Endowed Chair in Editing at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in honor of Kahn. The first to be appointed to the position was Norman Hollyn. [10] [11]
Steven Allan Spielberg is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director in film history. He is the recipient of many accolades, including three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, nine Golden Globe Awards, and four Directors Guild of America Awards, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Set in 1936, the film stars Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, a globetrotting archaeologist vying with Nazi German forces to recover the long-lost Ark of the Covenant which is said to make an army invincible. Teaming up with his tough former romantic interest Marion Ravenwood, Jones races to stop rival archaeologist René Belloq from guiding the Nazis to the Ark and its power.
Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
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