NEWS

Awards Illustration by Wm. Stetz

Crash was the surprise Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards this year, a surprise to many because this supposed dark horse film had been available on DVD since last September. Hughes Winborne, who won the Oscar for editing the film, frankly acknowledges that people in the industry perceive him differently since the Academy Awards. “It’s good for my career because it gives me an opportunity, hopefully, to have more choice in the films that I do,” he says.

In addition to the Oscar, Winborne also picked up the American Cinema Editors’ (ACE) Eddie Award for Best Achievement in Editing (Drama) and was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Crash. His most notable previous film was the Oscar-winning sleeper of 1996, Sling Blade. His upcoming films as are Even Money and Pursuit of Happyness.

Hughes Winborne with his Best Editing Oscar for Crash. Photo by Jeffrey Mayer

The Raleigh, North Carolina native, who lived in New York for 16 years before moving to Los Angeles nine years ago, has had a steady but largely unnoticed career because many of the independent films he edited had marginal or limited releases. He almost left the industry around 2002 because he couldn’t find work for almost six months. He went back to New York for four months to edit the CBS news series 48 Hours, for which he is “eternally grateful.” That led to the film Employee of the Month, which in turn brought him to Crash, and he was back on track.

Crash offered him the opportunity to work on a film of substance. “That doesn’t always happen, and they are few and far between, unfortunately,” he confesses. Not only were the film’s multiple storylines a challenge, but keeping them in balance was the key element. The social and racial clashes in Los Angeles were right up his alley. Winborne, the son of a legendary judge in Raleigh, Pretlow Winborne, grew up in that state capital during a period of racial tension in the Civil Rights era. A cross burning on the Winborne lawn when he was a child was a badge of honor at the time for him, he recalls, adding, “My father came out and cooked hot dogs on it.”

Always a film buff, along with his cousin Godfrey Cheshire (now a distinguished film critic), Winbourne almost followed in the family trade as an attorney. Among other jobs, he worked as a paralegal in the prisons for North Carolina Legal Services. “I’ll never forget the day I saw Barry Lyndon (1975) in Raleigh, and I came out of the theatre that day and said to myself, ‘This is what I’d like to do,’” he says. “I didn’t know what, but I would like to work in the film business.” He enrolled in a summer film course at New York University and edited many of the student films that were shot. “It was the best education experience that I ever had,” he acknowledges. “I knew pretty quickly from that class that I wanted to be in the editing room.”

Crash is a blur to him now because he edited it in 2004, almost a year before its release in May 2005. The DVD release really was the salvation of the film because it developed a word-of-mouth cult status. Still, the film’s awards were a surprise to him because, “My background is not doing films that tend to get nominated for Academy Awards or to even be eligible for them. I’ve always worked on independent films, many of which have struggled just to find a theatre to be shown in, so to be nominated by the American Cinema Editors was an honor and especially sweet.

The other nominees are the giants of the editing world,” he continues. “One of the pleasures of this whole season for me has been meeting all these other people who were nominated.”

In mid-career, Winborne, who edits primarily on an Avid, realizes that his gifts and talents lie in the realm of aesthetics rather than technology in a digital era. He jokes that if he came to work and his assistants were sick, “I wouldn’t know how to do their job. More than ever, the editor is there for storytelling, aesthetics and the look of the film,” he confesses.

“In the film days, it was pretty straightforward ––putting a film together on a flatbed,” he continues. “The digital technology is more complex. I don’t even like calling my assistants ‘assistants’ anymore, because they do something that I can’t do, and they deserve a lot of credit for that––which they don’t really get. Nor are they paid commensurate to the amount of knowledge they bring to the film. Editors rely on their assistants in ways that we never did in the past,” he says.

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