“I still make it a point to think hard about what I’m doing, so as not to forget my training as a film editor. I know I can fiddle, but my rule remains: Do it once right.”
Born in 1960 in Sydney, Lee Smith had plenty of encouragement to enter the film business while he was growing up, considering his father worked as an optical effects supervisor and his uncle owned a film-processing lab. After learning multiple film disciplines at a local post-production company, during which he edited a number of science-fiction thrillers including Communion (1989) and RoboCop 2 (1990), and served as an assistant editor, additional editor and sound designer on such Peter Weir dramas as The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Dead Poets Society (1989), Green Card (1990) and Fearless (1993), Smith was hired to co-edit Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) with William M. Anderson. He has since received solo editing credits on the Australian director’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) and The Way Back (2010).
Smith has also enjoyed a collaboration with Christopher Nolan, for whom he edited Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010). He received two Academy Award and ACE Eddie nominations for his work on Master and Commander and The Dark Knight. His other credits include Gregor Jordan’s Buffalo Soldiers (2001), Craig Lahiff’s Black and White (2002), and Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming X-Men: First Class (2011).
