“The greatest artists I’ve had the good fortune to work with have a generosity and curiosity that goes beyond ego.”

Photo: Christina Gapic

Editing, more than any other aspect of filmmaking, has the power to make or break a movie. It sets the pace, crafts the tone, and can shape a story through choices that come down to milliseconds. Without good editing, nothing flows properly; done well, the edit creates an experience that bridges dreams and cinema, connecting viewers to the film’s emotional heartbeat.

Christopher Donaldson has been a conduit for those feelings on some of the most noteworthy film and television projects in recent years: among them, TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Reacher; Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Chris has been widely celebrated for his editing, including by the Canadian Cinema Editors, Directors Guild of Canada and Gemini Awards.

To him, though, the work is as much about what he doesn’t do, as what he does. “As an editor, I try to get out of the way, consciously, as much as I possibly can,” he says. Before shooting starts, he reads the script and soaks up music and films “that rhyme” with the feeling the director is aiming for. Yet, when the footage comes in, he wipes it all away and starts fresh. He doesn’t consult the script on his initial pass through each scene; his priority is to find the film’s pulse.

“I’m the first audience, and therefore I have to respond to the footage as openly and instinctually as possible,” he says. “I’m trying to capture something that happened on set. I don’t come to it with a sense of how I’m going to mould the material; I let the material mould me. That’s how I build it.”

I first connected with Chris in 2011, when gathering quotes about Kickass Canadian Clarke Mackey, one of our former film profs. Chris responded so enthusiastically to my request, thanking me for including him and “especially for including Clarke as one of your Kickass Canadians.”

Fourteen years later, when I was working on a piece about Chris for the Queen’s Alumni Newsletter, he showed the same devotion and generosity; when the newsletter’s editor asked to be introduced to him for future alumni events, he didn’t hesitate to say yes: “You never know what might come up and, more importantly, in some way help the (Queen’s film and media) department.”

Since 2011, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of staying in touch with Chris. From everything I’ve seen, being supportive and appreciative is part of his DNA. It’s uplifting to see someone so gifted and successful remain gracious and humble. Now, 14 years after flagging Chris as a future Kickass Canadian, I’m thrilled to finally share more of his story here.

“Chris is the most talented editor working in Canada. His contributions to every project make it come alive. He is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible and removing limitations on what a film can be, all while being incredibly generous and collaborative. He brings everything he has to his work.” —Sarah Polley, filmmaker (Away From Her, Take This Waltz, Women Talking)

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Chris first fell under cinema’s spell when he was 10 and saw Harrison Ford emerge as Indiana Jones. Empowered by money earned on his paper route in Toronto, Ontario, Chris and his friends saw Raiders of the Lost Ark 14 times in the theatre. “Every opportunity to see it, I took,” he says. “It was just so incredibly magical.” For those heady summer months, Indy was real and exactly who Chris wanted to be.

In time, the lights came back on in his mind; he realized Indy wasn’t real. But it led to a parallel insight: “Somebody made the Indiana Jones movie.” And that was something could see doing with his life.

Back then, hockey was still duking it out with movies for top spot in his heart. But in 1982, when his father’s pharmaceutical job moved the family to Seoul, South Korea for four years, hockey was no longer an option. That’s when his “obsessive love of movies really kicked in,” and it didn’t ease up on the Donaldsons return to Toronto.

After gorging on blockbusters like Star Wars and Back to the Future, and being inspired by Cronenberg, Scorsese and Coppola, Chris made his filmmaking debut via improvised, in-camera-edited videos for class assignments at Leaside High School. Despite admittedly being “preposterous things,” the videos gave him “this feeling that there was an alternative way to live your life that could be a tremendous amount of fun, and playful and creative.”

Around that time, he read Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. Chris says that, although he was “obviously in no way capable of fully understanding it then,” the poem inspired him to trust his instinct and pursue an alternative path: to become a film major in the early ’90s, when “it was still viewed as vaguely eccentric, slightly outside the mainstream.”

He enrolled in Queen’s University’s film program because it was—and is—one of the few that puts equal value on theory as well as production. There, he dove deep into the psychoanalysis of what happens when the lights go down and the movies begin—how our desires and imaginings can find a home on the screen. He also cut his teeth in the edit suite.

Working all hours at the former Film House on Stuart Street “that everyone joked was slightly haunted,” camped out on the third floor with an old Steenbeck editing machine, slicing film strips with razor blades and stitching them together with tape, Chris first felt the rush of how movie magic happens: when two shots paired together create something more than the sum of their parts. “Those late nights at Film House were the first time I had sense of what could be the trajectory of my entire life.”

Chris names several Queen’s professors who were influential to his education: Blaine Allan, Jody Baker, Peter Baxter, Frank Burke, Derek Redmond. “We knew nothing, and they never made us feel that way. They would give you feedback on your work as if you were their peer, and went out of their way to build you up as you tried to find your footing.”

In particular, he calls out Clarke Mackey, whose directing credits include the beloved ’80s TV series Degrassi Junior High and the celebrated ’70s indie film The Only Thing You Know. “Clarke was a filmmaker who made a very deliberate choice to remove himself from the industry to concentrate on the artform,” says Chris. “It has always been and always will be easy to be incredibly cynical about the industry. Clarke really inspired (his students at Queen’s) to believe in film as an artform that has value beyond just commercial storytelling, and as something that can change not only your life, but the world. His insistence on a kind of innocence was defining for someone like me. I still believe the work can do important things; whether that’s changing people’s minds or changing people’s day for a couple hours, these are important things.”

Clarke also emphasized the importance of being a creative risktaker. He once told me that “artists have to be allowed to fail.” Without experimentation, there can be no innovation, no space for new ideas. Chris recalls a similar lesson. “A lot of creative work is sort of floundering,” he says. “(Clarke taught that) the creative journey is accepting and acknowledging that you know nothing—that, in a way, you’re always starting from scratch with each new project. And inherent in that is the risk of failure.” But also, the possibility of greatness.

“I remember coming into Film House early one spring morning and finding Chris in the editing room. He had been there all night editing a short 16mm student film. Like all student films, the material was flawed and required significant creative massaging to work well. Chris was determined to do his very, very best with the footage he was supplied, even if that meant many hours alone in the edit suite trying several alternative cuts. That stubborn and rigorous attitude to the work hasn’t changed. Chris is now regarded as one of the most creative and hard-working editors in the business and a specialist in fixing problem material.” —Kickass Canadian Clarke Mackey, filmmaker (The Only Thing You Know, Taking Care), Queen’s University professor emeritus

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

Before he graduated from Queen’s, Chris had already decided on editing. Not only did being in the edit suite “feel like I was home,” but he saw it as the quickest path to getting creatively involved in filmmaking—to bypass the coffee runs that most other entry-level positions entail, and immediately get close to the action. Even as an assistant editor, “you’re sitting a few feet from the monitor, working with elements of every single department at all times,” he says.

After completing a BAH in 1994, “at the tail-end of people cutting on film,” he started volunteering as an assistant editor, largely on Canadian independent fare. His last assistant job was on Don McKellar’s 1998 gem of a film, Last Night. Don and editor Reginald Harkema spotted Chris’ keen instincts and invited him to sit in on editing sessions, in addition to his assistant work digitizing and cataloging footage, and cleaning up sound.

They also helped get him his first proper editing assignment, with documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig, who was working on Vinyl—“a weirdo doc that nobody knew what to make of,” says Chris. Drawing from dozens of hours of footage on record collecting, including Alan talking into a mirror “about his record collection and eventually everything about his life,” Chris was tasked with delivering an experimental form of filmmaking that his director “had never seen before but felt could work.”

Thanks to Chris, it did. Vinyl was a hit at Hot Docs in 2000, and led to Chris finally landing paid editing gigs. His first major job was for TV’s Slings & Arrows, which lasted from 2003 to 2006. That relative stability came at a good time; he and his wife, screenwriter Meredith Vuchnich, were starting a family by the third season. (They now have three teenage children: Sophie, Rachel and Michael.)

“I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Chris Donaldson for over 30 years, since meeting at university. I have watched Chris evolve from a sharp young editor with a tireless work ethic into one of the finest film editors working today. What I most admire about Chris is that he is a champion of those around him. He immerses himself in the director’s vision, fully investing in the collaborative process that an editor and director share. At the same time, he makes sure the rest of the team is included alongside them. He’s always the first person in the room to offer a compliment or direct praise to the appropriate recipient. His positive attitude and joy for storytelling is infectious and lifts those around him.” —David McCallum, supervising sound editor (The Handmaid’s Tale, Women Talking, Priscilla)

Then took the other, as just as fair

The Slings & Arrows cast featured Sarah Polley—along with a host of other big Canadian names, including Paul Gross, Luke Kirby, Rachel McAdams and Don McKellar. After crossing professional paths with Chris a few times, Sarah hired him to edit her 2011 feature film, Take This Waltz. It marked the start of their creative relationship, “where we began to see what we could achieve as collaborators,” says Chris. It also unlocked him from a sense of wanting to please his director first and foremost, freeing him to cut the film according to his rhythm and vision.

“Sarah is completely open to your interpretation and your execution, and that’s a very inspiring creative environment because you can go where you feel (the film) needs to go,” he says. “Working with her as a director, she’s extremely emotionally intuitive and knows how she wants things to feel, yet is not invested in the specificity of how you achieve it… She wanted to know what I saw in the footage.”

That freedom has informed Chris’ approach on every project since, including his work on 2015’s Remember for Atom Egoyan, whom he calls “a hero and essential to my conception of the Canadian film industry,” David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) and The Shrouds (2024), Sarah Polley’s Academy Award-winning Women Talking (2022) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024).

“In all instances, what (each director) responded to the most was the thing that I felt was most directly my own interpretation of their footage,” says Chris. “Francis would say, ‘Go crazier, go crazier, go crazier.’ When I was purely on highwire, finding connections between scenes and footage that didn’t exist and throwing them all together and trying to make it an experience, that’s when Francis got really excited.”

Chris sees that approach—making space for creative impact from all key collaborators—as integral to their success. “The common denominator is a kind of humility and curiosity. I think the cliché of a lot of directors is a megalomania, but the greatest artists I’ve had the good fortune to work with have a generosity and curiosity that goes beyond ego.”

Those artists also share a willingness to give credit where its due. For the Queen’s Alumni Newsletter (QAN) piece I wrote on Chris, David Cronenberg calls out Chris’ “sensitivity to performance, pace and tone” as being pivotal in shaping and strengthening Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds. It’s an endorsement that continues to amaze Chris, who recalls “obsessing over” newspaper ads for Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly in his youth.

“David existed in so different a universe, you just never imagined there was any way in which your universe and his would collide,” says Chris. “When given the actual opportunity to collaborate with him, you’re sort of constantly pinching yourself while slowly acclimatizing to the fact that he considers you a peer.”

Chris was working on Crimes of the Future when Women Talking was first cut, so he wasn’t initially available to edit. Sarah brought him on later in the process, when she and the producers were looking for “a reimagining of the movie.” Two of the most significant reimaginings came to Chris on instinct, when he watched a preliminary cut by editor Roslyn Kalloo: that the narrator be changed from a man to a 16-year-old girl, and that the film open with a flashback of one of the women waking after being attacked. (For a more in-depth look, you can read my 2023 piece on Women Talking.)

His intuition resonated with Sarah. For that same QAN article, she says “there is no better collaborator in film than Chris Donaldson” and credits him with transforming Women Talking: “He found the film’s voice and pushed it further than I could have dreamed.” It went on to win Sarah the 2023 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture.

“Chris and I collaborated on Remember, a film that required sensitivities to both arthouse and genre elements. His ability to weave these sensibilities into a narrative both surprising and moving was an essential part of the film’s success. I also know Chris as a dedicated member of our community, who always does his best to make himself available to screen the rough cuts of colleagues’ films and to offer whatever insight and help he can. His belief in the value of a community of artists connects him to a long tradition in independent Canadian cinema, a tradition that has supported many of us over the years.” —Atom Egoyan, filmmaker (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Remember, Seven Veils)

And be one traveller, long I stood

After Women Talking, Sarah recommended Chris as an editor for Megalopolis. Francis already had two main editors attached, but he contacted Chris for another take on a standalone wedding reception sequence—similar to what he’d done with the helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now.

“Essentially, I was hired to take a lot of improvisation and experimental footage and do whatever I wanted with it,” says Chris. “Just discover the potentials.”

That assignment was a flashback to Chris’ experience more than 20 years before, when he took a freestyle approach to cutting Vinyl. It also brought home an earlier lesson in film: to open yourself up to the possibility of failure.

“One of the most incredible and inspiring things about working with Francis Ford Coppola was that he said over and over that he didn’t know what he was doing. That he was still trying to discover what cinema could be capable of and what he could be capable of as an artist. And for somebody like that to speak of the process that way gave you a tremendous amount of latitude and freedom and inspiration to push yourself as hard as you can in a direction that you’re not entirely comfortable with.”

This far down the road, Chris knows not to fear that discomfort, the unseen beyond the bend. In trusting his gut feelings—those same ones that responded so strongly to Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, that enable him to keep the channel open for a sense of wonder and innocence—he’s embracing his most effective editing tool. Experience, he says, makes you “more capable technically of achieving your instincts. But it is still ultimately instinct that pushes you forward.”

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For the latest on Chris, follow @chrdonald on Instagram.

‘After the move’ Former Queen’s Film House, Kingston, Ont., November 2021 Photo: Amanda Sage