Lisa Fruchtman
Born 1948
Lisa Fruchtman is a film and television editor and documentary director with twenty-five film credits. After interning with a documentary film group in the USA, Fruchtman spent a year developing her editing skills at the National Film Board of Canada and then returned to the states, where she began working as an assistant editor for Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather Part II. Later, as an editor, she worked on two other Coppola films: Apocalypse Now (co-edited with Richard Marks, Gerald B. Greenberg and Walter Murch) and The Godfather Part III (co-edited with Barry Malkin and Walter Murch). Both films were nominated for Best Editing Oscars. Fruchtman (and her co-editors Glenn Farr, Tom Rolf, Stephen A. Rotter and Douglas Stewart) won an Oscar for Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Her first film with solo editing credit was for Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God.
“He [Coppola] surrounds himself with a lot of different kinds of collaborators—not only great artists but also very nuts and bolts people, so it’s kind of like all the different parts of the job are taken up by his team and he’s free to be wildly imaginative because he depends on all of us to execute the vision without actually being told what to do. He never says, “Do this” or “Do that” or “Cut here” or anything ever like that. He’s rarely in the cutting room. He likes to see what you come up with and then screen it separately or in the context of a cut and then give you some vague direction about how it could be better and let you go back and figure it out. And for me, that was a very exciting and creative process. For some people, it might be maddening. For the studio, it was certainly maddening.”
—From “The Art of the Edit,” a 2017 interview with Lisa Fruchtman. The link to the full video can be found in the appendix.
