Chris Innis, ACE
No birth date available.
Chris Innis, ACE graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a B.A. in film studies, and earned an M.F.A. in live-action filmmaking from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). She began her career in cinema as an assistant, and later an associate, editor on numerous films including G.I. Jane, directed by Ridley Scott, and assistant editor on JFK, directed by Oliver Stone. Innis worked with Pietro Scalia, ACE for almost six years and has also worked several times with director Sam Raimi—as music editor for The Gift and Spider-Man and as an editor on the Raimi-produced American Gothic television series.
For their editing of The Hurt Locker, Innis and her co-editor (Bob Murawski, ACE) won an Oscar, an Eddie and a BAFTA Award for Best Editing. (*)
Innis was co-producer of the digital restoration (and first-time release in the U.S) of The Big Gundown, directed by Sergio Sollima, as well as the re-release and digital restoration of The Swimmer, directed by Frank Perry, which won the International Press Academy Satellite Award for “Best Overall Blu-ray/DVD.” She also wrote, directed and produced a two-and-a-half hour documentary on the making of The Swimmer. Innis was recently selected for the Ryan Murphy Television Directing Mentorship Half Initiative.
(*) For her directorial work on Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director.
“An editor will often sift through all the footage trying to find the best moments, sewing together that magic, finding things that even the director, actors and the writer weren’t necessarily aware existed. A lot of what we do is editing for subtext or body language. It’s something the actors bring to the performance consciously, and even sometimes unconsciously, and we have to find those nuggets and a way to include them. It’s those little bits that can really bring a film to life and help create dramatic tension.”
—“Tech Support Interview: The Craft of ‘The Hurt Locker’” by Guy Lodge. The full text can be found in the Appendix.
