Jon Gregory obituary | Movies

Obituary

Jon Gregory obituary

Film editor who brought his brilliance to Secrets & Lies, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Four Weddings and a Funeral

When shooting the massacre scene in my film Peterloo (2018), the cinematographer Dick Pope and I worked in our customary mode – no script, no storyboard. However, unusually for us, we used three cameras for a substantial part of the action. The quantity and complexity of the resulting footage might have been daunting for most film editors, but this was far from the case for Jon Gregory, who has died aged 77 after a short illness.

He brought to the task his unique characteristic skill, imagination, sensitivity and sophistication, while, as always, staying true to the material. As Pope said: “Jon’s editing is always incredibly sympathetic to my cinematography. Whatever I produce, he’ll make the most of it.”

Peterloo, 2018, directed by Mike Leigh. Jon Gregory brought his unique skill to the editing of the film. Photograph: Simon Mein/Amazon/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

John Hillcoat, for whom Jon cut The Road (2009), called him “a genius editor”. Jon himself talked about a film editor having “an innate rhythm within”, to which I would add, in Jon’s case, his innate humanity and his wry sense of humour.

We worked together over 30 years, during which time he also edited Mike Newell’s glorious Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Martin McDonagh’s 2017 masterpiece Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which earned Jon an Academy award nomination.

Although we had known each other around the BBC film studios at Ealing, west London, in the 1970s, Jon and I did not join forces until the 80s, when the new Channel 4 enabled all of us to start making serious indigenous feature films.

We first collaborated on a short, The Short & Curlies (1987), then High Hopes (1988) and Life Is Sweet (1990), and became more adventurous with Naked (1993). After Four Weddings and a Funeral came my Secrets & Lies (1996), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For an example of the brilliance of Jon’s editing, look no further than the photographic studio sequence in this film.

Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2017. Jon Gregory earned an Academy award nomination for the film. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Timothy Spall plays a high-street photographer, and, to get to the essence of this character and his work, I gathered together 31 assorted actors, a set of three identical little girl triplets, a small boy, a baby, a dog and a cat. Over the course of a couple of days, we invented and shot a series of brief scenes of people having their pictures taken. Jon’s ability to convert this eccentric ad hoc footage into sheer cinematic poetry was special and unique.

In the climactic sequence of the same film, when all the secrets and lies are revealed, Jon handled the emotional chaos of seven fraught souls in a suburban house with mastery. And in the earlier key scene, when the mother and daughter meet for the first time, and sit side by side in an empty cafe, Jon unequivocally encouraged me to have the confidence to let the action play uninterrupted, with no cuts or close-ups. And it worked perfectly.

Of course, the director always has the final word, but through collaborating with Jon, a true artist in his own right, and trusting in his vision, qualities in the material were revealed that I might not otherwise have known were there.

Jon might say to me: “It’s Thursday; leave me to it, and don’t come back till Tuesday.” I would duly show up on Tuesday, and he would say: “Look, I’ve totally recut this sequence, but if you don’t like what I’ve done, I can put it all back as it was.” And with rare exceptions, Jon’s radical new version would be a total revelation.

After Secrets & Lies, Jon’s services were in so much demand that it would be 14 years before we would work together again. Of the many films he edited during this period, most notable are Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997), Chen Kaige’s Killing Me Softly (2002), Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly (2003), Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) and McDonagh’s enticing In Bruges (2008).

Jon and I reunited for Another Year (2010), and then, after he had cut Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria (2011), we shared the complex joys of Mr Turner (2014). John Maclean’s Slow West (2015) and Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (2016) came next, but it was for McDonagh’s masterpiece Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri that Jon won an Academy nomination, and a British Independent Film award.

Born in Lahore, in pre-partition India, now Pakistan, Jon was the son of Jack Gregory, an agricultural estate manager, and Beryl (nee Alderton), a hairdresser. The family moved to Bangalore in 1949, returning to the UK in 1953. Jon attended Reigate school, where his all-consuming passion for cinema precluded any chance of academic achievement.

Timothy Spall and Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lies, 1996, directed by Mike Leigh. Jon Gregory had the ability to convert ad hoc footage into sheer cinematic poetry. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

After a brief spell as a draughtsman at Vision Hire, he successfully answered a BBC advert, and joined the studio scene crew. Observing the on-set monitors, he quickly became fascinated with the way shots were designed and organised. He had found his vocation, and in due course he joined the film department at Ealing, progressing from assistant to editor. He always claimed that the BBC was better than any film school in the world.

As a staff editor, Jon cut a wide range of programmes. These included Open All Hours, the miniseries Nancy Astor, and a number of Playhouse and Play for Today dramas. One of these, Beyond the Pale (1981), about East End Jewish immigrants, was directed by Les Blair, who later enticed Jon out of the BBC to cut his controversial C4 series The Nation’s Health (1983), written by GF Newman and produced by Tony Garnett.

It was at the BBC that Jon met Sue Baker, who was his assistant, and would later work as his dubbing editor. Partners for 40 years, they finally married in 2020. His first marriage, in 1966, to Beryl Ridley, with whom he had two daughters, Amanda and Claire, ended in divorce.

Sue and his children survive him, as do his stepdaughter, Sarah, and nine grandchildren, Serenah, Summer, Kit, Gabriel J, Ava, Bodie, Asher, Gabriel and Erin.

Jon Henry Albert Gregory, film editor, born 21 May 1944; died 9 September 2021

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