Michael Kahn — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Michael Kahn (born December 8, c. 1930) is an American film editor known for his frequent collaboration with Steven Spielberg. His first collaboration with Spielberg was for his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He has edited all of Spielberg's subsequent films except for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which was edited by Carol Littleton. Kahn has received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Film Editing and has won three times—for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Schindler's List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), which were all Spielberg-directed films.

Kahn was born to a Jewish family in New York City. While his birth year has been reported as 1935, Kahn said in 2015, when asked if he was 80, that his age at that point was "closer to 85."

Kahn has edited digitally since at least Twister (1996), though he continued to edit on film with Spielberg long after most editors had stopped doing so. In 2008, Kahn acknowledged that "people find it hard to believe that Steven and I still edit film on a Moviola and a KEM. [But] Steven feels film got us where we are today, and he loves the smell of it and feel of it. We started that way and both really enjoy it." George Lucas remarked, "Michael Kahn can cut faster on a Moviola than anybody can cut on an Avid." However, since The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011), Kahn has edited Spielberg's films on an Avid machine.

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