Stuart Baird has spent fifty years cutting other people's action films into shape, and directed three of his own. On the evidence of Star Trek: Nemesis, the editor's instincts did not survive the walk from the cutting room to the set.
Fi1m perspective
The strangest thing about Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) is the dune buggy chase. Picard drives across a desert planet grinning like a man on a stag weekend, and the sequence is shot flat and cut into pieces so short we could not tell where anyone was. This is a film directed by an editor, a man studios call in when a picture will not cut together, and the action he staged himself does not cut together. We were bored by the chase, and then annoyed, because we knew this was a crew's last voyage and the film was spending it on a car chase.
Baird's career is in the cutting room. He started in the late 1960s as an assistant on Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968) and on Ken Russell films including The Devils (1971) and Tommy (1975), then went to Hollywood and found Richard Donner. From The Omen (1976) through Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987) he gave Donner's films their pace, and along the way he became known as a film doctor, the editor brought in to rescue productions in trouble. He has said he always thought he "should sort my own messes out rather than continuing sorting other people's messes out", and in the 1990s he got the chance.
Three features followed: Executive Decision (1996), U.S. Marshals (1998) and Nemesis. We have reviewed only the last, and it is the one that ended the run. The film has real things in it. Tom Hardy plays a hungry, whispering double for Picard, and Jerry Goldsmith writes the crew a proper farewell. Around them Baird arranges corridor shootouts and a bridge that shakes on cue, and a fist fight between Riker and Ron Perlman's Viceroy gets more screen time than Riker's departure for his own command. The model is The Wrath of Khan (1982), a film that knew its people and let them grieve on camera. Baird gives them lines and no scenes. Members of the cast later said he had little interest in the series or in what they had to offer, and the film bears that out.
Since then he has gone back to what he does well. He cut Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012), and neither has the problem Nemesis has. The lesson of his three films is not that editors cannot direct. It is that a man who has spent his life fixing other people's pictures may never have had to learn what goes wrong in front of the camera. If you want Baird at his best, look at the credits of somebody else's film.
Biography
Stuart Baird is an English film editor, producer and director. He was born on 14 January 1947 in Uxbridge, Middlesex. He began his career as an assistant editor and assistant director on films by Ken Russell before receiving his first editing credit on Tommy (1975).
Baird is known for his work on action films, including long collaborations with director Richard Donner on titles such as Superman (1978), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and the Lethal Weapon series. He has edited over thirty major motion pictures and was nominated for a second Oscar for Gorillas in the Mist (1988). He has also directed three films: Executive Decision (1996), U.S. Marshals (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002).
His editing credits include Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012), both directed by Martin Campbell. He received further nominations from the American Cinema Editors and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for these Bond films.
