The Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron, right, and Mark Sanger with the award for Best Film Editing. Courtesy Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP
The Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron, right, and Mark Sanger with the award for Best Film Editing. Courtesy Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP

The gravity of the Oscars: Mark Sanger on winning for co-editing Gravity



Chris Newbould

You'd think the man who'd just won the Oscar for co-editing Gravity – which won seven Oscars, six Baftas and seven Critics' Choice Awards – would be entitled to sit back and bask in the glory for a bit.

Instead, we found Mark Sanger at the Cabsat conference in Dubai this week, just eight days after his win.

“I love to travel and see how the film industry is around the world,” he explains. “So when [editing equipment manufacturer] Avid suggested bringing me out here, I jumped at the chance. I think there’s going to be a real seismic shift in the way films are financed and where they are filmed, and being here has been a real eye-opener and a joy.”

Sanger seems remarkably blasé for a man who just won an Oscar, though he admits the reality may not have fully hit him yet.

“When it actually sinks in that I have an Oscar I’ll probably be able to say more – but, of course, it’s great,” he says. “It’s not only fantastic that I won an award last weekend but, because of the collaborative nature of film we worked on, it was fantastic to see so many of us up on the stage, really humbling.”

The film took about three years to make and, having spent much of that time locked in a dark room with the director, I wonder if Sanger had predicted he had such a hit on his hands.

“We knew it was a unique film, but when you’re engaged in something so deeply for so long, you have no way of knowing whether an audience will engage with it,” he says. “Plus we had finished it months before its release, so we’d all moved onto other things. When it finally came out, the initial reaction at Venice was nice – we realised that people were engaging in the cinema experience we’d spent all that time working on, but we could never have predicted how much. Amazing.”

So, has Sanger’s phone been ringing off the hook with new offers since the win?

“There are offers,” he admits. “But it’s all about making the right decision on what is creatively the most interesting thing you can do, but also what is best for your family and paying the bills. I do have a wider range of choices following the win, but it’s still all about making the right choice. And having some sleep, which I don’t seem to have done since the Oscar.”

It's up to you to go green

Nils El Accad, chief executive and owner of Organic Foods and Café, says going green is about “lifestyle and attitude” rather than a “money change”; people need to plan ahead to fill water bottles in advance and take their own bags to the supermarket, he says.

“People always want someone else to do the work; it doesn’t work like that,” he adds. “The first step: you have to consciously make that decision and change.”

When he gets a takeaway, says Mr El Accad, he takes his own glass jars instead of accepting disposable aluminium containers, paper napkins and plastic tubs, cutlery and bags from restaurants.

He also plants his own crops and herbs at home and at the Sheikh Zayed store, from basil and rosemary to beans, squashes and papayas. “If you’re going to water anything, better it be tomatoes and cucumbers, something edible, than grass,” he says.

“All this throwaway plastic - cups, bottles, forks - has to go first,” says Mr El Accad, who has banned all disposable straws, whether plastic or even paper, from the café chain.

One of the latest changes he has implemented at his stores is to offer refills of liquid laundry detergent, to save plastic. The two brands Organic Foods stocks, Organic Larder and Sonnett, are both “triple-certified - you could eat the product”.  

The Organic Larder detergent will soon be delivered in 200-litre metal oil drums before being decanted into 20-litre containers in-store.

Customers can refill their bottles at least 30 times before they start to degrade, he says. Organic Larder costs Dh35.75 for one litre and Dh62 for 2.75 litres and refills will cost 15 to 20 per cent less, Mr El Accad says.

But while there are savings to be had, going green tends to come with upfront costs and extra work and planning. Are we ready to refill bottles rather than throw them away? “You have to change,” says Mr El Accad. “I can only make it available.”

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