The Hong Kong director who became Éric Rohmer’s editor: Mary Stephen on a life in film

It’s a kind of magic – not the 1980s stadium rock extravaganza type, more the movie-make-believe sort.

“Editing is magic!” says Mary Stephen, Hong Kong-born film and documentary editor and the calibre of practitioner to whom the description “legendary” is frequently applied.

Stephen is speaking on video, from her Paris home, about a long career spent almost entirely in the comparative dark, yet one without which numerous films and documentaries would be unrecognisable, as well as, undoubtedly, worse off.

What does she mean by “magic”?

“Well, that’s what it is!” she says. “It can make things happen – it makes emotions happen, it makes things you never knew existed happen. In documentaries, especially, it’s even very dangerous, in the sense that you can make the characters do anything you want. It’s magic in the sense that I have done fiction films where I turned the characters around to make them seem like somebody else.