Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today." - Meaning and context.">
QuotesCosmos
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[Asked: "How did your famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today.

— Anne V. Coates

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "[Asked: "How did your famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 19, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

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#Anne V. Coates#cut#lawrence#together#perfect#match#thats#shot#literally#accident#sequence#nowadays
Anne V. Coates

About Anne V. Coates

Anne Voase Coates OBE (12 December 1925 – 8 May 2018) was a British film editor with a more than 60-year-long career. She was perhaps best known as the editor of David Lean's epic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Coates was nominated on four other occasions for the Oscar, the other motion pictures being Becket (1964), The Elephant Man (1980), In the Line of Fire (1993) and Out of Sight (1998). In an industry where women accounted for only 16 per cent of all editors working on the top 250 films of 2004, and 80 per cent of the films had absolutely no women on their editing teams at all, Coates thrived as a leading film editor. She was awarded BAFTA's highest honour, a BAFTA Fellowship, in February 2007 and was given an Academy Honorary Award, which are popularly known as a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, in November 2016 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.