Academy Award-Winning Editor Paul Rogers Offers a Glimpse into the Film Industry

President Gordon Martin and Rotarian Alan Rogers with Paul Rogers

The Rotary Club of Birmingham recently welcomed Academy Award-Winning Film Editor Paul Rogers. Rotarian Alan Rogers led a conversation with Paul about his journey from growing up in Birmingham to finding success in Hollywood.

Paul discussed the film industry and offered insights into his career as an editor who works collaboratively on a wide range of video projects, including films, music videos, corporate projects, and multi-media art installations. He described his foundation making movies for fun as a teenager, earning a film degree at the College of Santa Fe and starting his professional career at Alabama Public Television. He shared the short film by Kahlil Joseph that prompted him to take a leap and move to Los Angeles to work with Joseph, Luke Lynch and Graham Zeller with whom he now co-owns Parallax Post Production.

Paul showed clips from Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film that earned dozens of awards, including an Oscar for Paul for achievement in film editing earlier this year. He explained what it is like to work on a film and the process of bringing the fantastical concept written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s to life on screen.

“The movie shifts genres, it’s part action film, part romance, part comedy, part thriller, horror movie. Being fluent in the vocabularies of those different genres to execute those well was a big challenge but it was also really fun,” said Paul. “We all celebrated when it came out because it did well and people were watching it. We all felt like we had won the greatest award which is the film was a success, people watched it.”

Paul described the shift a year later when the movie started sweeping awards and garnering more widespread attention.

“I had been in LA for so long working kind of siloed off, outside of the industry, never had any mainstream successes, though I had done work that I was very proud of,” Paul said. “I didn’t know what a sense of community the filmmaking world as a greater whole had. Being able to tap into that and seeing that these are just people who love telling stories, having a good time with each other, and treating everyone fairly….the respect that everyone had for everyone else was really wonderful.”

About Paul Rogers

Birmingham native Paul Rogers has been editing films and other video projects in Los Angeles for the last eight years. He won the Oscar for Best Achievement in Film Editing for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once during the 95th Academy Awards, as well as multiple additional awards from entities including the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Film Awards and the Critics Choice Awards.

Rogers attended Homewood High School and earned a degree in film at the College of Santa Fe. He co-owns Parallax Post Production, a full-service post production company based in Los Angeles, with Kahlil Joseph, Luke Lynch and Graham Zeller. Paul and his wife Becky live in Altadena, CA, and have two children, Jomei and Enso.