When supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle accepts her career achievement award on Feb. 26 at the 70th Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel Awards, she’ll be only the third woman to do so. “I’m hoping to start a trend of more women getting more recognition,” Yates Whittle, who worked on Avatar: The Way of Water (for which she received her third Oscar nomination) and Top Gun: Maverick, tells THR. “There are a lot of fantastic female sound editors out there. We should be a bigger club.”
The honoree is featured in a new episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Behind the Screen, during which she talks about her latest and upcoming work.
Based at Skywalker Sound in Northern California for three decades, Yates Whittle has worked on more than 120 films, including Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Minority Report, Munich, Iron Man, Cloverfield, Jurassic World and Fight Club. Her two previous Academy Award nominations came for James Cameron’s original Avatar and Maverick director Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy; she’ll be reteaming with Kosinski on his upcoming Formula One racing movie.
The 70th Golden Reel Awards–the first to be held in person since the start of the pandemic–will be presented at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, with Jerry Bruckheimer scheduled to take home the filmmaker of the year honor.
A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
