Alan Collins was born in India and grew up in the UK where he studied Drama and Film at Bristol University. He was inspired to become a film editor after viewing Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein and reading the bible of the edit room, The Technique of Film Editing (K. Reisz, G. Lambert) in 1967.

He became a fan of Roger Corman’s movies, particularly The Pit and the Pendulum and The Wild Angels and sent the director reviews he had written of these movies in the university newspaper while a film student. He was later hired by Corman as an Assistant Editor on the World War 1 feature Von Richthofen and Brown
filmed at Ardmore Studios near Dublin, Ireland in 1973.

Corman invited him to Hollywood, where he was promoted to co-editor of Von Richthofen and Brown and edited 3 more features for New World Pictures. While in Los Angeles he edited I Escaped from Devil’s Island starring Jim Brown.

Alan moved to Toronto in 1975 where he edited The Clown Murders, starring John Candy, and Love at First Sight, starring Dan Aykroyd, which received a Best Editing Award from the newly formed Canadian Film Editors guild in 1977. Collins then edited David Cronenberg’s The Brood, which later became a cult classic.

In 1987 Alan was series editor on the original Degrassi High series directed by Kit Hood. After editing 13 features and numerous documentaries he began teaching Film Editing at Ryerson University in Toronto from 1994 to 2006, just as the industry was shifting from flatbed editing to digital editing.

Alan firmly believes that editing is a tradition handed down from one generation to the next; his main influences being David Lean, Thelma Schumacher (Goodfellas) and Walter Murch (The Conversation).

In 2006 he moved to Halifax and began working as a producer. In 2007 he was invited by Focal Press to write the Foreword for the second edition of The Technique of Film Editing, the book that had played such a central role in his life as an editor. He describes this as one of the proudest moments in his life along with receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the CCE.

In 2015 Collins produced his
first feature, Relative Happiness, based on the best-selling novel by Nova Scotia author Lesley Crewe. He has also directed and edited two documentaries, Drowning in Colour: The Art of Wayne Boucher (2013) and Terminal: A day in the life of the Dartmouth Bridge Terminal (2014).