Raja Raymond Gosnell (born December 9, 1958) is an American film editor and director. He is known for directing comedies and family films. Among his best known works are Home Alone 3 (1997), Never Been Kissed (1999), Big Momma's House (2000), the theatrical Scooby-Doo films (2002 and 2004), Yours, Mine & Ours (2005) and Sony Pictures Animation's live-action Smurfs films (2011 and 2013).
Contents
Early life
Gosnell is named after his father's friend Raja Mohideen. He was born in Los Angeles, California on December 9, 1958.
Gosnell has traced his interest in editing to a middle-school project shot on his father's Super-8 camera. He filmed around the school without a plan and assembled the footage in no particular order, then screened it to the Paul McCartney song "Another Day". Images and song ended together by coincidence, which he later described as showing him what editing could do. From that point he set out to become a film editor, and has said that editing was his route into the industry.
Career
Editing
Gosnell's career started in 1980 when he worked with director Robert Altman as an assistant editor on Popeye. His first solo credit as an editor was on the film The Silence. Afterward, Gosnell would serve as editor on a number of films, including Teen Wolf Too, Pretty Woman, and Rookie of the Year.
He is also known for his collaboration with director Chris Columbus, for whom he edited the films Home Alone (1990), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Gosnell has attributed his sense of comic timing to watching Chuck Jones's Bugs Bunny cartoons as a child, and has said that it fed directly into his editing of Home Alone.
Directing
Gosnell made his directorial debut with Home Alone 3 after learning writer and producer John Hughes was looking for a director for the project. He has said that the studios approached him about family films because of his work for Columbus, who had made a series of commercially successful pictures for family audiences during their time together, and that Home Alone 3 was a straightforward choice given that he had edited the first two films in the series. Afterwards, he went on to direct more theatrical films, including Never Been Kissed (1999), Big Momma's House (2000), Scooby-Doo (2002), Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) and The Smurfs (2011) and its sequel, The Smurfs 2 (2013). While many of his films have been met with poor reception from critics, they have generally been very successful at the box office. In 2021, Gosnell co-directed his son, Bradley, in Gun and a Hotel Bible alongside Alicia Joy LeBlanc.
Describing his approach in 2013, Gosnell said he read a script scene by scene to establish what each was for - comedy, emotion or exposition - and then looked for the most entertaining way to achieve it, rather than composing shots with a child viewer in mind. He said the audience only entered his thinking at the preview stage, and that on expensive films the reactions of preview audiences were taken seriously enough to remove material from the final cut. He gave as an example a scene cut from The Smurfs 2 involving Brendan Gleeson's character.
Filmography
Director
Executive producer only
Smurfs: The Lost Village (2017)
Editor
