[2] The directors that McIntyre worked alongside during this period included Charles Crichton, Leslie Norman, Jack Clayton, Sidney Gilliat, Anthony Asquith, Guy Green and Bryan Forbes.
"[1] McIntyre's role as an editor began in 1962 on the low-budget film Station Six-Sahara, which was directed by Seth Holt and starred Carroll Baker, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen.
Because of the difficulties inherent in living together in a remote area for a long period of time, tensions soon erupted among the cast and crew during filming: the leading performers (Françoise Dorléac, Donald Pleasence and Lionel Stander) all came to loathe each other, the lighting cameraman Gilbert Taylor punched the actor Iain Quarrier in the face, and a strike was threatened in protest over Polanski's treatment of Dorléac while filming a beach scene.
[11] McIntyre – later described by Harlan Kennedy in American Film as "genial" and "voluble"[12] – was one of the few reassuring presences on set, and Polanski subsequently recalled his editor enlivening many scenes in the island's pubs with his "hilarious Scottish vocal act".
[13] The two men, according to assistant director Roger Simons, remained "very close" throughout the making of the film, spending most evenings watching the rushes together after the day's shooting was complete.
Although McIntyre spent nearly a year meticulously trying to piece the film's narrative together,[15] the finished result – despite being described by Variety magazine in its pre-release review as displaying "excellent" editing[16][17] – was not to the director's satisfaction.
In the late 1960s he worked on films for Don Chaffey and James B. Clark, and followed them up by editing a further two films on behalf of producer Gene Gutowski: A Day at the Beach (1970), an adaptation of a critically-acclaimed work by the Dutch author Heere Heeresma that was originally intended as a vehicle for Polanski before it was passed on to the unknown director Simon Hesera, and which was given only a limited release more than twenty years after it was completed;[21][22] and The Adventures of Gerard (1970), taken from an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, which was directed by another young Pole, Jerzy Skolimowski – who, like Polanski with Repulsion, was at the helm of an English-language production for the first time.
[1] In a tribute, published in the pages of the industry journal Film and TV Technician in June 1986, Polanski described McIntyre as "first, a friend; a hard worker, loyal and like nobody else I met, fast.