His directing credits include the Academy Award-nominated film Frances, Gleaming the Cube and the mini-series The Last Don, which received two Emmy nominations.
Clifford was a leading film editor for over ten years, before he made an impressive feature directorial debut with Frances, the dramatic real-life story of actress Frances Farmer, which gained Academy Award nominations for Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley and was also entered into the 13th Moscow International Film Festival.
[3] His second feature outing was the Australian historical adventure-drama Burke & Wills which was chosen as a participant in the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.
Clifford's other feature editing credits include Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T., Sam Peckinpah's Convoy, Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice and the cult-classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
They include episodes of Joan of Arcadia, The Guardian, Twin Peaks and Faerie Tale Theatre, and the movies Profoundly Normal (Kirstie Alley, Delroy Lindo), See You In My Dreams (Aidan Quinn, Marcia Gay Harden), Redeemer (Matthew Modine), Past Tense (Scott Glenn, Lara Flynn Boyle, Anthony LaPaglia) and Mario Puzo's The Last Don Parts I and II, an Emmy-nominated 10-hour mini-series (Danny Aiello, Joe Mantegna, Jason Gedrick, Daryl Hannah).