Smith is best known for his work on several of Christopher Nolan's films, including Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Interstellar (2014) and Dunkirk (2017), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2004) and The Dark Knight (2008).
He began his notable collaboration with director Peter Weir on the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously, on which he was an associate editor working with Weir's longtime editor William M. Anderson.
[1] He was the sole editor for Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), for which Smith was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing and for an "Eddie Award" from the American Cinema Editors.
In 2010, he received another nomination for the American Cinema Editors Award for his editing work on Inception; Inception was listed as the 35th best-edited film of all time in a 2012 survey of members of the Motion Picture Editors Guild.