by Thelma Schoonmaker was 15 years old when she first watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the wartime classic by British filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one day after school.
“It happened to be on, but I never forgot it. It prevailed in my brain,” she says fondly, almost 70 years later. “I had no idea it was the man I would later marry who did it.”
Today, Schoonmaker is arguably the most successful film editor in the world, having collaborated with Martin Scorsese for over five decades. She is the backstage wizard behind some of the greatest films of modern cinema – Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, Wolf of Wall Street, and Killers of the Flower Moon, which have topped polls of the best films 2023 Sight and Sound.
Because of the actors’ strike, Schoonmaker and Scorsese did a lot of PR for their latest film. But the impetus for Schoonmaker’s promotional tour of the UK is the BFI’s 12-week retrospective of the work of Powell and Pressburger – the so-called “Archers” who made two dozen films between 1939 and 1972 including A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes.
Schoonmaker married Powell in 1984. Since his death in 1990, she and Scorsese have long collaborated on his films, working to restore eight of them with money raised by the Scorcese Film Foundation.
“My relationship with Michael was the happiest years of my life,” says the 83-year-old. “When he died, he left a little furnace burning inside me.” For Schoonmaker, promoting her late husband’s film helps ease her grief, but it also speaks to her modesty — that she spends more time discussing his path than her own, which isn’t very significant.
Schoonmaker has received eight Oscar nominations for best film editing and won three – making her the first woman to win multiple film editing Oscars. She also shares the record for the most Oscar winners in the editing category. She has two Baftas, four ACE Eddie awards, and has been awarded a BFI Fellowship, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and a Bafta Fellowship.
But her way of making a film was not a straight line. Raised mainly on the Dutch-Caribbean island of Aruba (her father was employed by an oil company and worked extensively abroad), she moved to the US when she was a teenager, and found America “a little foreign”. She wanted to be a diplomat, but the state department rejected her for being “too politically liberal” when she denounced apartheid South Africa. “They said, ‘you won’t be happy here’,” she says.
She decided to go into filmmaking, and it was by chance – during a summer course at Washington Square College, now NYU – that she met Scorsese. She was 23, he was 21. “Marty trusted me to do what was right for his films and started teaching me about editing, which I knew nothing about,” she recalls. She edited her feature programme, Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1967, Raging Bull in 1980 and everything else since.
Related: Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s stunning epic about the bloody birth of modern America
She credits Scorsese not only for her “artistic development”, but for giving her the proper “education” on the films of Powell and Pressburger, and later introducing her to Powell over dinner in New York. “I was already a fan, but when I met Michael it was so extraordinary. He had a look on his face that suggested his great passion for art.” Slowly, romance blossomed, “to everyone’s surprise”, she laughs at the coquettishness of the teenager.
Things became difficult for Powell when the industry turned against him, especially after his controversial 1960 film Peeping Tom. She says he “lived in obscurity” until Scorsese helped fuel his interest. to revive his work. “Nobody did more for Powell and Pressburger than Marty.”
And while it may seem that the films of an Englishman from Kent and an Italian-American from Little Italy have much in common, there is much in common. Robert Helpmann’s eyes in The Tales of Hoffmann inspired the look of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver; the champion fight construction in Raging Bull drew on the duel scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. “In Michael’s films there is no hero or villain. It’s more about the people in between, and Scorsese is also interested … Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA. He thinks about it almost every day.”
Goodfellas saved my life … I knew Michael would want me to go back and finish it
The Red Shoes – which tells the story of a young woman (played by prima ballerina Moira Shearer) who aspires to become a famous dancer – is being re-released in cinemas on Friday to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Scorsese has lent a pair of shoes from the film to an exhibition which will be held at the BFI Southbank until January 7.
It is heartening for Schoonmaker to see how much these two great men have helped each other in their lives. When Powell became ill, Scorsese even stopped editing Goodfellas so Schoonmaker could take it home to England. Her death two months later left her completely bereft. “Goodfellas saved my life. I didn’t want to live anymore, but I knew Michael would want me to go back and finish it.” The tragedy is that Powell never saw the film, even though he encouraged Scorsese to continue when studio after studio rejected it because “they didn’t want drugs in it”.
Pity the naysayers, because Goodfellas helped cement Scorsese’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest directors. “The greatest job in the world” says Schoonmaker is to collaborate with him. “Every film is a new challenge. Nothing is more different than Wolf of Wall Street, and Silence, and Killers of the Flower Moon.” The two cut every film together, she says, and part of Scorsese’s skill is that he thinks he’s an editor.
Killers of the Flower Moon is the first time a Scorsese film has topped the annual Sight and Sound poll, voted on by around 100 of the world’s leading critics. Schoonmaker hoped that the film – about the systematic robbery and murder of the Osage Nation of Native Americans – would “open the door to a period in American history that has been in the dark for far too long”. Did she factor in running time (the movie is coming in at 206 minutes)? She only says that the collaboration with the Osage Nation “made a big difference to my life and I think the film will have that effect on those who watch it”. She had previously said that the cinema interventions introduced for screenings of the film were a “violation”.
Fences is more eloquent when discussing the historical role of women in filmmaking. Although she faced prejudice in the 1960s and 70s – “when I went to a laboratory with a can of film the man then said ‘drop that can’ because he was so upset that a woman wanted to come into the laboratory” – it also highlights the work of the prominent women editors who were working at that time. “There was Dede Allen, Margaret Booth, Verna Fields – although there was nothing like that now. Now it’s great.”
That’s not the only thing that has changed. Recently, while promoting the films of Powell and Pressburger, Schoonmaker was surprised by the number of young people who showed up for the classic films. “Greta Gerwig even said that A Matter of Life and Death and Red Shoes was a big influence on Barbie! It’s great to know that young people have found Michael’s films again.”
