Thelma Schoonmaker was 15 when she first watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a wartime classic by the British film-making duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one day after school.
“It just so happened to be on, but I never forgot it. It reigned in my brain,” she says wistfully, almost 70 years later. “I had no idea it was made by the man I would later marry.”
Today, Schoonmaker is arguably the world’s most successful film editor, having collaborated with Martin Scorsese for more than five decades. She is the backstage wizard behind some of the biggest blockbusters of modern cinema – Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, Wolf of Wall Street, and Killers of the Flower Moon, which has just topped Sight and Sound’s best films of 2023 poll.
Due to the actors’ strike, Schoonmaker and Scorsese did much of the PR for their latest film. But the impetus for Schoonmaker’s promotional tour of the UK has been the BFI’s 12-week retrospective on 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, along with Scorsese, have been longstanding proselytisers of his films, working to restore eight of them with money raised by Scorcese’s Film Foundation.
“My relationship with Michael was the happiest years of my life,” the 83-year-old says. “When he died, he left a little furnace burning inside me.” For Schoonmaker, promoting her late husband’s films helps assuage her grief, but it also speaks to her modesty – that she spends more time discussing his trajectory than her own, which has been nothing short of remarkable.
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 wins in the editing category. She has two Baftas, four ACE Eddie awards, and was honoured with the BFI Fellowship, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and the Bafta Fellowship.
But her route to film-making was not a direct line. Raised primarily 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 an adolescent, and found America “a little foreign”. She wanted to become a diplomat, but was turned down by the state department for being “too politically liberal” when she denounced South African apartheid. “They said, ‘you’re not going to be happy here’,” she laughs.
She decided to pursue film-making, and it was by chance – during a summer course at Washington Square College, now NYU – that she met Scorsese. She was 23, he 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 went on to edit his feature debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1967, Raging Bull in 1980 and everything else since.
She credits Scorsese not just with her “artistic development”, but with properly “educating” her 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 he was so extraordinary. He had a look on his face that implied all of his great passion for art.” Slowly, a romance blossomed, “much to everyone’s surprise”, she giggles with the coquettishness of a 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 oblivion” until Scorsese helped revive interest in his work. “No one has done more for Powell and Pressburger than Marty.”
And while it may seem improbable that the films of an Englishman from Kent and an Italian-American from Little Italy would have much in common, there’s plenty that unites them. Robert Helpmann’s eyes in The Tales of Hoffmann inspired Robert De Niro’s gaze in Taxi Driver; the championship fight buildup in Raging Bull drew on the duel scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. “In Michael’s films there isn’t a hero and a villain. It’s more about the people in between, and that interests Scorsese too … Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA. He thinks about it almost every day.”
The Red Shoes – which tells the story of a young woman (played by prima ballerina Moira Shearer) who desires to become a leading dancer – is rereleased in cinemas on Friday to mark its 75th anniversary. Scorsese has loaned a pair of the shoes from the film to an exhibition that’s on at the BFI Southbank until 7 January.
It’s touching for Schoonmaker to see the extent to which the two leading men of her life have helped one another. When Powell became ill, Scorsese even shut down editing of Goodfellas so Schoonmaker could take him home to England. His death two months later left her completely bereft. “Goodfellas saved my life. I didn’t want to live any more, but I knew Michael would have wanted me to go back and finish it.” The tragedy is that Powell didn’t see the film, though he had encouraged Scorsese to persist when studio after studio rejected it because they “didn’t want drugs in it”.
Pity the denouncers, because Goodfellas helped cement Scorsese’s reputation as one of the world’s best directors. Collaborating with him has been “the greatest job in the world”, Schoonmaker says. “Every film has been a new challenge. There’s nothing more different than Wolf of Wall Street, and Silence, and Killers of the Flower Moon.” The two cut every movie together, she adds, and part of Scorsese’s skill is that he thinks like an editor.
Killers of the Flower Moon marks the first time a Scorsese film has topped Sight and Sound’s annual poll, voted for by about 100 of the world’s top film critics. Schoonmaker hoped the film – about the systematic robbing and murder of the Native American Osage Nation – would “open the door to a period of American history that has been in the dark for far too long”. Did she take running time into consideration (the film clocks in at 206 minutes)? She says only that the collaboration with the Osage Nation “has enriched my life immensely and I think the film will have that effect on those who view it”. She has previously said cinema intermissions introduced for the film’s screenings were a “violation”.
Schoonmaker is more loquacious when discussing the historic role of women in film-making. Though she faced prejudice in the 1960s and 70s – “when I went to a laboratory with a can of film the man there said ‘drop that can’ because he was so upset that a woman had dared to come into the lab” – she also highlights the work of notable female editors working at that time. “There was Dede Allen, Margaret Booth, Verna Fields – though it was nothing like now. Now it’s amazing.”
That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Lately, while promoting Powell and Pressburger films, Schoonmaker has been amazed by the number of young people at screenings of the classic films. “Even Greta Gerwig has said A Matter of Life and Death and Red Shoes were a big influence on Barbie! It’s a wonderful thing, knowing that young people have rediscovered Michael’s films.”