(This is a great article about Thelma in the Independent I'm copying it here as their articles go paid very quickly)
~~~~~
Thelma Schoonmaker, winner of three Oscars, is Martin Scorsese's editor and was Michael Powell's wife. She tells Cathy Pryor about her work, and how to handle a temperamental genius
Published: 25 March 2007
Thelma Schoonmaker doesn't believe in silly ideas like fate. And yet she's hard put to find another word to explain the fortuitous meetings and turnings that have changed the course of her life. If she'd had it her way, for instance, she wouldn't have worked in films at all: she would have been a diplomat. But when she applied to the state department in 1961, fresh out of university, they turned her down: too liberal and honest for us, they said. Left at a loose end, she saw an ad in the New York Times, offering training to be a film editor - the first and only ad of its kind that she has ever seen. She applied for the job because she thought she might as well. Her boss turned out to be a "terrible old hack" who slashed and burned classic films for slots on late-night TV, and she hated it. But the process of cutting film began to intrigue her. And so, in 1963, she applied to a six-week summer school at New York University. While she was there, the lecturer approached her. There was a student in trouble. Someone had botched the negative cutting of his film dreadfully. He was very distressed. Could she help? Schoonmaker could, and was introduced to the student - Martin Scorsese.
Cut to 1977. Scorsese has well and truly come to public attention as the director of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Schoonmaker is an established film editor (though, due to her problems getting into the union, of which more later, the film on which she would begin her regular collaboration with Scorsese would be Raging Bull, released in 1980). The two are also firm personal friends. Scorsese, ever the enthusiast for movie history, loves the classic work of the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. He can't understand why they aren't better known in America. "Marty was so intensely devoted to films," says Schoonmaker. "All of us would run off every night and see a new masterpiece by Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut. These films were just crashing into New York and Marty was learning all he could about these filmmakers. That's why he was so puzzled that he couldn't find anything to read about Powell and Pressburger, and that's why he went on his big search to find Michael." Find him he did, and he brought him to New York to help promote his films. Schoonmaker, who had fallen in love with Powell's films, promptly fell in love with the man himself. They married in 1984 - she was 45, he was 74 - and enjoyed what she describes as a blissfully happy union until Powell died in 1990.
Schoonmaker, now an Oscar-winning film editor who's worked almost exclusively with Scorsese for nearly 30 years (she won her third Oscar this year for The Departed), still seems endearingly gobsmacked by the chance events that led her to where she is today. She could so easily have done something completely different, she says. "I'm sure I would have if I hadn't seen the ad. It was quite extraordinary that I saw that. And then if I had taken the summer course a year later, Scorsese wouldn't have been there. And then it was absolute fate that he introduced me to my husband. I'm not a big believer in fate, but when I look at my life I have to say, well, you have to pay attention, don't you?"
Anyway, whether there's a little man in a cloud somewhere pulling long strings and saying "Oh come on, hurry up and make Goodfellas will you - I want to watch it", or whether we live in an entirely random universe, we can be grateful that Schoonmaker's life took the course it did. As great as Scorsese indisputably is, his films would not be in quite the same shape if they hadn't been edited by Schoonmaker. Ever since editing her first commercial film, Woodstock (1970), for which she was nominated for an Oscar for its experimental use of multiple images and freeze frames, her talent has been obvious. To give you two notable examples of her skills: if you've ever felt the depths of gangster Henry Hill's paranoia during the jittery sequence in Goodfellas that spans the day he gets arrested, you may not have noticed it, but the inventive and precise use of jump cuts and freeze frames has a great deal to do with its impact. Likewise, the fact that the fight scenes in Raging Bull flow with an astounding lyrical elegance and beauty that only serves to emphasise their shocking brutality is down, in no small part, to Schoonmaker. She herself demurs, and has said that it's all Scorsese, that that he directs like an editor and that they edit together. "He gives me beautifully thought out footage - you can't make something great through editing if you don't have strong footage to begin with" - but I'm sure he'd insist she was being absurdly modest. She has a musical ear as well as a good eye, too, judging by the satisfying rhythms of the storytelling and the seamless way her cuts fit with Scorsese's generally brilliant choice of accompanying song. But perhaps the best testament to her skill is that if you sit down in front of one of his films in order to pay attention to the editing and see what you can learn, you'll find - if you're anything like me, anyway - that within 60 seconds you'll have forgotten all about that and got sucked in to simply watching the story. And that, in a nutshell, is why she and Scorsese as a team are so good.
But though Schoonmaker is as famous as film editors get, her job is still not easy to appreciate from a layman's point of view. "You're presented with footage and when you put it together sometimes the way it was planned doesn't work," she says. "It might be too long, for example, or one actor is stronger than another, so you have to beef up the other actor and find a way to keep the balance between them. There's a thousand decisions that get made every day and that's why it's hard for people to understand. You'd have to sit here with me for months and months to see how a scene has been transformed into something entirely different, but you wouldn't understand the transformation unless you were here with me every step of the way. Sometimes people who see the changes ask 'How did you do that? How did you make that work better?', and it's so hard to explain. It's easier to explain camerawork, costumes, or lighting - sometimes even acting. It's not easy to explain editing."
It's a tremendously demanding job, too, she says, involving long hours seven days a week. Has technology not made the job easier over the years? "The digital thing has made experimenting easier, because I can do some very daring stuff and still have my original edit there," she says. "But the problem of being an artist in the film business, as Scorsese says, it's the same. Nothing changes! It's still hard! It's still an uphill battle to get good work done and to preserve it once you make it."
If the work is hard, however, the results speak for themselves: hence her recent Oscar for The Departed, even if it was somewhat overshadowed by Scorsese's win. Not that she minds. "It's really wonderful that Marty won at long last. We were praying for that. We didn't really expect to win adapted screenplay and editing and best picture, we thought maybe Babel would. Marty was so surprised. The first thing he said to me after the ceremony was 'And we won best picture too!' It would have been pretty devastating if he hadn't won. I don't think I could have taken it, frankly."
It's not surprising that her feelings on the subject are strong, since the two have clearly been through a lot, both good and bad. In fact, the way they work together on a film - her hard at work watching and cutting the footage, him sitting in the room directing the process, sometimes quietly reading a book while she gets on with the nuts and bolts of it - sounds like an old married couple. "Once he's seen whether the vision worked or not, when it comes to the three hours it's going to take to refine a scene he often will just go away, do other things, and then come back with a fresh eye," she has said. But Schoonmaker - who stays away from the set so she can approach the editing process with an unbiased mind - clearly never loses interest, no matter how difficult the work or how long the hours. Working with Marty is "like being in the best film school in the world," she says. "He's so enthusiastic about the filmmakers he admires and he infects you with his enthusiasm. That's why he's such a good teacher, he doesn't lecture you, he makes you excited and want to see all the films he loves. As for the work, it's so intense, so fulfilling, you feel so proud of the film at the end. I know many other editors who work on films they hate and they're bitter. I'm never that way."
Yet it can't all be positive, since Scorsese - a demanding, mercurial man, a little like Powell, in fact - is sometimes difficult to work with, surely? Schoonmaker admits he is moody "particularly when his work is being threatened", though she won't give specifics, saying merely that in arguments with the studio he will get heated and loud and bang the phone down. (I like to think of him doing a Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and shooting the nearest hapless assistant in the foot, but that's another story.) In any case, it's all part of her job to deal with it, she says. "His intensity and his moodiness is all part of being an artist. It's always because he's troubled about something artistic. Two days later he'll tell me something about the film that was causing his bad mood. For me it's all part of it." She likens Scorsese's intensity to Peeping Tom, written and directed by Powell, in which the main character, a photographer who is also a vicious killer, "can't get that shot quite right, so he's got to do it again and again, you know? That was Michael commenting on his own obsessiveness."
Powell never inflicted that obsessiveness on her, though, she says (she often slips from talking about Scorsese to talking about her husband, and vice versa). "To live with Michael was just fantastic. I never saw any of what I heard about his behavior on the set. Michael felt filmmaking was like a religion and if you came on his set unprepared he was merciless, because he didn't have big budgets. In those days he had one take. If that take didn't go well it was a big deal to do a second one. The way we shoot these days that's nothing, eight takes is quite common. But for Michael you had to be tuned up and ready to go and if you weren't up to his standard I understand he could be rather nasty. But I never saw it."
You get the impression speaking to Schoonmaker, a bubbly, warm, vibrant woman, that perhaps she's just adept at dealing with difficult men. "Yes, I know how to ride out the various moods," she says. "That's part of my job really. Staying calm is the best thing to do. Just ride it out."
Her ability to "ride it out" may well have something to do with her peripatetic upbringing. Her father worked for Standard Oil and moved from country to country with the job. "My parents were both American expatriates living in Paris when they met and then they moved to Algeria in 1937, where I was born. They would have loved to have stayed there but because of the North African invasion in World War II, we were evacuated to Lisbon when I was only one. My mother loved Algiers. She was always going out to the countryside riding camels and looking at archeological things. She was very adventurous, spoke several languages, gave me a fantastic interest in everything, particularly art and history. She's the main influence on my early life."
After Algeria became dangerous, Standard Oil moved the family to the Caribbean island of Aruba. "It was a beautiful little island. Quite dry - years ago pirates had put in there and cut down the trees to fix their ships, so it was just a coral outcrop - but with beautiful beaches. We would come home from school and throw off our shoes and run down the beach every day and go swimming. It was quite idyllic." But the family left Aruba to move back to America when Schoonmaker was 15. The change in culture came as a shock. "Suburban New Jersey was very conformist. If you weren't a cheerleader or a football player you were nobody. I didn't know anything about rock and roll. There weren't many students who were as interested as I was in literature or art. But when I went to Cornell University, from that point on, I was fine." At university Schoonmaker majored in political science and the Russian language and audited literature courses taught by none other than Vladimir Nabokov. "He was wonderful to listen to, but he had quite a bit of contempt for us as students. I understand that his wife read all of our papers because he was too bored by what we were saying to bother."
Then came Schoonmaker's problems with the State Department. "They said, 'What would you do if you were at a cocktail reception in South Africa and someone asked you about apartheid?' And I said, 'Oh! It's absolutely terrible.' And they told me, 'You can't say that when you're representing the United States, you have to wait until the embassy decides that and tells you you can say that, so you're going to be uncomfortable here'."
Hence the providential ad ("You never see ads like that! Editors recommend assistants to each other, we don't do it by advertising") and the meeting with Scorsese ("a strange fate", she says again). It was obvious at once that Scorsese was a major talent. "It was so clear that he had such strong filmic ideas. His student film It's Not Just You, Murray! was a comic look at gangsters and it was filled with wit and was so clever. Right away, you said, wow, that's a filmmaker. You were immediately in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. Which was what my husband used to say about Marty's films: that he could relax and enjoy them because there was somebody steering the ship. That is also what Marty would say about Michael Powell movies."
But though the two hit it off at once, Scorsese's efforts to employ Schoonmaker were stymied by the draconian rules of the union. "Even though I had been nominated for an Oscar for Woodstock, the union said I had to serve a long apprenticeship of seven years and something like five years as an assistant, and then I could become an editor," she says. "When Marty went to Hollywood he wanted me to edit for him and I couldn't, because the union wouldn't let me in. So I went back to New York and worked on documentaries about the American Revolution and things like that, until Marty called me again for The Last Waltz, and I went out and started working and they threw me off again - they said if you don't fire her immediately we're going to shut down New York, New York, which Marty was filming at the time. So I left again, then on Raging Bull Marty called me again and said 'We've fixed it now'. And then I did get in. But it was just silly. The union situation is a hell of a lot better now."
By that time Schoonmaker had met Powell and they had fallen in love. Powell, for all his genius, was by then a spent force as a filmmaker. The long creative period he had enjoyed with Pressburger had finished, and Peeping Tom, made without Pressburger and released in 1960, had been greeted by critics with such savagery that it ended Powell's career. "The reviews were so extreme. Crazy. You've never read reviews like that: 'This film should be flushed down the toilet'. You cannot believe the viciousness." Powell had never been particularly good at publicising his cause anyway, she says. "Powell and Pressburger didn't invest any of their own energy or money into publicity. They were more interested in the films. Lean went to Hollywood and got that big publicity machine behind him, but Powell and Pressburger didn't spend much energy on it. For a certain amount of time Rank had publicised them but then they broke off with Rank because Rank hated The Red Shoes and they told Michael and Emeric that in future they would decide what films they would make. Michael said, 'No one ever says that to me,' and walked out. If it hadn't been for two Americans who brought The Red Shoes to America and made it a world-wide hit, it would have vanished. Rank gave it 10 days in the provinces - there was no premiere. They just hated it - 'There were homosexuals in it... why did she have to die... it was weird.' Can you imagine? This is common in the history of art, though. It happens all the time."
Schoonmaker recalls that her first meeting with Powell didn't go particularly well. "There was a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and Marty told me to go and see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp there. I saw Michael and went up to him and said something about being Scorsese's editor. Michael was in a very strange mood that day. Emeric was bustling round talking to all of his friends but Michael was very sad. But a little later Marty said Michael was coming to dinner and so I ate with them that night at Marty's apartment. And I just fell in love with Michael immediately because he was such an extraordinary person: the vibrancy in his face, his love of life, his unusual way of speaking. He never spoke in cliches. He never spoke much at all, unless he had something to say, but when he did speak it was so unusual and startling. Things developed from there and he moved to New York to live with me and it was wonderful."
Though Schoonmaker was in her 40s, it was her first marriage. Had she never wanted to marry previously? "I was such a workaholic, and film editing is a brutally exhausting and time-consuming job. I had been in a relationship for a long time with someone but it was not something I really wanted and eventually I broke it off. Then when I met Michael all my doubts about marriage went away." The years of their marriage were "blissful", she says. "He was like the sun. He had the heart of a 16-year-old and he enjoyed every second of life." Had he not been embittered by the reception of Peeping Tom? "He was surprised and disappointed, but it never made him give up his love of filmmaking and I think he felt that if you're out on the cutting edge in art you'd better be prepared to be shot down. He knew that was the bargain. But he never stopped dreaming about making films and writing scripts."
So there are unwritten scripts? "Oh yes! Scorsese tried to get Michael jobs as a director so some of the projects could get made but there were always problems with insurance, even though Scorsese offered to direct if anything happened to Michael, and so did Coppola. Unfortunately, sometimes Michael would get annoyed at a potential backer they had found and insult him if he said something insensitive . Marty, you see, has learned how to function in the studio world, he's learned how to walk that tightrope between commerce and art and work with studio people. But Michael never learned that."
Since Powell's death, Schoonmaker has managed his estate and promoted his films and gone on working, which she seems likely to do for a good while yet, despite the fact that she's now 67. "Once you get infected with the film editing bug it's pretty strong," she says. "That's what makes it so hard for families to deal with. The friends you make you work so hard with that they're like the friendships you make in a war, because you've shared something so powerful. It's like a drug. Every film is different and it's exhilarating. It's hard to give up." And thank God for that, because it means there are many more films to come.
~~~~~
Thelma Schoonmaker, winner of three Oscars, is Martin Scorsese's editor and was Michael Powell's wife. She tells Cathy Pryor about her work, and how to handle a temperamental genius
Published: 25 March 2007
Thelma Schoonmaker doesn't believe in silly ideas like fate. And yet she's hard put to find another word to explain the fortuitous meetings and turnings that have changed the course of her life. If she'd had it her way, for instance, she wouldn't have worked in films at all: she would have been a diplomat. But when she applied to the state department in 1961, fresh out of university, they turned her down: too liberal and honest for us, they said. Left at a loose end, she saw an ad in the New York Times, offering training to be a film editor - the first and only ad of its kind that she has ever seen. She applied for the job because she thought she might as well. Her boss turned out to be a "terrible old hack" who slashed and burned classic films for slots on late-night TV, and she hated it. But the process of cutting film began to intrigue her. And so, in 1963, she applied to a six-week summer school at New York University. While she was there, the lecturer approached her. There was a student in trouble. Someone had botched the negative cutting of his film dreadfully. He was very distressed. Could she help? Schoonmaker could, and was introduced to the student - Martin Scorsese.
Cut to 1977. Scorsese has well and truly come to public attention as the director of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Schoonmaker is an established film editor (though, due to her problems getting into the union, of which more later, the film on which she would begin her regular collaboration with Scorsese would be Raging Bull, released in 1980). The two are also firm personal friends. Scorsese, ever the enthusiast for movie history, loves the classic work of the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. He can't understand why they aren't better known in America. "Marty was so intensely devoted to films," says Schoonmaker. "All of us would run off every night and see a new masterpiece by Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut. These films were just crashing into New York and Marty was learning all he could about these filmmakers. That's why he was so puzzled that he couldn't find anything to read about Powell and Pressburger, and that's why he went on his big search to find Michael." Find him he did, and he brought him to New York to help promote his films. Schoonmaker, who had fallen in love with Powell's films, promptly fell in love with the man himself. They married in 1984 - she was 45, he was 74 - and enjoyed what she describes as a blissfully happy union until Powell died in 1990.
Schoonmaker, now an Oscar-winning film editor who's worked almost exclusively with Scorsese for nearly 30 years (she won her third Oscar this year for The Departed), still seems endearingly gobsmacked by the chance events that led her to where she is today. She could so easily have done something completely different, she says. "I'm sure I would have if I hadn't seen the ad. It was quite extraordinary that I saw that. And then if I had taken the summer course a year later, Scorsese wouldn't have been there. And then it was absolute fate that he introduced me to my husband. I'm not a big believer in fate, but when I look at my life I have to say, well, you have to pay attention, don't you?"
Anyway, whether there's a little man in a cloud somewhere pulling long strings and saying "Oh come on, hurry up and make Goodfellas will you - I want to watch it", or whether we live in an entirely random universe, we can be grateful that Schoonmaker's life took the course it did. As great as Scorsese indisputably is, his films would not be in quite the same shape if they hadn't been edited by Schoonmaker. Ever since editing her first commercial film, Woodstock (1970), for which she was nominated for an Oscar for its experimental use of multiple images and freeze frames, her talent has been obvious. To give you two notable examples of her skills: if you've ever felt the depths of gangster Henry Hill's paranoia during the jittery sequence in Goodfellas that spans the day he gets arrested, you may not have noticed it, but the inventive and precise use of jump cuts and freeze frames has a great deal to do with its impact. Likewise, the fact that the fight scenes in Raging Bull flow with an astounding lyrical elegance and beauty that only serves to emphasise their shocking brutality is down, in no small part, to Schoonmaker. She herself demurs, and has said that it's all Scorsese, that that he directs like an editor and that they edit together. "He gives me beautifully thought out footage - you can't make something great through editing if you don't have strong footage to begin with" - but I'm sure he'd insist she was being absurdly modest. She has a musical ear as well as a good eye, too, judging by the satisfying rhythms of the storytelling and the seamless way her cuts fit with Scorsese's generally brilliant choice of accompanying song. But perhaps the best testament to her skill is that if you sit down in front of one of his films in order to pay attention to the editing and see what you can learn, you'll find - if you're anything like me, anyway - that within 60 seconds you'll have forgotten all about that and got sucked in to simply watching the story. And that, in a nutshell, is why she and Scorsese as a team are so good.
But though Schoonmaker is as famous as film editors get, her job is still not easy to appreciate from a layman's point of view. "You're presented with footage and when you put it together sometimes the way it was planned doesn't work," she says. "It might be too long, for example, or one actor is stronger than another, so you have to beef up the other actor and find a way to keep the balance between them. There's a thousand decisions that get made every day and that's why it's hard for people to understand. You'd have to sit here with me for months and months to see how a scene has been transformed into something entirely different, but you wouldn't understand the transformation unless you were here with me every step of the way. Sometimes people who see the changes ask 'How did you do that? How did you make that work better?', and it's so hard to explain. It's easier to explain camerawork, costumes, or lighting - sometimes even acting. It's not easy to explain editing."
It's a tremendously demanding job, too, she says, involving long hours seven days a week. Has technology not made the job easier over the years? "The digital thing has made experimenting easier, because I can do some very daring stuff and still have my original edit there," she says. "But the problem of being an artist in the film business, as Scorsese says, it's the same. Nothing changes! It's still hard! It's still an uphill battle to get good work done and to preserve it once you make it."
If the work is hard, however, the results speak for themselves: hence her recent Oscar for The Departed, even if it was somewhat overshadowed by Scorsese's win. Not that she minds. "It's really wonderful that Marty won at long last. We were praying for that. We didn't really expect to win adapted screenplay and editing and best picture, we thought maybe Babel would. Marty was so surprised. The first thing he said to me after the ceremony was 'And we won best picture too!' It would have been pretty devastating if he hadn't won. I don't think I could have taken it, frankly."
It's not surprising that her feelings on the subject are strong, since the two have clearly been through a lot, both good and bad. In fact, the way they work together on a film - her hard at work watching and cutting the footage, him sitting in the room directing the process, sometimes quietly reading a book while she gets on with the nuts and bolts of it - sounds like an old married couple. "Once he's seen whether the vision worked or not, when it comes to the three hours it's going to take to refine a scene he often will just go away, do other things, and then come back with a fresh eye," she has said. But Schoonmaker - who stays away from the set so she can approach the editing process with an unbiased mind - clearly never loses interest, no matter how difficult the work or how long the hours. Working with Marty is "like being in the best film school in the world," she says. "He's so enthusiastic about the filmmakers he admires and he infects you with his enthusiasm. That's why he's such a good teacher, he doesn't lecture you, he makes you excited and want to see all the films he loves. As for the work, it's so intense, so fulfilling, you feel so proud of the film at the end. I know many other editors who work on films they hate and they're bitter. I'm never that way."
Yet it can't all be positive, since Scorsese - a demanding, mercurial man, a little like Powell, in fact - is sometimes difficult to work with, surely? Schoonmaker admits he is moody "particularly when his work is being threatened", though she won't give specifics, saying merely that in arguments with the studio he will get heated and loud and bang the phone down. (I like to think of him doing a Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and shooting the nearest hapless assistant in the foot, but that's another story.) In any case, it's all part of her job to deal with it, she says. "His intensity and his moodiness is all part of being an artist. It's always because he's troubled about something artistic. Two days later he'll tell me something about the film that was causing his bad mood. For me it's all part of it." She likens Scorsese's intensity to Peeping Tom, written and directed by Powell, in which the main character, a photographer who is also a vicious killer, "can't get that shot quite right, so he's got to do it again and again, you know? That was Michael commenting on his own obsessiveness."
Powell never inflicted that obsessiveness on her, though, she says (she often slips from talking about Scorsese to talking about her husband, and vice versa). "To live with Michael was just fantastic. I never saw any of what I heard about his behavior on the set. Michael felt filmmaking was like a religion and if you came on his set unprepared he was merciless, because he didn't have big budgets. In those days he had one take. If that take didn't go well it was a big deal to do a second one. The way we shoot these days that's nothing, eight takes is quite common. But for Michael you had to be tuned up and ready to go and if you weren't up to his standard I understand he could be rather nasty. But I never saw it."
You get the impression speaking to Schoonmaker, a bubbly, warm, vibrant woman, that perhaps she's just adept at dealing with difficult men. "Yes, I know how to ride out the various moods," she says. "That's part of my job really. Staying calm is the best thing to do. Just ride it out."
Her ability to "ride it out" may well have something to do with her peripatetic upbringing. Her father worked for Standard Oil and moved from country to country with the job. "My parents were both American expatriates living in Paris when they met and then they moved to Algeria in 1937, where I was born. They would have loved to have stayed there but because of the North African invasion in World War II, we were evacuated to Lisbon when I was only one. My mother loved Algiers. She was always going out to the countryside riding camels and looking at archeological things. She was very adventurous, spoke several languages, gave me a fantastic interest in everything, particularly art and history. She's the main influence on my early life."
After Algeria became dangerous, Standard Oil moved the family to the Caribbean island of Aruba. "It was a beautiful little island. Quite dry - years ago pirates had put in there and cut down the trees to fix their ships, so it was just a coral outcrop - but with beautiful beaches. We would come home from school and throw off our shoes and run down the beach every day and go swimming. It was quite idyllic." But the family left Aruba to move back to America when Schoonmaker was 15. The change in culture came as a shock. "Suburban New Jersey was very conformist. If you weren't a cheerleader or a football player you were nobody. I didn't know anything about rock and roll. There weren't many students who were as interested as I was in literature or art. But when I went to Cornell University, from that point on, I was fine." At university Schoonmaker majored in political science and the Russian language and audited literature courses taught by none other than Vladimir Nabokov. "He was wonderful to listen to, but he had quite a bit of contempt for us as students. I understand that his wife read all of our papers because he was too bored by what we were saying to bother."
Then came Schoonmaker's problems with the State Department. "They said, 'What would you do if you were at a cocktail reception in South Africa and someone asked you about apartheid?' And I said, 'Oh! It's absolutely terrible.' And they told me, 'You can't say that when you're representing the United States, you have to wait until the embassy decides that and tells you you can say that, so you're going to be uncomfortable here'."
Hence the providential ad ("You never see ads like that! Editors recommend assistants to each other, we don't do it by advertising") and the meeting with Scorsese ("a strange fate", she says again). It was obvious at once that Scorsese was a major talent. "It was so clear that he had such strong filmic ideas. His student film It's Not Just You, Murray! was a comic look at gangsters and it was filled with wit and was so clever. Right away, you said, wow, that's a filmmaker. You were immediately in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. Which was what my husband used to say about Marty's films: that he could relax and enjoy them because there was somebody steering the ship. That is also what Marty would say about Michael Powell movies."
But though the two hit it off at once, Scorsese's efforts to employ Schoonmaker were stymied by the draconian rules of the union. "Even though I had been nominated for an Oscar for Woodstock, the union said I had to serve a long apprenticeship of seven years and something like five years as an assistant, and then I could become an editor," she says. "When Marty went to Hollywood he wanted me to edit for him and I couldn't, because the union wouldn't let me in. So I went back to New York and worked on documentaries about the American Revolution and things like that, until Marty called me again for The Last Waltz, and I went out and started working and they threw me off again - they said if you don't fire her immediately we're going to shut down New York, New York, which Marty was filming at the time. So I left again, then on Raging Bull Marty called me again and said 'We've fixed it now'. And then I did get in. But it was just silly. The union situation is a hell of a lot better now."
By that time Schoonmaker had met Powell and they had fallen in love. Powell, for all his genius, was by then a spent force as a filmmaker. The long creative period he had enjoyed with Pressburger had finished, and Peeping Tom, made without Pressburger and released in 1960, had been greeted by critics with such savagery that it ended Powell's career. "The reviews were so extreme. Crazy. You've never read reviews like that: 'This film should be flushed down the toilet'. You cannot believe the viciousness." Powell had never been particularly good at publicising his cause anyway, she says. "Powell and Pressburger didn't invest any of their own energy or money into publicity. They were more interested in the films. Lean went to Hollywood and got that big publicity machine behind him, but Powell and Pressburger didn't spend much energy on it. For a certain amount of time Rank had publicised them but then they broke off with Rank because Rank hated The Red Shoes and they told Michael and Emeric that in future they would decide what films they would make. Michael said, 'No one ever says that to me,' and walked out. If it hadn't been for two Americans who brought The Red Shoes to America and made it a world-wide hit, it would have vanished. Rank gave it 10 days in the provinces - there was no premiere. They just hated it - 'There were homosexuals in it... why did she have to die... it was weird.' Can you imagine? This is common in the history of art, though. It happens all the time."
Schoonmaker recalls that her first meeting with Powell didn't go particularly well. "There was a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and Marty told me to go and see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp there. I saw Michael and went up to him and said something about being Scorsese's editor. Michael was in a very strange mood that day. Emeric was bustling round talking to all of his friends but Michael was very sad. But a little later Marty said Michael was coming to dinner and so I ate with them that night at Marty's apartment. And I just fell in love with Michael immediately because he was such an extraordinary person: the vibrancy in his face, his love of life, his unusual way of speaking. He never spoke in cliches. He never spoke much at all, unless he had something to say, but when he did speak it was so unusual and startling. Things developed from there and he moved to New York to live with me and it was wonderful."
Though Schoonmaker was in her 40s, it was her first marriage. Had she never wanted to marry previously? "I was such a workaholic, and film editing is a brutally exhausting and time-consuming job. I had been in a relationship for a long time with someone but it was not something I really wanted and eventually I broke it off. Then when I met Michael all my doubts about marriage went away." The years of their marriage were "blissful", she says. "He was like the sun. He had the heart of a 16-year-old and he enjoyed every second of life." Had he not been embittered by the reception of Peeping Tom? "He was surprised and disappointed, but it never made him give up his love of filmmaking and I think he felt that if you're out on the cutting edge in art you'd better be prepared to be shot down. He knew that was the bargain. But he never stopped dreaming about making films and writing scripts."
So there are unwritten scripts? "Oh yes! Scorsese tried to get Michael jobs as a director so some of the projects could get made but there were always problems with insurance, even though Scorsese offered to direct if anything happened to Michael, and so did Coppola. Unfortunately, sometimes Michael would get annoyed at a potential backer they had found and insult him if he said something insensitive . Marty, you see, has learned how to function in the studio world, he's learned how to walk that tightrope between commerce and art and work with studio people. But Michael never learned that."
Since Powell's death, Schoonmaker has managed his estate and promoted his films and gone on working, which she seems likely to do for a good while yet, despite the fact that she's now 67. "Once you get infected with the film editing bug it's pretty strong," she says. "That's what makes it so hard for families to deal with. The friends you make you work so hard with that they're like the friendships you make in a war, because you've shared something so powerful. It's like a drug. Every film is different and it's exhilarating. It's hard to give up." And thank God for that, because it means there are many more films to come.
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