Thelma Schoonmaker at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, 2010. Photo by Petr Novák.
At 83 years old, Thelma Schoonmaker has no intention of slowing down. Best known for her career-long collaboration with Martin Scorsese, the three-time Oscar-winning editor is still juggling multiple projects. As we sat down for our conversation in London, the press juggernaut for her latest film with Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon, was in full swing, while back in New York, her editing consoles were whirring away, already at work on the duo’s next feature: a documentary on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
It’s a film close to the legendary editor’s heart. Schoonmaker was married to Powell from 1984 until his death in 1990. She was introduced to the filmmaker—one of the greatest in the history of British cinema—by Scorsese, a lifelong admirer who had set out to rehabilitate Powell’s critical reputation. Following the release of his notorious film maudit Peeping Tom (1960), which was savaged by the press, Powell couldn’t catch a break. By the time Scorsese caught up with him in the late 1970s, the filmmaker was practically destitute, and the films he made with Pressburger—which count The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948) among their most celebrated masterpieces—had long been out of popular favor, eclipsed by contemporary fashions.
Schoonmaker and Scorsese have worked tirelessly to reclaim Powell and Pressburger’s cinematic legacy, restoring a number of their films through Scorsese’s Film Foundation. Most recently, Schoonmaker completed work on a stunning restoration of Peeping Tom, and collaborated with the British Film Institute to rescue Powell’s earliest works. Premiering at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, these “quota quickies” were low-budget productions made to stimulate the British film industry in the interwar period.
With a three-month retrospective of Powell and Pressburger’s films now underway at London’s BFI Southbank, Schoonmaker is hopping back and forth across the pond, giving numerous talks and introductions in London while working on the documentary in New York. Beginning with one of Powell’s pre-Pressburger “quota” films, we cued up a series of clips chosen to highlight the eclecticism of the duo’s remarkable oeuvre, then sat down with Schoonmaker to talk about the scenes in question, as well as the highs and lows of their inexhaustibly rich careers.
***
RED ENSIGN (1934)
Things are not going well for the workers at a Glasgow shipbuilding firm. In this sequence, an agitator is trying to convince the men to strike until they’ve received their due pay. David Barr (Leslie Banks), the visionary engineer responsible for a radical new ship design, throws the man over the side of the dock and speaks his piece to the crowd. He convinces them to stick with him for the long-term promise of more work and better pay once his ships are completed. Shooting on location in Scotland, Powell matches both crowd and speaker’s intensity of feeling with a series of fast cuts between the speech-givers, the faces of the men, and the iron hammers they rattle aloft.
NOTEBOOK: The Leslie Banks character here is quite the dreamer. Do you see any of Powell in him?
SCHOONMAKER: Michael always loved people with dreams. Late in his life, when we were living in New York, we sublet a place down in the Village, and he was always going to the little local stores where people would give him ideas about scripts and stories. If people had scripts of their own he would work with them very intensely, which I was always stunned by. He loved people with dreams.
Leslie Banks is so powerful. His grandson showed up at the Bologna Film Festival when we were running this film. I think it’s one of my favorites of the quota quickies because it has a more powerful subject than the others, which were basically rip-offs of Warner Brothers films. This one has a lot more guts to it, thanks to Leslie, I think.
NOTEBOOK: Even if you can’t make the greatest claims for these films compared to the later masterworks, you can see the experimentation at play here in everything from material to technique.
SCHOONMAKER: Well, the Soviet influence is right here, in the editing of the men with their hammers. It’s very nice. Michael was influenced by all the great cinema of the 1930s, as well as the silent films that he loved so much. He said that one of the things we lost when sound came in was internationality. You could make a film in England and send it to Japan, and while they’d replace the intertitles, it was still the same movie. When sound came in everything had to be translated in one way or another and it became a much less fluid situation. He always felt he should make movies for the world, not just the United Kingdom. He was quite adamant about that. You can see him getting better and better with every film. Were you at Bologna?
NOTEBOOK: I wasn’t, sadly.
SCHOONMAKER: The audience was much younger than I expected, which was so great. I haven’t been to these festivals for many years, but it used to be full of great scholars of classical films who were much older. Now it was full of young people and they were loving these quota quickies. They were loving the humor which Michael inserted into these Warner rip-offs.
I adore seeing the gags he puts in, especially when it’s something with Miles Malleson, who would go on to play the sultan in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and wrote the dialogue for that film. They’ve just revived his plays in New York and they’re wonderful. He was really a good playwright. Anyway, there’s one little moment in Lazybones (1935) where the main couple want to get married and need a witness, so they grab this homeless person played by Malleson and he does this little improvisation that’s absolutely brilliant. Really, really funny.
At Bologna, I was often sitting with either Wim Wenders or Thierry Frémaux from Cannes, and they were enjoying the hell out of these films. Michael hated them, because he felt they weren’t coming from his heart. Whenever they found a new one, the British Film Institute would ring up and say, “We just found another quota quickie!” and I would tell Michael and he would always go, “Oh, no!”
***
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (1937)
The island of Hirta in the Scottish Shetlands. The elders of the small community decide that a perilous race up the side of a cliff should settle a disagreement between two young men. One of the men falls to his death, and this wordless sequence shows the passage of his coffin through the rain, from his village home to the churchyard where he is to be buried.
SCHOONMAKER: I love this sequence. Beautiful editing. The rain probably just came along and they decided to keep shooting. Not many people would have done that.
NOTEBOOK: It’s amazing to think this was a good five years before neorealism had established itself.
SCHOONMAKER: It definitely has the flavor of that. He didn’t think much of neorealism, which was very disappointing. I don’t think he saw enough of it. For Scorsese and me it’s one of the most brilliant periods in filmmaking. Maybe it was too close to documentary? Michael was making films at a time when documentary, especially in Britain, was considered the holy grail, and he didn’t agree with that. He used to have big arguments with Robert Flaherty about Man of Aran (1934). Michael would say, “You need a story,” but Flaherty didn’t agree. I think Michael’s reaction against documentary was a bit overblown, which is too bad, because neorealism was a great, great period in filmmaking.
The Edge of the World is one of the greatest films ever made, I’d say. I just think it’s unbelievably beautiful. It’s so poetic. This sequence where they’re carrying the coffin is so simple but so moving—the angles and the use of the music. He’ll use that chorus again in I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) very effectively. It’s a brilliant use of music and image.
NOTEBOOK: It’s astonishing to watch this alongside the quota quickies and see Powell go from shooting stagebound drawing rooms to out-Fording John Ford in just a couple of years.
SCHOONMAKER: Well, he loved Scotland. He never stopped loving Scotland. In fact, at one point he said we would retire there, but unfortunately he didn’t live long enough for that. That’s where he wanted to be; it was his favorite place in the world. He’d walked over every inch of it.
I just love this movie so much; I could watch it over and over and never get tired of it. With the burial sequence here, we don’t see the burial itself or any reading of Bible verses. Maybe they shot that but took it all out to save time, which is right. But to shoot that scene in the driving rain where everyone is getting soaked… Hollywood people wouldn’t do that. They’d wait for it to stop, or use a hose that limited how much water there was. The gutsiness of going ahead and shooting that is just so impressive. It’s like the tears from heaven, isn’t it?
***
A CANTERBURY TALE (1944)
In the prologue to Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, we follow a band of medieval pilgrims en route to the titular cathedral city. A falconer launches a bird into the air. As it takes to the skies, a single cut propels us into the present day. Britain is at war. The shot of the soaring bird of prey is now that of a warplane, and the face of the Canterbury pilgrim is now that of a soldier.
NOTEBOOK: Powell and Pressburger are so good at conveying an idea in the most imaginative visual terms.
SCHOONMAKER: We have this moment in the documentary we’re working on now. Scorsese talks about how brilliant an idea it is, and the guts of it again—to not use the exact same frame. With all our digital tools today, we’d probably make the plane the same size as the bird. But it’s just a straight cut to a wide shot, and it works!
NOTEBOOK: And nearly 25 years before Kubrick did the same thing at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
SCHOONMAKER: That’s right! It may have influenced him, but I don’t know. They never met, unfortunately. They were supposed to. Michael went to see the set of something Kubrick was working on, but he couldn’t be there that day. They did exchange emails though, and Michael admired his films very much.
“You need to stay ahead of your audience”: that’s what he always said to Scorsese and me. “Don’t ever talk down to them. They’re always ahead of you, so you’ve got to try to get ahead of them.” So here he’s just acknowledging that the audience will go with this idea. It’s brilliant.
NOTEBOOK: He’s collapsing 500 years of history here into a single cut. A Canterbury Tale is very much about the coexistence of present and past, and about cultural identity. It’s a theme that runs throughout the Powell and Pressburger filmography.
SCHOONMAKER: He was making films for the world, and he had had the experience of working in France with an American film crew who taught him everything and were very generous. Then when he came back to Britain, the unions were not generous, but he made his way. In their films, you’ll often hear German or French spoken without any subtitles. They just want you to get the flavor of that country, of that language. You get what’s going on, and it gives you a chance to feel that world, which was very important to Michael. In the BBC Arena show about his career, he was asked if he identifies with Colonel Blimp, and he said, “Oh yes, very British. Loves women and dogs.”
NOTEBOOK: There are all these dreamy dissolves throughout A Canterbury Tale, which you don’t tend to see in the rest of their filmography. You did something similar at the very end of Gangs of New York (2002), using dissolves for a collapsing of history in which the 19th-century skyline becomes that of the present day.
SCHOONMAKER: Michael had about a hundred projects he wanted to make at the end of his life. He was writing a new project every day. I don’t want to say exactly what it is in case somebody tries to steal it, but he had a beautiful one with a medieval scene, in which we’d see a large, groaning animal which had just lost its child. There was going to be a dissolve to a modern highway running beside the mound on which the animal lay. It’s quite a stunning idea which never really left him.
***
GONE TO EARTH (1950)
Shropshire, 1897. Dawn is breaking. Hazel Woodus (Jennifer Jones) has crept away from home. She seeks advice from the land; from powers greater than herself: “If I be to go down t’ spinney, if I be to go, let me hear the faerie music.” An eerie tune fills the air. Her decision is made. Behind her husband’s back, she will meet her lover the following morning.
Produced by David O. Selznick, Gone to Earth was dramatically recut for its American release. New sequences were shot by Rouben Mamoulian, and the finished version, retitled The Wild Heart, bears little relation to Powell and Pressburger’s original vision.
SCHOONMAKER: Jennifer Jones is so wonderful in this, better than she was, I’m sure, in anything else she made in Hollywood.
NOTEBOOK: It’s such a shame what happened to this film. Selznick completely gutted it.
SCHOONMAKER: And now they’ve put out a Blu-ray of the Selznick version!
NOTEBOOK: Yeah, it’s been released as The Wild Heart.
SCHOONMAKER: It’s horrifying.
NOTEBOOK: As far as I know, they’ve restored the Selznick-Mamoulian cut, and included the Powell and Pressburger original as an unrestored extra.
SCHOONMAKER: Well, there is no restoration of Gone to Earth. One of the problems is that Selznick cut the negative when he did his thing. So now it’s almost impossible for us to restore it. But I’ve been fighting for it because she’s so magnificent in it.
I love this film. It’s a wonderful evocation of Shropshire, which is where Michael’s father’s family came from. I’m actually trying to edit it right now for the documentary, but it’s very hard to get it to work.
NOTEBOOK: The shot of Jennifer Jones here, framed against the sky, reminds me of a similar scene in A Canterbury Tale, where Sheila Sim’s character first sees the cathedral. It’s much more elementally charged here, though. There’s a great Powell quote in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, where he says, “My films aren’t romantic, they’re mystic.” Gone to Earth testifies to that in spades.
SCHOONMAKER: He did love folk culture very, very much, and it features heavily here. Scorsese loves that too. We’re trying to get that across in the documentary, but it’s just so hard to cut this one down. In fact, I’m literally going back to New York tomorrow to try and do it. I hope I can crack it because I truly love this movie, I think it’s great. It really doesn’t get enough attention, though. Have there been any reviews of that Blu-ray release?
NOTEBOOK: I’m sure there have. It’s a US release, I believe by Kino Lorber.
SCHOONMAKER: It is indeed. I fought them because I didn’t know they were planning on doing that. I had no idea they were putting the Selznick version front and center. But Disney owns the Selznick library, and that’s the answer. Powell and Pressburger had already dealt with a number of movie moguls and didn’t want to get burned again, so they insisted in their contract that they be allowed to have their own version, and that’s why there are two cuts of the film. But Gone to Earth is the correct version, and it shouldn’t have been released with The Wild Heart on the cover. I’m furious about it. With the negative savaged it’s almost impossible to restore. We’ll have to spend a lot of money and see if there’s some way to save it.
NOTEBOOK: You see these kinds of shots, of the characters filmed from below and framed against the elements, throughout their filmography, usually at defining or decisive moments.
SCHOONMAKER: Michael loved the climate. Every day for him was important, and he lived every second of every day. If the weather was one way or another he would always note it in his diaries. He also noted what he cooked every day—he was a great cook. He spent a lot of time on the French Riviera at his father’s hotel, but he always said he had a compass in his head which pointed north, meaning Scotland.
NOTEBOOK: There’s a lovely quote from the second volume of his memoirs about Gone to Earth, in which Powell asks, “Why is it that legend is more potent than reality at stirring our emotions?” Do you think he ever found the answer to that?
SCHOONMAKER: Probably because it encompasses our hopes, I think. That we hope that someday there might be some semi-perfect society. I don’t know. I worked so hard with him on those memoirs but I don’t remember that specifically. It’s idealistic, maybe that’s it? Legend is idealistic, and so was Michael.
NOTEBOOK: I came across a great interview with you both which must have been done around 1987. You were working together on the memoirs at your home in San Quentin, and it was just this beautiful little portrait of domestic bliss.
SCHOONMAKER: We loved that place because it was looking out on a bay, and it had a porch where he could walk up and down, pretending he was the captain of the ferry going by. There was a wonderful mutt of a dog across the way who would be allowed out in the mornings and would just shoot for Michael. He’d jump into his lap and accompany him all day. Michael loved dogs, and I can’t tell you how many photos I have of him with this particular dog, Rocky, from that spot.
NOTEBOOK: Am I right in thinking you got the chance to work together once, on the ballerina biopic Anna Pavlova (1983)?
SCHOONMAKER: Well, yes. We tried to work on it, but Michael was not allowed to direct it. I hope that’s very clear to the world. He did not direct it. He went there as a favor to Frixos Constantine, who was the producer who wanted someone there to represent him. But Michael was unable to get the director to do what he would have done. He had written a very beautiful script with Erwin Hillier, which they had worked on in Russia in the depths of Stalinist times.
For example, there was one scene that he told me about which the director would not do. When Pavlova was dying in a hotel room in Holland, her fans were gathered outside. In Michael’s scene, the crowd slowly passed her tutu over their heads towards her door, begging her to put it on. What a scene that would have been! But he wouldn’t do it. The script just became Soviet propaganda, unfortunately.
NOTEBOOK: So you didn’t have a hand in the cutting?
SCHOONMAKER: I did try. Michael and I went before Perestroika, so it was very interesting for me to see what Russia was like before it changed. We worked with a group of assistants, and I tried to do something to make it better. But I was shot down every time by the people who ran the state studio because they wanted it to be a propaganda film. In fact, Pavlova left Russia as soon as the revolution took place, but that’s not the way they wanted it to be seen. So I couldn’t save it, but we tried.
***
OH… ROSALINDA!! (1955)
Postwar Vienna. A New Year’s Eve party has come to an end. The marquis is drunk, and makes his way home. He is seeing double, illustrated by Powell and Pressburger through a charmingly ingenious array of visual effects.
NOTEBOOK: This is their only film in CinemaScope, is that right?
SCHOONMAKER: Yes. He did VistaVision for The Battle of the River Plate (1956). That was on television once while Scorsese and I were editing. Sometimes Marty would have a separate screen where he’d be watching stuff while he waited for me to make a cut, and there was just this one shot of a battleship. He said, “Would you look at that?! It’s just a wide shot of a battleship, but look at how beautiful it is.” That was VistaVision, which Marty thinks is every bit as good as IMAX. George Lucas used it a lot in the early days for Star Wars (1977).
NOTEBOOK: This film is often called the third part of an unofficial trilogy, after The Red Shoes (1948) and Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
SCHOONMAKER: Rosalinda? This?
NOTEBOOK: I think because it’s an operetta.
SCHOONMAKER: It is, but it’s nowhere near the brilliance of those films.
NOTEBOOK: It’s such a wild and zany film, like a Frank Tashlin movie. I’m very fond of it. Do you think there’s something of Emeric Pressburger in the Anton Walbrook character here?
SCHOONMAKER: For sure. What happened in Europe after the war—that dividing up of the continent into east and west by Truman, Stalin, and Churchill—Michael always felt very bad about that. He felt that we had betrayed Eastern Europe. When the Berlin Wall came down, we were having breakfast in that house in San Quentin and he started to cry. He said to me, “I never thought this would happen, that we would get back the life we took away from them.”
So this is set in the period after the war, with the Four Powers. But he also probably liked the mixture of all the foreign languages. No, I agree with you, I do think this is very funny.
NOTEBOOK: Artifice is a huge part of all of their movies, but here it’s especially foregrounded.
SCHOONMAKER: Very much so. In fact, I didn’t know until recently that there were theatrical performances of this in modern dress.
NOTEBOOK: The double printing you see here goes all the way back to The Edge of the World, that scene with the ghosts walking past.
SCHOONMAKER: That was all done in camera. They just rewound the film. I mean, it would be unthinkable today to take a gamble like that. To leave him standing there, rewind the film, and have the other characters cross, probably twice. Wow!
NOTEBOOK: The split screen effect here is amazing.
SCHOONMAKER: Yeah, they’re using two different actors but the effect is the same.
NOTEBOOK: Three years before Indiscreet (1958), and fifteen years before your split screens in Woodstock (1970)…
SCHOONMAKER: That’s right!
NOTEBOOK: Powell and Pressburger only made two more films together after this before going their separate ways for many years. Can you tell me a little about how their partnership came to an end?
SCHOONMAKER: When they went to work for Alexander Korda, Michael was very upset with what Korda wanted. He wanted them to make movies from books that he had bought. He had already spent money on the rights, and he wanted to recoup that money through them. Michael said, “I could hear the crackle of the page,” as in it was all literary rather than cinematic. It wasn’t designed as a film, and that bothered him very much. They made quite a few films for Korda that way, and after a while there were no more original ideas coming from Emeric, or Michael. When it came to Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), they really tangled over that one. Emeric wanted a documentary approach, like something from Time magazine, and Michael wanted something more romantic. He had spent months walking alone over Crete, meeting people to prepare for the film. That was what he was interested in, while I think Emeric was probably more interested in the German kidnapping. They were very at odds by that point, so they decided to separate. But they never stopped loving each other, or seeing each other. And of course they came back together for the children’s film, The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972).
***
PEEPING TOM (1960)
Mark Lewis, a film-obsessed loner, murders women with his camera. His tenant, Helen, talks her way into his apartment and asks Mark to show her a film. He puts on a home movie from his childhood, detailing his father’s abuse. “I want to film you while you watch,” says Mark, as Helen’s gaze fixes on images of torment: a light shone in the young Mark’s face as he sleeps; a lizard thrown into his bed. She sees Mark visiting his mother’s corpse, and the gift of a first camera, presented to him by his father—played, in the home movie, by Michael Powell.
NOTEBOOK: Watching this again last night, I was struck by quite how sordid a vision of ’60s London Powell creates. It really is disturbing.
SCHOONMAKER: I think he felt that he had to reinvent himself for this movie. It’s a whole new look, which was courtesy of the brilliant cameraman Otto Heller. He was crucial. Now that I’ve restored it, and seen it over and over, I really noticed the incredible camera moves. There’s the scene where she’s by herself and she turns on the projector to see the murder. It starts as just a medium shot on her before pushing in as she becomes more and more disturbed. She stands up into a different light—this is all one shot—and then she runs as the camera racks, straight into Mark. You see her face, but the camera had to stop in exactly the right place to frame her perfectly. It’s unbelievable. So he had great help from a cameraman who knew what he wanted to do. I think he felt that if he was going to portray this world, he would have to go full-bore—and he certainly did!
NOTEBOOK: In his memoirs, he doesn’t flinch when screenwriter Leo Marks comes to him and says, “How would you like to make a film about a young man who kills women with his camera?” Powell replies, “That’s me!”
SCHOONMAKER: I think what Marty admires so much about the film is that it absolutely lays down the dangers of filmmaking. And we are destructive sometimes. Don’t ever rent your house to a filmmaker. Our personal lives are deeply affected by the demands of the job. I work insane hours, and when Michael was alive it was very painful for me not to be able to go home and make him dinner sometimes. It’s destructive, but it’s also such a wonderful, creative outlet that you become addicted to it. It can affect your life dangerously, and that’s what he’s showing here so brilliantly. Just brilliantly.
NOTEBOOK: Tell me a bit about Peeping Tom’s editor, Noreen Ackland.
SCHOONMAKER: She was wonderful. We met up with her many times. She was an assistant for so long, working with Reginald Mills all the way back to the war films. So to get a chance to cut something like this—she did a brilliant job! It’s really beautifully edited, and I was so glad to finally see her recognized for that. We did a benefit screening for Hugo (2011), which Prince Charles came to as he was the head of the Prince's Trust at the time. They had chosen one person to come along from the retirement home that the organization runs, and I was thrilled to see it was Noreen!
I wrote to her and she wrote back to me for a while. Her husband was an editor too. He cut The Dam Busters (1955), which meant he always wanted to talk about The Dam Busters, which I had never seen. But she was so lovely. I have no idea what she did after this.
NOTEBOOK: Powell’s diaries from this period must be quite heartbreaking. Are you still working on getting them published?
SCHOONMAKER: If I could just find enough time. It’s an enormous job; there are forty years of diaries. I’ve been sending sections to Ian Christie and Scorsese. The worst part is when his wife, Pamela Brown, died, just before Marty found him. They’re devastating, but so beautifully written. I’m hoping I’ll live long enough to do it.
Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger runs until December 31 at London’s BFI Southbank and at various venues UK-wide.