THELMA SCHOONMAKER Issue #32

One of the world’s most prominent film editors accepts a Coolidge lifetime achievement award and talks about a ‘fresh eyes’ approach to her work

By Chelsea Spear
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

“The job of an editor is to be invisible,” Thelma Schoonmaker says, ticking off on her fingers the many aspects of a film an editor can influence — performance, pacing, even a punch line for a joke — without calling attention to herself.

Paradoxically, Schoonmaker is the most visible editor working in film today. She has collaborated with Martin Scorsese — regarded by many as the greatest living American director — for almost 40 years. Their continuous collaboration began with his 1980 masterpiece, Raging Bull.

A little more than a month after receiving her third Oscar, this time for cutting The Departed, Schoonmaker breezed through Boston in April on a whirlwind trip to receive the Coolidge Award for her lifetime achievement as a bold filmmaker.

AN EDITOR’S STORY: HOWSCHOONMAKER BUILT HER CAREER
Schoonmaker, 67, regards her initiation into film editing as “fate.” The daughter of a Standard Oil Company executive, she grew up in Algeria and had an interest in film. The Red Shoes, released in 1948 and directed by her late husband Michael Powell, was one of the films she fondly remembers from her youth.

When her family returned to America in 1955, Schoonmaker enrolled in Cornell University with an eye toward a career in international diplomacy. “When I graduated, I took the State Department exams, and I went all the way up to the final stress test where they try and unsettle you, as if you’re at a reception in South Africa or something,” she says. “I kept saying apartheid was wrong, and they kept saying, ‘You can’t say that! You have to wait until the government tells you that you can say that!’” Government officials told Schoonmaker that she’d be very unhappy in the State Department and suggested that she’d be happier working for the U.S. Information Agency, but she wasn’t interested.

While taking courses on primitive art at NYU, she applied for a job aiming to train an assistant editor that she saw posted in the New York Times — “which you will never see again,” she hastens to add. While still in her 20s, she landed the gig for Astor Films, a sub-distributor that acquired foreign films for little money and edited them for local television broadcasts. “[The owner of Astor Films] would take a reel out,” she says, laughing. “And I would say to him, ‘you can’t do that!’ He thought that no one was watching these movies at two in the morning, but you know who was watching them? Martin Scorsese.”

Though disgusted by the work of this “butcher,” Schoonmaker was intrigued by filmmaking and took a summer course at NYU. While editing “a boring documentary on horse racing” for one filmmaking team, she was pulled in to help Martin Scorsese, whose negative was damaged in the cutting. “I was up for three days salvaging the film,” she recalls. In saving the film, Schoonmaker gained the trust of a young Scorsese, and thus a collaboration and friendship was born.

Scorsese hired Schoonmaker to edit his earliest feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door (1967), and he worked as one of several editors on 1970’s Woodstock, for which supervising editor Schoonmaker received her first of six Oscar nods for editing. (Apart from the 1970 nomination, Schoonmaker got the nod for 1980’s Raging Bull, 1990’s GoodFellas, 2002’s Gangs of New York, 2004’s The Aviator, and 2006’s The Departed, winning for Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Departed.)
Woodstock, a documentary of the music festival in 1970, allowed Schoonmaker and her crew to experiment with new postproduction techniques, such as freeze frames, superimpositions, and the use of split screens. “We had [the footage] synced up on a three-picture flatbed. In Aretha Franklin’s concert, we watched it on all three screens and said, ‘Look at how that dynamizes her performance!’”

In spite of her obvious abilities, it took 12 years for Schoonmaker to follow up her early work, due to a rule in the film editors’ union stipulating that all editors had to have cut a feature film, but in order to edit a feature film, one had to be a member of the union. To this day, Schoonmaker doesn’t know the identity of the individual who helped her get into the editors’ union.

While Schoonmaker bristles at the question of whether she has a favorite of all the films she’s edited, she proudly describes Raging Bull — which she made after a long absence from the cutting room — as her firstborn. “This was the first studio film, where I had assistants,” she adds. In a master class presented as part of the Coolidge Awards, she showed several clips from the film, slowing them down or otherwise altering them to showcase different aspects of the production (most notably, Gary Gerlich’s masterful sound editing).

Earlier in the day, while doing a press conference, however, she alluded to another scene in The Departed that required as much finesse in the cutting. “This scene was a nightmare to edit, but it was fun,” she says, warming up to the scene in which Joey LaMotta (Joe Pesci) talks his brother Jake (Robert DeNiro) into going back in the boxing ring for a comeback fight. “Marty usually likes to have two cameras going in scenes where his actors were improvising, so that if Joe does something, he can get a shot of Bobby reacting. The location where we shot could only fit one camera, and it was under a flight path. They were both holding babies on their laps, and one of the babies kept reaching for the knives on the table. It took forever to get right, and you can see the seams!” She laughs at the recollection.

In the 27 years since Raging Bull was released, Schoonmaker has edited every film that Scorsese has directed. Over time, their working relationship has changed. In their earlier collaborations, Scorsese sat in the editing room with Schoonmaker, but now she assembles a cut of the film independently and works with Scorsese to hone the cut to his vision of the scene. “My favorite part of the day is the evening, when Marty comes in with the rushes and says, ‘I like this,’ or ‘I hate this. Don’t ever let me see this again,’” she says. “He gives me a lot of information — fortunately, I write like the wind.”

Though she’s one of the few editors invited to set, she’s rarely taken Scorsese up on this invitation. “Marty needs me to be a fresh pair of eyes on the footage so that I can have a similar reaction to the audience,” Schoonmaker says. “I usually just read the script once before preproduction and forget about it. In one scene in The Departed, [one of the protagonists] was killed, and I felt as though he was ripped from us. Marty wants me to have that kind of reaction.”

In 1995, Schoonmaker began working with non-linear editing — editing a film on a computer, in a manner so that it doesn’t have to be cut in linear order — and almost every feature she’s worked since on has been cut on a computer. With today’s technology, Schoonmaker says she can experiment more easily. “Now, I can copy an edit like Xerox, and make three or four different versions,” she says. “This kind of editing can make things too easy. Marty and I shy away from the MTV-style editing. I wish more people understood that a shot was important, as in Stanley Kubrick’s films where the shots can go on for minutes at a time.”

One year after editing her first film on a computer, she returned to the flatbed editor to cut a rare film not directed by Scorsese — Allison Anders’ 1996 feature Grace of My Heart, in which Illeana Douglas played a 1950s songwriter inspired by Carole King. “Marty was executive producing [Grace], and Allison needed an editor with new ideas, who could intercut some of the scene,” Schoonmaker says. “Going back to film was a big transition. I needed to remember how to flip trims in the bins, things like that.”

In a 1996 article for Premiere magazine, Anders spoke of Schoonmaker’s contributions to her film in much greater detail. “While doing this one scene, where we had earlier agreed to rearrange material for greater clarity and emotional connections, she went even further, cross-cutting the scene with complete grace,” Anders says. “If any other editor did this, it would be jarring. But the way Thelma has done it, it’s like turning over in your sleep in the arms of your favorite warm body. That’s what her cuts are like.”

NOT JUST BLOCKBUSTERS: SCHOONMAKER HAS A PASSIONFOR UNDER-RATED FILMS
Standing amid the red-velvet and gold-gilt splendor of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Schoonmaker appears in her element. While many downtown theaters with one or two screens have closed in the Age of the Multiplex, the Coolidge has thrived, positioning itself as the theater for film buffs in the greater Boston area with its eclectic programming.

Schoonmaker — who works for a director who has positioned himself as the preeminent film buff, shining a light on classic and under-screened features and working on restoration — shares the Coolidge’s passion for under-rated film by opening and closing her master class with clips from Anthony Asquith’s Cottage on Dartmoor and Powell and Pressburger’s epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, respectively. “This was how we learned,” she says. “Four or five theaters [in New York] presented classic and foreign movies, and we ran to see them every night. They were masterpieces, and we shared the experience. These films were never made to be seen by one person in a room.”

While Scorsese has four features on deck — among them a biopic of Queen Victoria, a film about Italian monks in 15th-century Japan, and another starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy Roosevelt — Schoonmaker speaks little about them. She does speak at great length about a documentary on 1950s film and theater director Elia Kazan, which Scorsese is shooting as we speak. “I love doing these. It’s very important that I got my start [in documentaries],” she says. “The process is so much different because we have to make the raw footage come together.”

Schoonmaker closes her master class with advice for aspiring filmmakers. “Study older films,” she says. “Marty studied films from when he was small. There is nothing better to learn from. Also, do everything you can to get your foot in the door. Work for free. When people see what you can do, they’ll be likely to take you on.”