The Wolf of Magazine Street: When Thelma Schoonmaker visited Nerve CentreThe Wolf of Magazine Street: When Thelma Schoonmaker visited Nerve Centre

Thelma is indisputably the most accomplished and recognised film editor since the medium began. She holds the record for most Oscar nominations in Film Editing, winning 3 — for Raging Bull (1980), The Aviator (2004), and The Departed (2006). Her creative partnership with Scorsese has been a bedrock for his filmmaking style — noticeably adopting a more kinetic approach to storytelling after hiring Thelma to edit his features from Raging Bull onwards.

I myself have been editing since I was nine years old, producing silly short film parodies and stop motion animations with my younger brothers when we were kids. Now aged 30, it’s still the creative process that I enjoy the most. In fact, as a videographer/photographer, filming and capturing, in my view, is merely a necessity. It’s not the fun part. The editing process is.

Considering my love for editing, to be able to sit down and chat with the most iconic practitioner of said craft was the definition of a “pinch me” moment. The purpose for Thelma’s visit was to celebrate the legacy of her late husband Michael Powell’s collaborations with Emeric Pressburger in a BFI-supported season honouring the films of Powell and Pressburger, featuring such titles as A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). For Thelma, it was a privilege to introduce their work to new audiences:

“What I've been feeling from the events that were done in London, Manchester and last night in Derry is, a lot of young people are opening their minds to these movies, which is very exciting…. They're very unusual films. Not like most films being made in Britain at the time… Their films are very emotional, but never sentimental. They're full of surprises, and bear revealing over and over again. I've been restoring some of them.”

I was curious to learn more about the restoration process.

“Well, the Technicolor ones are the ones that were the hardest to do, but also the most exciting. There were three strips of film in a Technicolor camera recording different colours, and so we were able to have access to the original three strips… We can access the colour and get it back to the way it was supposed to be. We can remove mould and scratches so you can make the film look as much as possible like it would have when it was first made.”

As an aspiring editor, I asked her about what goes into the craft.

“I think becoming a good editor means doing what is right for the film. Not what’s right for your ego. And the reason that Scorsese and I have had a good collaboration is because we never fight over the movie. I know there are many situations that he was in himself earlier where an editor might not agree with his wonderful new ideas about editing, but that never occurs with us… And it's difficult to describe what makes good editing. It's a mysterious craft. And you would have to be with us for six months in the editing room to really understand what happens… you have to find the right rhythm for a movie, and each movie has a different rhythm. You must find the right structure for a movie, you have to build certain characters to be stronger than other characters. Each film is a different challenge.”

What was striking about Thelma was, as a woman in her early-eighties, her passion for the craft and ability to speak about it so fluently, had clearly not diminished whatsoever over the fifty-plus years she has been working in the field. It was incredibly inspiring, and a true honour to shake the hand that assembled films like Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

However, I must say, the biggest honour of all was discovering that, according to Thelma herself, I “made a mean cup of tea!”

Click here to watch Professor Ian Christie's lecture on the influence of Powell and Pressburger on Martin Scorsese, recorded at Nerve Centre in November 2023.