THELMA SCHOONMAKER IS one of the world’s most celebrated film editors; her shelves creak with awards from a decades-long collaboration with Martin Scorsese, dating back to his directorial debut, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door. But she has another, parallel career: as unofficial custodian of the legacy of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the British-Hungarian filmmaking duo behind Technicolor masterpieces like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.
Schoonmaker’s story is uniquely intertwined with Powell in particular. “Marty was training me to look at the Powell and Pressburger films, back when we were working on Raging Bull,” she tells Empire, speaking from her edit suite in New York. “He would send me home with the VHS tapes. I was falling in love with their films.” Eventually, Scorsese acted as an unlikely Cupid. “One day, he said, ‘Michael Powell is coming for dinner. Do you want to meet him?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ That’s how it all started.” Schoonmaker and Powell married soon after in 1984, and remained so until Powell’s death in 1990. “I have the best job in the world. And I had the best husband in the world,” she says. Schoonmaker’s love of both Powell the filmmaker and Powell the man continues to this day; she even recognises their romance reflected in his and Pressburger’s films. Take, for example, the gorgeous 1946 wartime-romance-science-fiction epic A Matter Of Life And Death, in which a character is willing to sacrifice her life for love, nobly stepping onto a celestial escalator. “That moment when Kim Hunter steps on the stairway to give her life up — that is so Michael Powell. I would have done it for him, and he would have done it for me. I always burst into tears when we get to that point. It’s so beautiful.”
A Matter Of Life And Death was part of an astonishing run of classic films by Powell and Pressburger, what Scorsese has described as “the longest period of subversive filmmaking in a major studio, ever”, which included One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Those films, and more, are being shown in ‘Cinema Unbound’, a retrospective of the filmmakers’ work by the BFI across the UK and Ireland, in which Schoonmaker — now an important ambassador for their filmography — is deeply involved.