My interview with Thelma Schoonmaker in full
In the interests of posterity, here is the full transcription of my 27-minute conversation with Thelma Schoonmaker, held as part of the promotion for the BFI’s Cinema Unbound series on the creative works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
While the interview was not policed, I was politely asked by the BFI to keep the conversation on Powell and Pressburger and not on Killers of the Flower Moon or Schoonmaker’s incredible career on the whole.
Tom Davidson: “I want to focus, first of all, on Peeping Tom, which is out today the remaster in 4K… I have been under strict instruction to keep this conversation as much as possible on Powell and Pressburger, but I did see (Killers of) the Flower Moon on the weekend and I wanted to say congratulations, if nothing else.”
Thelma Schoonmaker: “Thank you!”
TD: “I’ll try and keep the conversation on your late husband and the celebration of his work…”
TS: “Was the audience full when you saw Killers?”
TD: “It wasn’t full because it was a 2pm screening, it was only about 10 people or so.”
TS: “Oh really!”
TD: “Unfortunately, it was a little on the low side but it meant I was able to stretch out a little bit, because it’s one of those you really have to prepare yourself for.”
TS: “And you didn’t… I understand somebody’s running it with an intermission which is not right.”
TD: “Yes, I saw that as well.”
TS: “Where did you see that?”
TD: “I saw it on social media, it was somewhere in America basically being like…
TS: “Somewhere, where?”
TD: “In America.”
TS: “Oh, not here.”
TD: “Well, it might be as well here but where I saw it was America and it was ‘we are running it with an eight-minute intermission’. And I remember, I’ve only seen it once, obviously you must have seen it dozens and dozens, and I was thinking, where could they have put it in and if the filmmaker hasn’t intended for it…”
TS: “No, it’s not supposed to be. That’s a violation, so I have to find out about it. I didn’t realise it’s in America. Why did you see it in America?”
TD: “On Twitter, on social media, I think someone had retweeted it.”
TS: “Ah, that’s what you mean, you saw that.”
TD: “Yes, so someone was sharing it, I think in a positive way and then someone who I followed had replied and been like ‘actually no, this isn’t what…’”
TS: “No.”
TD: “But, we digress, already we digress, and Peeping Tom I chose because, I think… would it be fair to say that Michael was almost ‘cancelled’ because of it and there was a quote you gave last night, you were asked about what he taught you and you said there was two things, you said there was ‘never explain and always remember the audience is ahead of you.”
TS: “Well, that’s a general thing and not about Peeping Tom, but you’re right it is reflected in…”
TD: “No, but do you think he was ahead of the critics?”
TS: “He was way ahead, that’s what the problem, he was way ahead, you know there was a movie, I think I said that last night, called M in Germany starring Peter Lorre which was somewhat similar but then since Peeping Tom there have been all these movies about this kind of person and actually, Scorsese and Michael share an interest not in villains and heroes but the thing in the middle which is more like people are.
“So, it was way ahead of its time but as I said last night I think that Michael felt if you want to do something daring you have to be aware that you’re in danger and you’re on the end of a branch and you could easily be sawed off but he said ‘I would prefer that to being conventional’, so he maybe understood better than poor Carl Boehm, who plays Mark, what the possible consequences were going to be but he was ready to accept them.
“I mean it was not easy, it was terrible, he did make five films after that but it was, he fell into a terrible period of complete oblivion, you know he and Emeric, the films were just… no one was seeing them, no one was honouring them, except this TV show in America which fortunately Marty was seeing and all of his friends were too who are directors and that’s what really saved this.”
TD: “You obviously got to know him and fell in love with him as he was starting to enjoy this resurgence, so it must have been heartwarming then and heartwarming now that he did have that 10-year, obviously the 80s getting involved with Scorsese’s films but also there were those first repertory showings in 1978, how do you think he would feel today?”
TS: “He would be thrilled, he said when he met Marty, and Marty knew everything about his movies and kept saying ‘how did you do that shot, how did you do that?’ he said, ‘this is a miracle, how can this young, American director know all this?’ and it was just lucky that that Million Dollar Movie, because the Brits would sell to American television, American producers would not, yet, they weren’t ready to turn their films over to TV now, of course, it’s common, so it’s because the Brits were selling and Marty and (Francis Ford) Coppola and all these people were seeing these movies, that Marty began, along with Ian Christie and Kevin Gough-Yates at BFI to try and get people to understand these are brilliant movies, lets bring them back.
“But it was a terrible, terrible time he went through, it was 30 years we’re talking about but he was constantly writing new projects and dreaming of making them, never gave up.”
TD: “You say it was 30 years but Peeping Tom came out in 1960 so was his career already somewhat on the wane after the high watermark of the war years?”
TS: “Also, Ian Christie says that the British film industry was in a bad way then it was very hard to raise funding. After Tales of Hoffman Michael flew all around the world, he literally went all around the world and came back to London he went to Japan, to India, trying to raise money for ideas and failing.
“Of course he went to Hollywood, but he just couldn’t raise the money and the question is why. Were the projects too ahead of their time or was he not a good salesman or was there no funding? It was a bad time so, it’s just a shame that all these marvelous ideas never got made but he never stopped trying.
“I think a lot of directors would become bitter , if you went through what he went through, which was horrendous, but he didn’t I think he accepted… he had seen many geniuses have their careers ruined, Rex Ingram who taught him about directing when he was in the south of France, he was embraced by this American crew who were so generous and open and teaching him about editing and everything.
“When he went back to England it wasn’t that way but I think that he somehow was able to digest what happened with Peeping Tom, Carl Boehm was not, when we would have dinner with Carl Boehm if he came to London he just couldn’t understand what happened, why was that film a failure, if in fact the studio didn’t yank it which they did and sold it to a porno guy or something, then maybe people would have gone to see it and it would have been a success, who knows, but they never got a chance.”
TD: “Marty says he can see imitations of his own work elsewhere in the film industry and I was wondering as someone who has seen so much of Powell and Pressburger’s work, how much you see of their influence today?”
TS: “I don’t see a lot of films, I hate to say, because I work so hard. I’m working on Michael’s diaries so any second I get for example now, when I go back to his cottage tomorrow I’ll start again on his diaries which I worked on extensively during the self-isolating of Covid but I haven’t had time since then because I went to Killers and I’ve been flat-out on that and the documentary we’re making about Powell and Pressburger and the celebration events and all that so, I don’t see a lot of movies, I don’t have time to see them which is bad, you know, I should but I think at my great old age I’m allowed.
“I want to get these diaries published, they’re sensational. They started when he was beginning to fail and he wrote 40 years of diaries so I have a lot of work to do, so I don’t see enough films to answer your question but I know with Marty there are specific things that have influenced him but I don’t know if it’s an overall… What was the film that was made that was like I Know Where I’m Going, whatshisname, the Scottish director, I’m trying to think, anyway I think that was an attempt to make something like I Know Where I’m Going, I just don’t see enough to…”
TD: “That’s fair enough, how are the diaries going?”
TS: “Slowly but surely, I’ve been trying to transcribe them because they’re beautifully written Michael had… back in those days they taught people how to write, and they’re beautiful so I just haven’t got far enough, I’ve got to really plunge in and get them transcribed so that publishers can look at them because they won’t look at the handwritten version, which is too bad because they’re beautiful but I’ve got to really somehow figure a way to get this done, it takes a lot of time and I don’t know how much time I have left so…”
TD: “Well, you seem fit as a fiddle. So, what’s it like doing the diaries on one hand, involving yourself so heavily in the restoration work and also working with Scorsese on his films, I was struck by an interesting thing where you are partly responsible for the sanctity of Powell and Pressburger as the grandfather’s of British cinema but also at the same time you’re working with an American filmmaker who is the greatest living filmmaker, and you straddle both sides, what’s that like? Is that something you think of consciously?”
TS: “I’ve had anything any one could ever have wanted in life, I’ve had the best job and the best husband and a life filled with excitement and creativity and how much more could you ask for than that?
“I’m just so lucky that I have all these rich projects to work on, I just wish I had more time to do the diaries but I would never give up working on Marty’s films too.
“So right now it’s just a struggle for me to know how to try and focus my energies on that, I spent a lot of time on this celebration the planning of it and all and the documentary as well, but that hopefully is going to be done very soon and I’ll be released from that and released from Killers, I’m going to watch this afternoon the Killers open captioning for the hard of hearing to see, I’m still working on that, it just happens to be one last little thing.
“Look, some people at my age are very bored, right, and I have the richest possible life, so I’m lucky.”
TD: “Well, what a life you have had and are having. I’ve lost my train of thought now, I’ll just go back to Peeping Tom, if you don’t mind. Marty once said you could learn everything from filmmaking from that, and you’ve also spoken about how Michael Powell didn’t directly give you advice in terms of editing, so did you take stuff from Peeping Tom?”
TS: “Well, I didn’t know Peeping Tom as much, I knew the other Powell and Pressburger films much earlier because Marty was training me in them.
“I mean, maybe he did a little even when I worked with him before he went to Hollywood then I couldn’t work with him for 10 years because I wasn’t in the union so on Raging Bull I was in.
“I would say that I probably didn’t see Peeping Tom until maybe the 90s, I’m not sure, I saw the other Powell/Pressburgers and there’s tremendous editing and brilliant camerawork and very interesting structural ideas in it but I don’t think it’s influenced me personally, in fact I’ve got to know it only really well since I restored it and you see it over and over and over again and really appreciate the filmmaking in it, it’s amazing.
“I think I said last night that at one point when we were trying to decide what clip to put into the documentary and I was showing Marty two choices and one of them he was saying ‘look at the filmmaking!’ he was screaming in the room ‘look at the filmmaking’! but I don’t think it’s had that much of a personal effect on me in terms of my work, much more on Marty.”
TD: “Which one did? You’ve said Blimp’s your favourite, AMOLAD (A Matter of Life and Death), was Michael’s, which is also mine, but would you say Blimp is the one that’s had the most impact on your editing style?”
TS: “I don’t think the style no, because it’s Marty’s style. It’s just the emotional power of that movie, one of the things about the emotion in Michael’s movies and in Marty’s is there’s never sentimentality, it’s powerful emotion but not sentimental which a lot of Hollywood movies are, so that is always something I learn from Marty and something we always follow.
“I think probably the Powell/Pressburger films are maybe a little too emotional for people too in Britain. I think it’s more powerful than some of movies that were made in Britain at the time.”
TD: “Well if you think Hitchock was a director not renowned for his emotion, it was more for his suspense and terror and they’re very different filmmakers and they’re obviously seen in this canon as competitors but really they were very different filmmakers, is that what you mean by say that they were ‘more emotional’?
TS: “Well, I think Hitchcock had such a name by then you know, he had a big TV series, he was so famous, people loved going to see the movies so when Psycho came out of course they flooded in but Peeping Tom got no chance it was yanked immediately. Michael said let it stay in the theatres, the people may want to come and see it, just the critics hate it, don’t just accept that, give it a chance and they wouldn’t, they sold it to some porno guy or something, they dumped it.
“But Hitchcock of course had such fame and particularly in America, I mean enormous, however I don’t think you feel the same compassion for Norman Bates that you do for Mark in Peeping Tom.
“So I think it was easier for people to accept and say ‘oh that’s a bad man, that’s a villain’ but Marty and Michael don’t like that, they don’t like hero, villain, they want something in between and so, but here, but who the hell knows how many people even read those reviews, I mean it was yanked immediately so no one got a chance to see it!”
TD: “Well I think Psycho was perhaps more expected, here was the Master of Suspense delivering another one wheras Peeping Tom was nothing like his (Powell’s) previous work…”
TS: “I don’t think Powell and Pressburger ad the stature that Hitchcock did because they’d already been thrown out, you know thrown out the baby with the bathwater when the political mood changed at the end of World War Two, they were just chucked, you know and it was really tragic and it’s taken a long time.
“I mean Marty’s been trying long before me to bring the films back to the world but I think now though something has happened with young people right now, they’re much more open to it, maybe people who grew up in the kitchen sink world felt, someone said ‘I felt I was betraying the kitchen sink school if I looked at those movies and then when I started looking at them I fell in love with them’, so… it took people time to not think of them as colonial, as conservative and look at them as great films, it took a while for people to readjust you know.”
TD: “I think there was a similar snobbishness with, say, Douglas Sirk films, which were seen as Technicolor, melodramatic, it takes generations later people realise there’s a genius here, there’s certainly a similarity.”
TS: “It was an unfortunate period of history that went against them, after they made all these films which helped the war effort, I mean they weren’t propaganda films but they did help the war effort and they were commercially viable, except for Canterbury Tale was not, so that’s why they were left alone.
“Marty says it’s the longest period of subversive filmmaking in a major studio ever.
“They got away with murder because the war was on, J Arthur Rank just didn’t give them any trouble until The Red Shoes and then that was the end but, something happened in Britain at that time.
“I remember seeing a beautiful documentary, I’m not sure which one it was, there were some great documentary makers here in the 30s, and there was a man, I think a coalminer and he’s explaining to his mother how the world’s going to change after World War Two when Labour comes in and he’s saying we’re going to have health services, and the mother is going ‘oh sure, yeah right’, well it happened, something changed you know, it’s too bad.
“Maybe the class structure was changing, unfairly these films were considered upper class or something, I don’t know, they’re not, they’re not.
“Michael never went to boarding school, he never went to university, he grew up on a farm and luckily for him he was never molded as I said last night into another way of thinking and that was very, very lucky, that his family couldn’t afford to do that.”
TD: “I’d like to go back to the origins of this celebation, you’re obviously so involved with Michael Powell’s life, anyway what was it like when the BFI approached you and said ‘we want to do a definitive, we’re going to throw the kitchen sink at it’.”
“It’s wonderful, it’s been extremley successful so far which is great, it’s been long overdue frankly Michael died in 1990, and Emeric died I think in ’88, so it’s been a long time waiting for it, but they were celebrating other directors you know, but now, maybe we were lucky because something has changed, because Ian Chrstie who is the great Powell/Pressburger expert said that his young students he’s dealing with know these movies, and I don’t think that would have been so maybe five years even ago, maybe somehow something has changed and their minds are open, maybe they don’t know the kitchen sink school so well, I don’t know, but it’s really wonderful what’s happening, the ticket sales are great and the audiences are packed for some of these things, it’s fantastic.”
TD: “Well it was a sell-out last night so.”
TS: “Maybe in a way it was good they waited so long, maybe it took that long for people to recognise this brilliant period of filmmaking, just brilliant.
“And of course Marty’s a little jealous in the sense that they were allowed to do so much during the war, you know masterpiece after masterpiece after masterpiece and he wishes that when he went to Hollywood, it was not that easy for him, he had a very hard time and even Raging Bull was not recognised for 10 years.
“It didn’t do well at the box office, and they took 10 years literally, I remember we had alittle celebration for Marty’s birthday I think and we put up a big poster saying that finally people had begun to recognise it, so he had a rough time and Michael didn’t have such a rough time in the beginning of his career like Marty but they both suffered, later Michael suffered terribly later and Marty suffered early on, so I think there was so much, well they loved each other it was a wonderful friendship for all of Michael’s life, it meant so much to Marty.”
TD: “And he helped with those films of course, he helped with Raging Bull, he helped with After Hours, did he see Goodfellas before he passed? He helped with the script?”
TS: “He got it made, he told Marty, after Marty had given up because the studios said you have to take the drugs out and Marty said ‘I can’t take the drugs out that’s the story’ and he was so depressed and I told Michael about it because Michael was so concerned that Marty get artistic freedom, he was really concerned about that, because he thought Mean Streets was a masterpiece, so at one point he said to me, ‘well read me the script why is he having trouble selling it’, so I read him the script on a Sunday, when I wasn’t working in the editing room and he said get Marty on the phone and I did and he said to Marty ;you have to make this movie, this is the best script I’ve read in 20 years; and Marty went back in one more time and sold it and so Michael really was responsible in a way for it getting made and then he didn’t live to see it unfortunately.”
TD: “And to move to Scotland, he wanted to move there, you were saying.”
TS: “He loved Scotland. Ever since Edge of the World, have you seen it? (No) Get it! There’s a new blu-ray out, get it, it is so beautiful and that’s when he fell in love (with Scotland).”
TD: “Because it’s interesting with this celebration, with this season, I’ve only really seen the big hitters, but I haven’t seen lots of others, which of those are you hoping to see enjoy a resurgence to that level?”
TS: “Well I think last night to get people to look at Gone to Earth, yeah.”
TD: “Why is that?”
TS: “It’s sort of been forgotten and there are reasons for that because Selznick was such a bully, he was terrible, the directors he worked with were constantly bombarded with notes from him every day about the dailies and Michael just never read them, they were put in a drawer and that was it.
“So I think because Selznick made his own version somehow it just got fuzzy and people just don’t know that film well enough but it’s quite beautiful Michael loved the folk beliefs that he featured in the film and it was the area that his father grew up so he evokes it in a beautiful way and Jennifer Jones is fantastic in the movie, so I wish more people would see it, I wish we could restore it but Selznick when he did his version cut into the negative and so it’s going to be hell to try and restore but I’m still hoping…”
TD: “Are there ongoing efforts?
TS: “I don’t even know if it’s physically possible, we’ll have to see, there are missing frames now you know where he cut, maybe more than missing frames, maybe there’s whole sequences of the negative that are unavailable you know, it’s very sad.”
TD: “I’m being harrangued so I better wrap it up but thank you so much for your time and congratulations on Killers of the Flower Moon once again.”
TS: “Okay, thank you so much!”
