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Veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker, now 83, is a
graceful, generous and fascinating interview subject as she discusses Martin
Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
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“The love story is the basic thing that Marty
decided to focus on,” she told Matt
Feury of The Rough Cut podcast. “When the idea about the film changed, because
Leo DiCaprio decided he would like to play Ernest instead of the role of the
FBI man [Jesse Plemons]. That was a dramatic change you can imagine in the
script, and they were still working on that as we were shooting. Lily Gladstone
and DiCaprio were working with Marty to create scenes that would show the
evolving love story.”
She describes how the film teases out
the complex character of Ernest, as someone who seems both to have genuine
affection for his Osage wife, and yet is capable of facilitating murder.
“The audience enter this world and
learn and experience things through Ernest, but we’re not really aligned with
him because we only get a true sense of who he is, the atrocities and the
violence, over time.”
The opening scene, for instance,
depicts Robert De Niro’s character sizing up his nephew, much as the audience
is.
“The way we worked on the rhythm of
that scene, was to make sure that we sometimes paused for a few seconds, more
than you normally would. Because you see that De Niro’s trying to make up his
mind. What questions should I ask next to find out if this guy’s going to be a
tool? As Ernest is. It’s obvious in the film that he doesn’t read, for example.
He’s been horribly educated, whereas his uncle is much better educated.”
She and Scorsese tend to screen the movies they
work on in multiple different cuts, fine-tuning in reaction to select
audiences, as she explained to Craig McLean at Esquire.
“With our movies, we do rough cuts —
sometimes as many as 12,” she said. Those cuts-in-progress are screened for
people in her and Scorsese’s New York and Hollywood inner circles. “Then we
start opening up to people we don’t know. Then we go to bigger audiences. And
we learn from what we’re hearing, and then we do another cut.
“Then we screen again, and then we do
another… we’re very lucky. A lot of editors aren’t given that kind of time,
which I think they should be.”
Schoonmaker explains to Art of The Cut, “The fact that somebody who doesn’t know the
movie is in the room with you affects you deeply. You’re very very conscious of
people moving, or do they laugh? Or don’t they laugh at the right place? Or the
wrong place? How are they feeling afterwards? Of course, we do talk to people
at length afterwards to find out how they’re reacting.”
Sometimes there are big changes in direction — as
was the case for Killers of the Flower Moon. “We usually do move
things around when editing, except for Goodfellas where
everything was perfect right from the start,” she told Feury. “That movie was
like riding a horse. It knew where it wanted to go. We dropped only one shot.
That film was just there.”
Honoring the Osage and Recognizing Powerful Scenes
Killers of the Flower Moon is dedicated to the memory of musician and composer Robbie Robertson, someone who’s had a hand in the music in various ways for many of Scorsese’s films since he recorded The Last Waltz (featuring The Band’s last concert) in 1976
Schoonmaker says the score’s
throbbing baseline was something that Robertson came up with. “This culture, as
you see in the last shot, and the dances that they do, are very sacred, you
have to be invited to them, they’re not tourist things. So the drums are
incredibly important. The Osage actually consider the drum a person as they do
the pipe.
“So I think that Robbie being half
Mohawk, Marty definitely wanted an indigenous person to do the music, and felt
that this would drive the movie all the way through to the end. You know, it
also is probably blood running through your veins. The fact that he
continuously employed it meant that in his mind, he was giving it to Marty as a
way to move the film along.”
In addition to the scoring, Scorsese
wanted to emphasize the indigeneity of the characters. He did so in part by
including several pivotal scenes in which Osage is spoken but no subtitles are
provided.
Schoonmaker tells Steve Hullfish in an episode of The Art of The Cut, “There
are many times in the movie where you do hear the Osage purely, which is a
very, very good decision which I resisted at first. Not hearing it by itself.
You don’t need to know what he’s saying in the wedding ceremony, for example,
you know, he’s marrying them, right?”
However, in a late scene in which
DiCaprio and Gladstone’s characters are arguing, Scorsese again opted for no
subtitles, which Schoonmaker says “was a very brave and correct decision.”
Although Schoonmaker and Scorsese
have worked on many projects together over the years, her instincts don’t
always mesh with his, at least initially.
Scorsese knows, she says, he “could
trust me to do what was right for the movie, that we weren’t going to have ego
battles in the editing room about who’s right and who’s wrong.
“So when there ever is a really major
disagreement, which is rare, I am always more than happy to show him what he
has asked for. And then if I want to show him options, then I show him options.
And he’s very happy to look at those. And then we’ll decide which one is best.
But it’s never a battle.”
But, she says, “There’s never a
problem when something’s that powerful. There’s never a question” of what to
do, referring to DiCaprio’s performance in the courtroom scene.
For maximum impact, Scorsese
instructed Schoonmaker to “cut away only when we absolutely have to. I want to
just hold on Leo for the entire duration of the testimony because he is so
brilliant.
“And he is. So we only cut away when
the prosecutor points to De Niro and says he is now talking about this man. And
that switch pans over to De Niro because Leo has just incriminated him.”
Powell Pressburger’s Oeuvre
Her custodianship with Scorsese of the film œuvre
of Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black
Narcissus — with Emeric Pressburger — and Peeping Tom),
her late husband, crops up time and time again. The BFI in London recently held
a career retrospective including newly minted versions of films like The
Red Shoes, and Schoonmaker is a more than able commentator.
She tells Feury, “Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger used to do what they called place little bombs in a movie
little things that you may just barely notice that explode later. That is
something that Marty would have noticed in his, you know, devouring of the
Powell Pressburger films.”
“Marty says The Red Shoes are in
his DNA,” notes Schoonmaker to Esquire. It’s a film that she first
saw aged 12 while living on the Caribbean island of Aruba, in an “American
colony” created by Standard Oil.
Returning to the U.S., aged 15, she tuned into a
“wonderful TV show called Million Dollar Movie, where they ran one
film nine times a week.” She later learned of another avid viewer: “Marty would
[try to] watch a Powell and Pressburger movie [all] nine times unless his
mother said: ‘If you don’t turn that off, I’m going to start screaming.’
That’s because, with the rise of realism in British
cinema — “kitchen sink dramas” such as Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963) —
the films of Powell and Pressburger fell out of fashion in the UK. They were
viewed as conservative, colonial, old-fashioned.
Key in that canon is Powell’s transgressive horror
from 1960, Peeping Tom. In 1979 Scorsese arranged for Peeping
Tom to be shown at that year’s New York Film Festival, and then paid
for its redistribution in U.S. cinemas.
To mark the moment, Scorsese held a dinner in New
York in Powell’s honor. He invited along the editor he’d hired to cut his
latest movie, Raging Bull, partly on the advice of Powell.
“I was just so struck by Michael,” recalls
Schoonmaker, who had last worked with Scorsese on his debut feature,
1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
“He was so extraordinary. He came back to talk to
me — I was editing Raging Bull in a bedroom, and we had
film racks in the bathtub.”
That was how Schoonmaker and Powell
met. They married in 1984. He died a decade later. “Marty gave me the best job
in the world and the best husband in the world!”
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