Marty me

Thelma Schoonmaker has edited every Martin Scorsese movie since 1980's Raging Bull. The three-time Oscar winner tells Total Film all about their legendary relationship, and why movies like Good Fellas, The Departed and Killers of the Flower Moon are a cut above...

- JAMIE GRAHAM

What, exactly, does a film editor do? Ask the average person on the street to, ahem, assemble an answer, and they’re likely to struggle. While filmmaking is the blending together of several established art forms – literature (script), painting and photography (cinematography), music (score) and theatre (acting, production design, costume) – the art of cutting is unique to cinema.

‘It’s mysterious,’ nods Thelma Schoonmaker, who is perhaps the only editor who’s not also a director that the average person on the street might have heard of. Her work with filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and the eight Oscar nominations that it’s garnered, have made her something of a legend. ‘I must say it’s hard [to explain it]. You start one way, and everything is long, then you screen to friends, discuss. We do many screenings, many rough cuts. You’d have to be there to see why things are changing because they change gradually. But basically, what I say is, “Look, they shoot the film, then I get it. They might shoot a wide shot, a medium shot and a close-up, and one of my jobs is: should we be on a wide shot, medium or a close-up for this line?”’

Editing is not simply about taking a four-hour cut of a film and chiselling it down to an audience-friendly two hours. It’s about providing the visual language of the movie and the punctuation; style and rhythm. This, in turn, contributes significantly to the tone and emotion of the picture. Naturally, then, it’s something that Schoonmaker and Scorsese do together.