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Thelma Schoonmaker wins Oscar for Best Editor (“Raging Bull’), pictured with presenters Richard Pryor and Jane Seymour at The 53rd Academy Awards.
“We share a lot of the same passion for filmmaking. We love it deeply. It’s in our blood,” “He taught me everything I know, so his taste is my taste.”
“I’m a calmer person. He goes through very strong emotional moods because he’s constantly challenging himself, asking have I done right here? It’s good that I work more diligently and don’t go through the ups and downs that he does. It helps him calm down.”
-Thelma Schoonmaker on her long-standing partnership with Scorsese
THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE
T - THEMLA SCHOONMAKER
Every great director needs a great editor to add rhythm and pace to their vision. Spielberg has Michael Kahn, Coppola has Walter Murch and Scorsese has Thelma Schoonmaker, his collaborator since their days at NYU together. She’s not just his editor but his friend, and, even including the likes of De Niro and DiCaprio, perhaps his greatest collaborator. Schoonmaker has won Oscars for her work on Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed, although she modestly gives credit for the first’s boxing scenes to her director: “Well, the beautiful fight sequences for which Raging Bull won the editing Oscar were really Marty,” she told Time Out in 2005. “I helped him pull it together, but he had designed them so beautifully.” There are plenty of other editing tours de force to pick from, though, like the famous - and largely improv-ed - exchange between De Niro and Pesci that turned into one of Raging Bull’s most memorable scenes. As if Scorsese and Schoonmaker weren’t already top of each others’ Christmas cards lists, the director introduced his editor to the great English filmmaker Michael Powell and the two were married four years later. That’s a wedding video we’d like to see.