Three-time Oscar winner and longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker was the star of an Edinburgh International Film Festival event on Sunday, where she spoke about the life and work of her late husband, Michael Powell.
Schoonmaker has worked on a whopping 22 of Scorsese’s films across her decades-spanning career, picking up Academy Awards for Raging Bull (1981), The Aviator (2005) and The Departed (2007). She met Powell through Scorsese, whose reverence for the partnership between Powell and fellow English filmmaker Emeric Pressburger led to the pair becoming close friends. Scorsese became influential in helping to restore Powell’s films and was a major advocate for the recognition of his brilliance.
“When I first started working with Scorsese, he immediately started giving me Powell and Pressburger films to take home and look at at night,” Schoonmaker told producer Emma Boa at Edinburgh’s Tollcross Central Hall, the day after she introduced a restored, retrospective screening of Powell’s 1937 film The Edge of the World. “Scorsese had been bringing Michael to America. … He said, ‘You love his films. Would you like to meet him?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes, I would.’ So I had dinner with Marty and Michael, and it was astounding, because Michael, even his face was so interesting. He didn’t say much, but when he said something, it was very powerful. Nobody ever expected us to get married.”
The pair were married from 1984 until Powell’s death aged 84 in 1990. Among his and Pressburger’s best-known movies are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and The Red Shoes (1948).
Schoonmaker became visibly emotional when discussing her husband’s relationship with Scorsese. “When Michael died, not one British director came to his funeral,” she said. “Bernardo Bertolucci came, and Martin Scorsese flew across the Atlantic to be there and throw the first clump of dirt on Michael’s grave. Their friendship was remarkable.” She recalls Powell coming to her one day and telling her: “Marty’s really upset ’cause he can’t sell Goodfellas.”
“Can you imagine — he can’t sell Goodfellas?” she continued. “And the studios were saying to him: ‘You have to take the drugs out.’ And [Scorsese] said, ‘The story of Goodfellas is the drugs. I can’t take it out.’ So Michael said to me, ‘Read me the script.’ I read the script to him on Sunday. … And he said, ‘Get Marty on phone.’ And I did. He said, ‘Marty, you have to make this movie. It’s the best script I’ve read in 20 years. You have to make it.’ So Marty went in and somehow convinced Warner Bros. to make it.”
Schoonmaker also confirmed she’s still working on publishing Powell’s diaries — some of them detailing his foray into theater directing — and is using AI to help. “We’re using AI with the diaries. … We have people read the diary from Michael’s handwriting, because publishers want to see it in print, not handwriting,” she explained.
“It takes a lot of people to do it, and I have very dear friends who I can trust. He actually wrote the diaries for his mother, which is so interesting, and he’s got a lot about his personal life with his family that I will remove because he didn’t want his diaries published. So I will only publish some things that are relevant to film history.”
The acclaimed film editor also went into some depth about the bumps in Powell and Pressburger’s relationship. “Emeric was much more aware of how bad the British film industry was and how are they going to survive it,” she explained, “and he was willing to try and find a way to do that. But Michael was sticking to his feelings, and they went through a period of 20 years of total oblivion where nobody even knew who they were anymore,” she said, adding that Michael became “quite broke.”
Schoonmaker expertly and candidly fielded a myriad of questions about Powell’s childhood, his acclimation to New York, how he inspired her editing and even when the pair fell in love. “I don’t think Marty actually was [too happy],” she laughed, “because then he had to split his devotion to Michael and me. And you know, if I said, ‘I have to go home and make dinner for Michael.’ He had to say yes. But he loved having him around. He loved having him on the set.”
She also spoke about her own career, navigating her way into the film industry and becoming friends with Scorsese. At the heart of the conversation, however, was Powell. She said about her favorite memories of him: “I think just his love of life. What affected him every day was the weather, the light outside, the window, what he was cooking. He just knew how to get the best out of everything. And that was a great joy to live with.”
The Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 runs Aug. 14-20.