How Scorsese helped save Britain's most important filmmakers from obscurity

Thelma Schoonmaker, the legendary director's long-term editor, speaks with James Mottram about their mission to restore the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

For the past three decades, few have been more dedicated to preserving the legacy of British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger than Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese. Schoonmaker, one of cinema’s most renowned editors, and Scorsese, for many the world’s greatest living director, have made it their business to ensure audiences remember the men behind such indelible movies as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death.

The pair – Powell died in 1990 at the age of 84, Pressburger in 1988 at the age of 85 – were cinematic fabulists, responsible for visually rich Technicolor fantasias, the likes of which have never been seen before or since. Schoonmaker and Scorsese have been a similar dream-team ever since their first collaboration on the 1980 boxing saga Ra ng Bull, for which Schoonmaker won an Oscar – her first of three, followed by wins for editing The

Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006). It was in the immediate aftermath of Ra ng Bull that Scorsese introduced Schoonmaker to Powell, who he’d befriended in the 1970s, after the British director had split from his Hungarian-born producer/screenwriter, Pressburger. They’d enjoyed success in the Forties and Fifties, but by the time Schoonmaker became a fan of their work, their names had fallen into obscurity.