Thelma Schoonmaker’s Editing Style and Collaboration with Scorsese

Original article: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/thelma-schoonmaker-editing-style/

Film editing is an undervalued art form, and often underestimated. Editing is the backbone of filmmaking—it demands tremendous effort and dedication to the craft, including developing your own unique editing style and breaking the rules. Let’s look at one of Hollywood’s most accomplished and renowned film editors, Thelma Schoonmaker, and see what has made her one of the most celebrated figures in the industry. In this article, we’ll look at Thelma Schoonmaker’s background, explore her distinctive editing style, and of course, her decades-long collaboration with filmmaker and cinematic innovator Martin Scorsese.

How Thelma Entered the Editing World

Schoonmaker is famous for her work on films such as Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Irishman, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and many other movies you may love. Let’s take a look at Schoonmaker’s life before she became the second most Oscar-nominated editor in Academy Awards history.

Thelma was born in Algeria to American expatriate parents but spent her early years in Aruba. She didn’t move to the United States until she was fifteen, when her family relocated and she continued her education. Surprisingly, film editing was not Schoonmaker’s original passion. She studied political science and international diplomacy at Cornell University.

It was during a graduate program in primitive art at Columbia University that she very quickly paved the way toward becoming an award-winning editor.

Although Schoonmaker did not start out in film school, she soon found her passion. During the course, she saw a job ad in The New York Times for an assistant editor position. She applied, got the job, quickly realized how interesting the work was, and then enrolled in a film editing course at NYU.

In the film industry, networking is key to success, and that was exactly the case for Schoonmaker. During her course at NYU, she met a young filmmaker named Martin Scorsese, who asked her to help fix editing problems in his first film. The two have since collaborated on 23 feature films (and counting).

Schoonmaker and Scorsese are known for improvisation, something Schoonmaker says she loves. For example, remember the pivotal scene in The Departed where Jack Nicholson discovers Leonardo DiCaprio is an undercover agent and pulls a gun on him? That scene was completely improvised, and Leonardo’s reaction was in the moment!

I love cutting improvisation because it’s like putting a puzzle together—that’s what working with improvised scenes feels like. You have to find a way to make the scene work dramatically, and I love doing that. — Thelma Schoonmaker

Collaboration with Martin Scorsese

Many successful people say that collaboration is a key factor in success, and that’s certainly true of Schoonmaker and Scorsese. Together they’ve created many award-winning films, including the three-and-a-half-hour epic The Irishman.

Throughout her success, Schoonmaker has remained humble, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, teamwork, and ensuring that the director’s vision is realized. Schoonmaker’s editing skills combined with Scorsese’s directing style have formed one of the greatest partnerships in film history.

Film editing is anything but easy. Schoonmaker and Scorsese spend enormous amounts of time crafting epic cinematic imagery for films like Raging Bull, which was ultimately voted one of the best films of the 1980s. Schoonmaker’s work on that film earned her first Academy Award for editing.

In fact, the film was so successful and their collaboration so effective that she went on to edit every narrative feature Scorsese has directed since.

A hallmark of Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is her ability to incorporate improvisation, as seen in films like Raging Bull and The Wolf of Wall Street. Schoonmaker says it was her work on documentaries that trained her to handle improvised material in narrative films. Her collaboration with Scorsese is pure partnership. While it may be his vision, he relies on her to help bring it to life. That’s the key to the director–editor relationship: communication.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s Editing Style

If you think good editing means that people don’t notice it’s happening, that’s not the case with Thelma Schoonmaker’s films. The secret to great craftsmanship is throwing out conventional rules, and that’s exactly what Schoonmaker and Scorsese have done through their filmmaking and editing styles. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing style and unique techniques are part of why her films with Scorsese are so successful.

Freeze Frames

A “freeze frame” happens when a single frame is repeated on screen, freezing the action and creating a static image (like a photograph). In Goodfellas, Scorsese uses this visual device to freeze key moments in Henry Hill’s life. For instance, when he looks down at the trunk and says, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

You also see this when Henry burns the car. Freeze frames are used here to show the crucial moments Henry remembers from his life, helping us to empathize more deeply with the character.

Flash Frames

The name is fairly self-explanatory. This involves cutting with camera flashes. Schoonmaker uses flash frames in various ways across many of Scorsese’s films to capture different emotional tones. In The Aviator, flash frames are used as a disorienting effect. When Hughes walks the red carpet with Harlow, the flashes from the paparazzi’s cameras explode across his face. These flash cuts appear in quick succession, clearly showing his discomfort with all the attention. The flash-frame editing helps create a feeling of disorientation, allowing the audience to feel what the character is experiencing.

Slow Motion

Slow motion is an effect used in editing to make time appear to move more slowly. In Raging Bull, you see this technique when Sugar Ray Robinson is pummeling Jake LaMotta into a bloody mess. The slow motion of the heavy blows works in this fight scene as a juxtaposition and heightens the sense of chaos. Slow motion intensifies the action, builds tension, and keeps the audience on edge.

Ultimately, there is no universal truth to editing. There is no single “right” way, because you can cut (or not cut) according to how you want the audience to feel.

Sometimes we like a certain roughness in the cutting style that Hollywood editors don’t care for. Hollywood editors tend to like smooth editing styles where all the bumps are removed. But sometimes Marty and I like to keep those bumps because they add a certain toughness, a certain reality to the film.

— Thelma Schoonmaker