Thelma Schoonmaker’s Editing Style and Collaboration with Scorsese

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

Film editing is an underrated art form, and it’s often overlooked. Editing is the backbone of filmmaking—it requires immense effort and dedication to the craft, including developing your own unique editing style and breaking the rules. Let’s take a 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 go over Thelma Schoonmaker’s background, examine her distinctive editing style, and of course, look at her decades-long collaboration with filmmaker and technical pioneer Martin Scorsese.

How Thelma Got Into Editing

Schoonmaker is known for her work on films such as Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Irishman, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and many more you may love. Let’s 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 primitive art course in the graduate program at Columbia University that she quickly paved the way toward becoming an award-winning editor.

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

In the film industry, networking is key to success, and that’s exactly what happened for Schoonmaker. In her NYU course, she met a young filmmaker named Martin Scorsese, who asked her to fix the editing on his first film. The two would go on to collaborate on 23 feature films (and counting).

Schoonmaker and Scorsese are known for their use of improvisation, and Schoonmaker says she loves working this way. For example, remember the pivotal scene in The Departed when Jack Nicholson’s character realizes Leonardo DiCaprio is an undercover cop and pulls a gun on him? That moment was completely improvised, and Leo’s reaction is entirely in the moment.

“I love editing improvisation because it’s like putting a puzzle together, and that’s exactly 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 will say collaboration is a key factor in their achievements, and this is certainly true of Schoonmaker and Scorsese, who together have 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, paired with Scorsese’s directing style, have resulted in one of the greatest creative partnerships in film history.

Film editing is anything but easy. Schoonmaker and Scorsese spend enormous amounts of time crafting epic cinematic images for films like Raging Bull, which was ultimately voted one of the best films of the 1980s. Schoonmaker won her first Oscar for editing that film.

In fact, the film was so successful and their collaboration worked so well that she has edited every narrative feature Scorsese has directed since.

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

Thelma Schoonmaker’s Editing Style

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

Freeze Frames

Freeze frames “freeze” the action so a single frame is held on screen, creating a static image (similar to a photograph). In Goodfellas, Scorsese’s visual style uses freeze frames to stop the action at key moments in Henry’s life. For example, 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. The freeze frames are used to give the audience insight into the pivotal moments Henry remembers from his life, helping us empathize more deeply with the character.

Flash Frames

The term is fairly self-explanatory. This involves cutting with camera flashes. Schoonmaker uses flash frames in various ways in many of Scorsese’s films to capture different kinds of emotion. In The Aviator, flash frames are used to create a disorienting effect. When Hughes walks the red carpet with Harlow, the paparazzi’s camera flashes go off in his face, and the cuts between flashes appear in sequence, clearly showing how uncomfortable he is with all the attention. The flash-frame editing helps create a sense of disorientation, allowing the audience to feel what the character feels.

Slow Motion

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

Ultimately, there is no universal truth in editing. There is no single “right” way, because you can cut—or choose not to cut—based on how you want the audience to feel.

“Sometimes we like a certain roughness in the editing style that Hollywood editors don’t like. Hollywood editors tend to prefer a very smooth cutting style, with all the bumps removed. But sometimes Marty and I like to leave those bumps in, because they give the film a certain toughness, a certain reality.”

— Thelma Schoonmaker