SPECIAL AWARDS SECTION: MPEG WINNERS GALLERY
Schoonmaker's Third Oscar Arrives for 'The Departed'
by Laura Almo
 Thelma Schoonmaker. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP |
In an Academy Awards ceremony filled with firsts, Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Achievement in Editing three times, and only the fourth editor overall to be so honored. She is now tied with Michael Kahn, ACE, and the late editors Ralph Dawson and Daniel Mandell for Oscar wins.
But Schoonmaker does not feel that the gender divide is very important. “I’m not a big male vs. female carver up of the world,” she says. “I believe we’re filmmakers and we all work tremendously hard toward the same goals, so I’m very happy to be tied with the other three-time winners.” She then adds, “But I would trade one of my Oscars happily if Dede Allen could have gotten one.”
Schoonmaker garnered her most recent statuette for The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, a thriller about the mob in Boston. Based on a Hong Kong movie entitled Infernal Affairs, the original film was a more stripped-down thriller. “Writer Bill Monahan and Marty pumped all kinds of wonderful character and humor into the script,” she explains. The challenge of editing The Departed was to make the film a thriller with the right level of tension without going overboard, according to the editor, who says that it took a lot of work fiddling with the plot and restructuring the film in order to keep the right balance.
Schoonmaker believes that she won the Oscar for The Departed for different reasons than for her previous wins for Raging Bull (1980) and The Aviator (2004), both of which were directed by Scorsese. She feels she won for Raging Bull because of the fight scenes, and for The Aviator because of its impressive plane crash scene.
But The Departed was subtler; it’s about story structure, pacing, rhythm, tension and getting it all to work right, according to Schoonmaker. “I’m deeply proud of this one because I think it was the overall editing of the movie that won, not just a flashily edited sequence here or there,” she says. “It was particularly challenging.”
Raging Bull is a bittersweet memory for Schoonmaker. “Raging Bull, of course, is like my baby, my first born, because it was the first big, major Hollywood movie I worked on,” she recalls, but then describes her experience winning that Oscar: “I cannot tell you what despair I felt when standing backstage next to Robert DeNiro, who had also won for the film, and heard that Marty hadn’t won Best Director. I was just devastated and I never felt the same about that particular Oscar ever since––because I just wanted to just rush out and hand it to him and say, ‘It’s yours, not mine.’”
In fact, in her acceptance speech at this year’s ceremony, Schoonmaker again attributed her success to Scorsese. “This is the third time you’ve given the editing Oscar to a film that was made by Martin Scorsese,” she told the audience at the Kodak Theatre. “And believe me, I know I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for him.”
The creative exchange between the pair is intense, focused and dates back to their days as film students at NYU. Schoonmaker edited Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967). They worked together on Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) as editors and assistant directors. The pair’s collaboration is based upon friendship, intellectual curiosity, creativity and mutual respect.
Scorsese has described Schoonmaker as not only an editor but a filmmaker––and together they’re always experimenting, pushing the edge and trying to find new ways to do things. She laughs when she says that sometimes he refers to them as “the Bickersons.” “We pretend to sort of argue with each other,” she says, emphasizing that it is indeed done in fun––the sort of thing that happens when you’ve known a person for a long time, and something they do irritates you slightly.
Looking back over her career, Schoonmaker says she has a lot more confidence than when she started. “All the years of experience and the thousands of editorial decisions you make every day give you an ever-expanding set of tools and understanding that is invaluable.”
Laura Almo is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker. She currently teaches editing at El Camino College and can be reached at lka@alumni.stanford.org.
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