As Martin Scorsese’s longstanding editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, prepares to receive the British film industry’s top accolade, a Bafta fellowship, she has revealed plans to honour the memory of another great film maker: her late husband Michael Powell.
“I want to get Michael’s diaries published,” said the three-times Oscar winner, who has worked hand in glove with Scorsese over five decades. “They are stunning, and I want people to be able to read about all the great movies we lost, the ones he had hoped to make.”
Powell, an English director whose acclaimed films include The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, all made in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, fell heavily out of favour with the British film industry in 1960 with the release of his controversial film Peeping Tom, now considered a masterpiece by many. Starring Anna Massey and Karlheinz Böhm, it told of a voyeuristic serial killer who filmed his victims’ dying moments.
Schoonmaker said Powell’s diaries showed how hard he tried to continue making films. “The writing is stunning and it shows he never gave up and was constantly trying to option scripts and to raise money,” she said. “He did make a children’s film, as well as two films in Australia and then Bluebeard’s Castle in Germany. But he was never allowed to make a film again in England, which is tragic.” His efforts to film Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to have starred James Mason,
took him all round the world, she said.
Another ambitious thwarted plan was to shoot an episode from Homer’s The Odyssey, with music by Igor Stravinsky, design by Henri Matisse, a script by Dylan Thomas and a cast including Orson Welles. “It was not exactly realistic, particularly as the British film industry had more or less disappeared by then, but I want people to know that is how high his aspirations were. He had beautiful ideas for The Tempest,” said Schoonmaker.
Powell’s reputation was eventually restored in part by Scorsese, a fan of his films. Bringing him out to New York, Scorsese introduced him to his American editor, Schoonmaker and the couple were married in 1984.
“Until the point Marty found him, Michael had descended into this terrible lack of funds,” said Schoonmaker. “Towards the end he couldn’t even heat the house and he was in terrible shape, although he never really let anyone know. You have no idea how he suffered and how bad it was.”
Schoonmaker keeps the original diaries safe in a vault and has made three copies which she works on in different countries. “He wrote a page or two every day from 1952 to 1990,” she said. “I will now read them thoroughly and decide what to use. I will have to cut it down severely.
“He was a great writer, but didn’t have the time to keep the diary properly until his career was ruined by Peeping Tom. He had been living with the actress Pamela Brown, who was so good in his films, from 1962 until she died in 1975. This was just at the time when Marty found him and he was very low.”
“There is lots of wonderful juvenilia too, all of which I am cataloguing and then giving to the British Film Institute,” added Schoonmaker, who is currently working with Scorsese on their latest project, The Irishman, being made for Netflix and starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
