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"           Clockwise from top: A family asunder in Cape Fear (1991); Chlo\u00EB Grace Moretz and Asa Butterfield in the new Hugo; Sharon Stone&amp;#039;s mobster moll in Casino (1995); Newman and Cruise hustle in The Color of Money (1986); De Niro and Pesci in Raging Bull (1980); Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence (1993); Leonardo DiCaprio, gangster-buff in The Departed (2006) . Thelma Schoonmaker is a soft-spoken, gray-haired, somewhat motherly 71-year-old who, for the past 31 years, has spent up to 11 hours a day staring intently at men&amp;#039;s skulls being bashed in, their noses flattened, their hands broken, and, on occasion, their heads squeezed in a vise. &amp;quot;Thelma,&amp;quot; Martin Scorsese has declared, &amp;quot;is the woman I trust.&amp;quot; As such, she has been the editor on all of his feature films, 16 in total, since 1980&amp;#039;s Raging Bull, for which she won her first of three Oscars. (Scorsese himself did not take home an Academy Award until The Departed, 26 years later.) They met at New York University in the mid-&amp;#039;60s, back when Schoonmaker was an idealistic 23-year-old with lustrous brunette hair and &amp;quot;Marty,&amp;quot; three years her junior, wore close-clipped hair and neatnik shirts that did little to offset his worried, hyperserious demeanor. For more than three decades, they have reigned as one of Hollywood&amp;#039;s legendary professional power couples\u2014albeit one in which one member gets the lion&amp;#039;s share of the glory. &amp;quot;Films are made in the editing room,&amp;quot; says three-time Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore, who has scored five Scorsese films, including The Aviator and The Departed. The cut is essential to a movie&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;rhythm, sense of drama, and storytelling,&amp;quot; and Schoonmaker, Shore says, is &amp;quot;the absolute best.&amp;quot; Her work on the 1970 documentary Woodstock redefined concert films with its split screens and hallucinatory look; 10 years later, her innovative manipulation of time and radical use of freeze frames, juxtapositions, jump cuts, and vari-speed footage in Raging Bull brought a slew of avant-garde techniques into the mainstream. But Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s job isn&amp;#039;t just a matter of technical wizardry; Scorsese has said that he relies on her to maintain the emotional heart of his movies\u2014and you don&amp;#039;t have to be a cinephile to have been moved by her work (whether you knew it at the time or not). In 1986&amp;#039;s The Color of Money, in which Paul Newman and Tom Cruise play pool hustlers, the editing not only makes a montage of balls being hit into pockets genuinely exciting, but also turns their first game into a gun battle: With Newman shooting from the left of the screen, Cruise from the right, Schoonmaker establishes a rhythm that evokes two snipers dueling across a valley. And in The Age of Innocence, a study in suppressed desire, when Daniel Day-Lewis removes Michelle Pfeiffer&amp;#039;s gloves in the back of a carriage, the sequence and pace of the edit makes it feel as though Newland Archer has just ripped off Madame Olenska&amp;#039;s bodice. Editing, Schoonmaker says, is the art of decision-making. Selecting the best of, say, a dozen takes of a particular scene; whether the actor will deliver a line with taut, quiet pathos or red-faced fury; whether, in that moment, the audience will be watching the speaker or the spoken-to\u2014all decisions, Schoonmaker is quick to point out, that she and Scorsese make together\u2014shapes not only the texture of the scene but the interior life of the character. Thus it is perhaps the most powerful testament to Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s talent that actor&amp;#039;s actors, the kind of people who tend to be rather protective of their performances, are eager to share with her the credit for some of their best work. Robert De Niro, who famously improvised much of his performance as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull\u2014particularly in scenes with Joe Pesci&amp;#039;s character\u2014says, &amp;quot;I trust her completely.&amp;quot; And, while Pesci begins to sound like the psychotic mobster he played in Casino when he talks about how other editors have ruined his work (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve gotten killed in some films and it wasn&amp;#039;t my fault,&amp;quot; he says, his voice growing tighter. &amp;quot;It. Pisses. Me. Off.&amp;quot;), he softens instantly on the subject of Schoonmaker. &amp;quot;That stuff never happens with Thelma. I don&amp;#039;t have to think about it\u2014she always chooses the best take.&amp;quot; Ben Kingsley, who played an insane-asylum psychiatrist in 2010&amp;#039;s Shutter Island and has returned as a toy-shop owner with a secret past in this month&amp;#039;s Hugo, praises Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;intuitive, deep grasp of each individual&amp;#039;s narrative journey through the film.&amp;quot;  Juliette Lewis garnered an Oscar nomination for her role as a rebellious 15-year-old enthralled by De Niro&amp;#039;s greasy psychopath in 1991&amp;#039;s Cape Fear. One of the movie&amp;#039;s tensest scenes was the result of two nine-minute takes, artfully edited together: Lewis coyly, uneasily allows De Niro to slide his thumb into her mouth. &amp;quot;I never do [a scene] the same way twice. I&amp;#039;m living and breathing in that moment,&amp;quot; Lewis says. It&amp;#039;s up to Schoonmaker to &amp;quot;find the throughline, to follow and sometimes excavate the filmmaker&amp;#039;s and actor&amp;#039;s true intention. She&amp;#039;s going to suss out my most honest takes and the ones that connect to the next.&amp;quot; Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s style, says Lewis, &amp;quot;has such grace, but she knows when to buck convention, when to make it rough, when to make it seamless. She can nail it all.&amp;quot; Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s post-production suite in Scorsese&amp;#039;s Midtown Manhattan HQ is bright and airy, more like a suburban home office than the dark, womblike space her profession might suggest. She&amp;#039;s seated in front of her mixing desk, her lively hazel eyes glowing green behind square-rimmed glasses. Their color, she says, deepens the longer she works on a film\u2014&amp;quot;the redness brings out the green quite nicely&amp;quot;\u2014and now that she&amp;#039;s in the thick of editing Hugo, Scorsese&amp;#039;s first 3-D film, they are nearly emerald.  Scorsese often works with the same core team, but he singles out Schoonmaker as his &amp;quot;closest collaborator.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s the only one he&amp;#039;ll watch raw film with, and when he&amp;#039;s shooting in isolated locations and unable to watch his own footage, he relies on her, back in New York, to tell him if the work works. (When Schoonmaker unpacked the dailies for 1988&amp;#039;s The Last Temptation of Christ, shot in a Moroccan desert, sand came out of the canisters.) She does everything from screening and cataloging each day&amp;#039;s footage to overseeing the translation of the completed film for foreign markets. (She took on that responsibility after seeing Woodstock at Cannes. According to the French subtitles, Sly and the Family Stone were singing &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got to have a Honda,&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;I want to take you higher.&amp;quot;) Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s main task, however, is spending six to nine months per movie cutting the equivalent of 20 miles of rough footage into the two that are required for a commercial release. (Scorsese switched to digital editing with Casino in 1994, but even without physical film, her task is no less arduous.)          From left: Scorsese and Schoonmaker on 1970&amp;#039;s Woodstock; Schoonmaker&amp;#039;s second Oscar win, for The Aviator; the duo in 3-D glasses on the set of Hugo. In her office, Schoonmaker offers a pair of 3-D glasses and rolls in-progress footage from Hugo. The story of an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a 1930s Paris train station, where he secretly winds the clocks, it&amp;#039;s Scorsese&amp;#039;s first family film. &amp;quot;Marty is really making it for his daughter,&amp;quot; 12-year-old Francesca, Schoonmaker says. As the camera swoops down through clouds of locomotive steam to hurtle along the station platform, the 3-D effect sucks you into the action; as passengers hurry to board their trains, their legs zip toward your eyes. But Schoonmaker, it turns out, is the most modest of living legends\u2014as preternaturally humble as many of Scorsese&amp;#039;s characters are vicious\u2014and true to form, she singles out the lighting director, the set designer, 14-year-old actor Asa Butterfield, and the costume designer (&amp;quot;see how she&amp;#039;s made the clothes so he&amp;#039;s outgrowing them\u2014he has no parents and no one&amp;#039;s buying him anything&amp;quot;). She freezes a frame to show the blisters on Butterfield&amp;#039;s hands (&amp;quot;Look at that: all put on by the makeup artists&amp;quot;), and when a bird flaps across the screen, she even enthuses about the film&amp;#039;s pigeon trainer. Ask about her own contribution, though, and she demures. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really Marty&amp;#039;s vision,&amp;quot; she says, using a jog wheel to move the film forward and back like a DJ cueing a record. &amp;quot;Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he&amp;#039;s an editor himself\u2014we cut together. It means he&amp;#039;s constantly thinking about my problems while he&amp;#039;s filming. It&amp;#039;s wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; Schoonmaker feels so strongly about this that she has repeatedly tried to give Scorsese the Oscar she won for Raging Bull, &amp;quot;but he won&amp;#039;t take it,&amp;quot; she says in a resigned tone.  That was the first of many violent Scorsese films Schoonmaker cut, its shock factor later eclipsed by movies like GoodFellas and Casino, which made art of stomach-churning brutality. In Gangs of New York, a street battle involving knives, clubs, and hatchets is choreographed (and lingered upon) with the same aesthetic precision as ballroom scenes in The Age of Innocence\u2014the effect as darkly beautiful as it is horrifying. But the only time Schoonmaker becomes stern is when faced with that eternal Scorsese question: Do his films glorify violence? &amp;quot;The reason Marty made GoodFellas was to show people that the Mafia was not a rosy life,&amp;quot; says Schoonmaker. &amp;quot;They didn&amp;#039;t take care of people, they didn&amp;#039;t take care of the women when the men went to jail\u2014he wanted to make that clear. I think he has some important things to say about violence, so that doesn&amp;#039;t bother me.&amp;quot; Scorsese, after all, was a child of New York&amp;#039;s Mafia-steeped Lower East Side; local guys who gave him candy in the street later turned out to be mob hit men. She admits, though, that &amp;quot;it is a problem for us when we finally get the film together and realize it has more of an impact on other people than it ever will on us, because we know how we made it. There have been times when we&amp;#039;ve had screenings and realized the impact is too great and we have to back off it a little\u2014particularly the eye coming out of the man&amp;#039;s head in the vise in Casino. We went a little too far with that in our first screening.&amp;quot; Schoonmaker herself grew up far from working-class Italian America. Her father worked for Standard Oil; brought up in Algeria, Portugal, and Aruba, she planned on becoming a diplomat. She passed the exams but was rejected by the State Department for liberal views, including opposing Apartheid. She loved old movies, so she answered an ad to assist a &amp;quot;terrible old hack&amp;quot; re-cutting classics for late-night television; that led her to sign up for a six-week film course (&amp;quot;all I could afford&amp;quot;) at NYU. When a teacher asked for someone to help a student whose negative had been damaged, she stepped in. &amp;quot;The first time I saw Marty, he was flustered,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;d been up for three days trying to fix his film. He was sitting against a wall with his eyes open, but I think he was asleep. I recognized his drive and his intensity right away.&amp;quot; De Niro says that Schoonmaker has &amp;quot;a certain steadiness, sturdiness, and nurturing which I think is very important for Marty,&amp;quot; a man once renowned for smashing up telephones and chairs when filming, who is still prone to what Schoonmaker affectionately calls &amp;quot;a somewhat gloomy view of the world.&amp;quot; Scorsese introduced Schoonmaker to his band of fellow filmmakers, proto-hippies making guerrilla-style movies in New York. She recalls her early seat-of-the-pants filmmaking cohorts as &amp;quot;politically very active, very idealistic, and incredibly energetic.&amp;quot; They made films opposing the Vietnam War, segregation\u2014&amp;quot;We would take on anything,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There would be six or seven of us, pushing wheelchairs for tracking shots, driving our own cars as camera vehicles with the cameraman on the hood with no safety device. I learned to tie into power lines in the basement of houses\u2014you have to bend your knees so if you get a jolt you&amp;#039;ll fall over and break the connection, instead of being electrocuted.&amp;quot; Though she was working with mostly men, &amp;quot;they never made me feel like I was being treated differently,&amp;quot; she says. If anything, over the years she says her gender has proven something of an asset. If she veered quickly into editing, &amp;quot;I think that&amp;#039;s because the men were making such a mess of it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They liked editing, but they were losing everything, destroying things\u2014I was much more organized. I do think that&amp;#039;s a slightly female trait.&amp;quot; Indeed, editing is one of the few off-camera, tech-oriented aspects of filmmaking in which women are relatively well represented. Quentin Tarantino long worked with Sally Menke, who died last year; Cecil B. DeMille and Woody Allen have also relied on women to cut their films. Schoonmaker thinks this is partially explained by the fact that to be an effective editor, &amp;quot;you have to be a good collaborator with the director. A lot of male relationships are more combative, I think, and you have to be able to not fight over a film. I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, &amp;#039;Oh really? Why don&amp;#039;t you go try\u2014it&amp;#039;s not easy.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Early in her career, &amp;quot;I used to spend a lot of time explaining to the wives of my friends why they loved it so much, why they worked until two in the morning and they were never there,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Then I realized that if I really explained what their husbands do, they&amp;#039;d probably all want to become filmmakers and leave their children.&amp;quot; She laughs, but it&amp;#039;s clear she&amp;#039;s only half joking. Schoonmaker never had children, partly because she didn&amp;#039;t meet the man she might have wanted them with until she was 39 and he was 74. Scorsese introduced her to her future husband, cult English film director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) when she was editing Raging Bull in Scorsese&amp;#039;s spare bedroom (film racks were kept in the bathtub). Powell, who died in 1990, &amp;quot;was like the sun compared to anyone else,&amp;quot; she says. Today, when Schoonmaker and Scorsese are editing, she still arrives at the office before him and leaves after he&amp;#039;s gone. She works in a cheap-looking office chair at a low wooden desk with worn edges, flanked by large speakers. Scorsese sits behind her in a tan-colored armchair, literally looking over her shoulder, watching her work roll on a giant, MTV Cribs\u2013size monitor. He keeps a nearby TV permanently tuned to Turner Classic Movies, running silently in the background. Occasionally he&amp;#039;ll catch a glimpse of something inspiring, perhaps in an old Fellini movie, and he and Schoonmaker will pause to admire and discuss it. Directly in front of the director&amp;#039;s seat is what looks like the rearview mirror from a large truck, duct-taped to a speaker. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s so he can see who&amp;#039;s behind him,&amp;quot; Schoonmaker explains. &amp;quot;When his assistants come in, he can see from the look on their faces how serious it is.&amp;quot; (He keeps a bigger one on set, above his monitor.)  Asked how it feels to be the right hand\u2014even a universally admired one\u2014throughout a lifelong career, Schoonmaker shrugs. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t see it that way,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think of it as him being in the front and me being behind\u2014it&amp;#039;s just a wonderful collaboration. I love being around great artists, and I&amp;#039;ve been around a few of them.&amp;quot; Here she lets loose a particularly throaty chuckle. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s nothing like it, I tell you. It&amp;#039;s an addiction.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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