In David Hinton’s documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, Martin Scorsese provides a semester’s worth of material to learn about two filmmakers near and dear to his artistry and life. An extended interview with Scorsese guides us through the filmography of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who made a legendary run of films within the British studio system of the 1940s and ’50s under the banner of their production company The Archers. Scorsese also breaks down what makes their films so special while also illuminating the many points of inspiration for his own body of work.
But as Made in England highlights, the connection runs deeper than anything on the screen. Scorsese befriended Powell in the ’70s after the British filmmaker had slipped into obscurity and helped rehabilitate his reputation. Scorsese also served as an unexpected matchmaker by introducing Powell to the woman he would later marry, Scorsese’s longtime editor and closest collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker. In the last decade of his life, Powell served as a confidante and advisor on Scorsese’s work, a favor that he and Schoonmaker have repaid by continuing the preservation and promotion of Powell and Pressburger’s films.
I spoke with Schoonmaker, an executive producer on Made in England, and Hinton ahead of the documentary’s theatrical debut. Our conversation covered why Powell made certain editing and story recommendations to Scorsese, how the meanings of certain Powell and Pressburger films, like The Red Shoes, have evolved for them over time, and what the documentary’s title ironically says about the Archers’ desire to make a cinema for the world.
Michael Powell told Scorsese not to do master shots and just cut into the center of the scene. Why was that? Was it as much philosophical as it was practical?
Thelma Schoonmaker: Oh, it was very practical! Marty realized right away, “He’s right. I don’t need master shots!” I mean, how often do we use a master shot anyway? It’s more a rehearsal for the actors and camera crew. He knows now to not even do it if you don’t really need it. There would be certain [scenes in] courtrooms or something [where] you want to show a big room, but no, get right into the heart of the matter! David, in your dance films, do you do masters?
David Hinton: Well, I’ve done lots of films in different ways. But what fascinates me—and you told me this, Thelma—is when Michael and Emeric made their movies, they only did one take on things. One huge difference from lots of contemporary filmmaking is how heavily planned every shot was. These great Powell and Pressburger movies, they were really storyboarded out, so Michael knew what the shots were going to be before he went into the editing room, didn’t he?
TS: Yes, and Marty also storyboards. Now he’s doing it just on the side of the script, but he used to do really big ones for Raging Bull. There were 90 storyboards for the big final fight. It’s very important to get into the meat of things. The fact that Michael only did one take is astounding to me because Marty will do maybe four or five, maybe more depending on the situation. But nowadays with digital, people can do 20 if they want because it doesn’t cost more money.
Michael worked with actors who were acting on the stage at night and shooting films during the day. They were very tuned up and beautifully trained, so they would rehearse a lot. But can you imagine looking at something like The Red Shoes or Colonel Blimp and thinking, “They only did one take?” Michael couldn’t understand the way Marty and I work. Because there are more options for Marty to see, of course he wants to be in the editing room when those decisions are made. Whereas if I just had one take of Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey to cut, it’s not that hard. You don’t need the director there necessarily. You want to show him the edit and have his input, but he could never understand why I was in the editing room with Marty.
Why was Michael Powell so insistent that Griffin Dunne needed to return to work at the end of After Hours? Beyond being the right ending for the film, do either of you see it as an echo of any of his own films?
TS: Partially, it was because we didn’t have a good ending ourselves. I mean, Griffin Dunne is encased in papier-mâché that Cheech and Chong put in a truck [before driving] off. It wasn’t a strong enough ending, so people started giving us ideas like, “Oh, they should go off and a balloon,” and things like that which were just not right. But Michael felt that, in reality, this is what would have happened to him. Marty shot something of the sculpture he’s inside falling out of the truck and breaking open in front of where he used to work. That’s why he ends up going back to hell and having to do something he hates! [laughs]
I loved learning about Powell’s background in the quota quickies. It feels like it mirrors some of Thelma’s work at that first assistant editing job and Scorsese’s education in the Corman school. Is it a helpful skill to cut your teeth on somewhat less glamorous work to gain the skills needed to make masterpieces?
TS: [After the assistant job], I didn’t know what I was doing. When I started working with [Scorsese], he was telling me everything and teaching me. I just learned by doing it. Because he taught me everything, we are of the same mind. Often, you’ll have a director and an editor who fight over the movie, and that’s very destructive and terrible. But that was never the case with us. We do disagree sometimes, but we can settle that very easily. He made me what I am.
DH: One thing you can certainly say about Michael is he never went to film school. He learned by making movies. He really started at the bottom on the set of those Rex Ingram films in the south of France. He did many jobs on a film set before he became a director.
TS: He was taught by this wonderful American crew who were open to teaching him everything: editing and camerawork. When he went back to England, he didn’t receive that kind of openness and warmth, and it was hard. But I think it’s good that he never went to university. David, I really think if he had gone to Cambridge or Oxford, he might have become a different person. But he grew up on a farm, and he spent quite a bit of time in France. All of that shaped him instead of being shaped by certain rules in a university atmosphere.
DH: Part of his energy was physical, wasn’t it? He was very well-educated and intelligent, but he was active more than cerebral. A lot of his filmmaking was active. Going off to make The Edge of the World, living this very rugged life on a remote island, he was in his element, wasn’t he?
TS: No helicopter, no drone, no electricity, no radio, and a ferry that only came every two weeks. It was a very dangerous and daring thing that he did. But he was always in very good shape until the very end of his life. When he would finish a movie, the first thing he would do is walk out of the studio immediately, put on a knapsack, go up to Scotland with friends, and walk over the hills of Scotland for a couple of weeks. Thinking about the movie, maybe, but refreshing his mind. That took quite a bit of strength to be walking over the hills of Scotland for two weeks!
DH: And 49th Parallel, too, was a grueling physical adventure in the midst of a world war. I think Michael was completely at home working in that mode, wasn’t he?
TS: Yes.
David, how has your connection to the life and work of Powell grown or changed since you made your first documentary on him? Does Scorsese’s observation that “as you grow older, they grow deeper” ring true for you as well?
DH: 100%, yeah. One thing I love in the documentary is the idea that Scorsese brings up about the film’s subconscious. You can absorb films very young, live with them for the whole of your life, and you can go back to them and they mean different things at different points in your life. That’s certainly been my experience. In some ways, I was introduced to the work through the man. When I did that original TV show in the ’80s, it was on account of reading Michael’s autobiography. That was the kind of the pretext for the program we made together. Of course, that made me immediately watch all the masterpieces. But if I come back to a film like Colonel Blimp—now I’m sort of aging myself, but it means a lot more to me than it did when I was 30.
How have the meanings of Peeping Tom or The Red Shoes—which are so much about the relationship between art, love, and life—shifted for you both over time?
DH: If you take Peeping Tom, that film is like an education in all the most sordid aspects of being a filmmaker. The fact that it’s a voyeuristic activity, the fact that the person in front of the camera is always at the mercy of the person behind the camera. Since I first saw that in the ’80s, I’ve lived a long life making films, and so all those aspects of it resonate with me more. But also, so many of the themes of that film seem more and more pertinent to our lives now. The way that we all live in this world of things being endlessly recorded, CCTV, porn on the internet, and this whole world turning life into imagery all the time. The film seems incredibly prescient. It was ahead of its time anyway, nobody understood it in 1960. It wasn’t acceptable to critics or audiences. But it so clearly anticipates so much of what our lives are like now, doesn’t it?
TS: It’s so relevant to today!
DH: As for The Red Shoes, I’ve got a personal connection to that in the sense that I’ve made lots of films now with dance and dancers. And when I first saw The Red Shoes, that hadn’t happened. I wouldn’t say that there’s a direct connection between me seeing The Red Shoes and going on to work a lot with dance and dancers, but it made a very deep impression on me. Certainly, it steered me towards thinking a hell of a lot about physical performance in films and what can be communicated through the human body in motion rather than through people sitting at a table exchanging dialogue with each other. You could say that, to some extent, that film has set me off in a particular direction as a filmmaker.
TS: You might not even have known it, but it did have a deep influence.
DH: The fact that he cast an actual dancer, rather than an actress, to play that lead role paid off so brilliantly. I’m very fascinated about the whole world of what physical performance can provide within cinema. It’s something that’s been very much underexplored, and there are still huge possibilities in what might be done with working with dancers on film.
TS: One of the things Marty said recently to me, which made me understand something, is, “I just love the characters in these films.” I think that’s important to why they work so wonderfully and why you don’t get tired of them, because the characters are wonderfully human. There are no villains and heroes. It’s more about the gray area in which we all live. I find that when I’m restoring the films, I have to see them over and over again to get the color and timing right. I never get tired of them because I say, “Oh, this great line is coming up now! This great scene is coming up now, and I’m dying to see it again.” It’s very special, these movies in that way.
There are side-by-side sequences in the film where we see the echoes of the Archers’ work in Scorsese’s own. How did those come about given that his approach is to find inspiration from the Archers rather than do direct imitation?
TS: David, you did that beautiful sequence intercutting of Taxi Driver and [Anton Walbrook’s character] Boris Lermontov smashing his hand against the mirror.
DH: That was just such an interesting comparison that Marty made between Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Lermontov in The Red Shoes. I wouldn’t have immediately made that connection, but the minute he made that connection, I went back to the films and immediately it all made sense. And then it was a lot of fun to create that sequence where I deliberately made all these visual parallels between the two characters. It was fantastic to see. But the more interesting way the Powell and Pressburger movies influenced the Scorsese movies is deeper than direct one-to-one, “This shot looks a bit like this shot or this scene.”
TS: Never, never.
DH: It’s more to do with this whole idea of “the film subconscious” that Marty talks about. He sat there as a 10-year-old boy and watched The Tales of Hoffman, and ideas about the relationship between camera and music went into his bones from those viewings. Years later, when he makes GoodFellas, he plays back “Layla” on the set because he knows that’s going to be the music for a particular sequence. The cameraman is hearing the music as he’s shooting the shots. That’s an influence that’s going on at a very deep level.
TS: Marty says that The Red Shoes is in his DNA, and that’s what David’s talking about. He literally thinks about it almost every day, and he hears the music from The Tales of Hoffman in his head almost every day. The influence is so profound.
Is it startling, then, to see the side-by-side? I know you didn’t edit Taxi Driver, but does it elevate something subconscious?
TS: It’s not an easy comparison. It’s not slick or anything like that. It’s very deep!
DH: The connection Scorsese’s really making has to do with the kind of characters that interested Michael and Emeric and the kind of characters that interested him. These people are antiheroes. Difficult, obsessive people, not good guy/bad guy moviemaking. That’s the important point that he’s making. Then, finding these visual connections is just a way of having fun with that, but the point about character that’s most important. Marty talks about them both as characters who are on the edge of things, observing, but at any moment they might explode. That’s what the visual sequence was about, and to try and get that across was fun to do.
TS: Which it did!
Thinking about the film’s title Made in England, was there something special about the way Powell and Pressburger made British films? Are they any more reflective of the national character than a Scorsese film is about America?
TS: I was with Michael once when somebody asked him, “What do you think about the terrible state of the British film industry?” This was in the early ’80s, and he said, “Why should there be a British film industry? We should make films for the world, not just for Britain.” That was something he felt very deeply. You could send a film to Japan and they would take out the English title card, because there was no sound, and put in a Japanese title card. The film would remain exactly the same. So you could send a film to Indonesia, to Mexico, and it would work. He regretted that when silent films ended, a world cinema was lost, and so then it became more of a British film, or a French film, or a German film.
DH: That Made in England title came from that stamp at the end of Tales of Hoffman. But there’s a pugnaciousness in Michael putting that there that also applies to our film. Basically, what Michael is saying there is this doesn’t look anything like what you expect an English movie to look like. But nevertheless, it was made in England, so Michael is kind of insisting there. Of course, a lot of that was to do with the fact that that Emeric came from Hungary and got his film education in Germany. Two of the most important Archers, production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, were Germans. Michael was an English filmmaker, but he got his start making American movies in the south of France. What it’s about is the fact that these films are made in England, but actually, they’re drawing in influences from all over Europe and America. It’s a kind of English filmmaking that enlarges the whole idea of what an English film might be.
The film ends on a note about the relationship Powell fostered with Scorsese and so many others rather than recapping his artistic impact. Do you see his legacy as much tied to the filmmakers he inspired and mentored as it is to his own films?
TS: If you were lucky enough to meet him, yes. Not enough people [did], but anyone he ever met was affected by him. He was an extraordinary human being. There are so many people like Bertrand Tavernier, who wrote the only good review of Peeping Tom when it came out, who loved Michael, went to find him, and kept in touch with us. George Romero was a huge, huge fan. These people did get a chance to meet him, and they became friends. I think his legacy does carry on with many filmmakers. Aki Kaurismäki, for example. They’re all over the world, people who are so deeply influenced by having met him. Scorsese might have been influenced by that. I must say, he does spend an enormous amount of time nurturing and guiding young filmmakers today. It’s amazing what he’s doing from all over the world.
DH: I think the films themselves live on in the most glorious way, largely because of everything that Scorsese and Thelma have done in terms of restoring the films. So if you actually go and see The Red Shoes now in a cinema, what you’re seeing is an absolutely glorious representation of that film. It doesn’t feel like it was made 80 years ago. It feels like something that’s brand new, and it glows. The look and the color of it are just spectacular. I think that that’s one reason why the films live on with a younger generation: because they still feel and look new.
But certainly, in the time since I first made that thing with Michael, I’ve certainly seen Powell and Pressburger become central to British film culture. You hardly meet a young British filmmaker of any talent who doesn’t cite them as an influence. I think that’s because the films are out there in the world in these beautiful forms, and that’s really down to what Scorsese and Thelma have done. The other thing you have to remember is what Scorsese did for Michael.
TS: It was tremendous.
DH: In the mid-’70s, when Scorsese first met Michael, [he] was sort of a forgotten man. It was so important for his morale that Scorsese reminded him that people still loved his films and gave him practical help getting him this job at [American] Zoetrope. This meant that Michael’s life had a happy ending. It could easily have ended tragically, without [him] ever knowing that his reputation had been restored and his work was loved. So that was largely down to Scorsese.
TS: Absolutely.
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger opens July 12 at Quad Cinema.
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