Thelma Schoonmaker: 'His Heart was Like the Sun' She's worked as an editor on every one of Scorsese's feature films since, winning Oscars for her work on Raging Bull (1980) and The Departed (2006). He says I pull the humanity out of his films - well, he puts it in there! He trusts me completely with his work and he knows I'll die to get it right. In Schoonmaker's Manhattan office - a cheerful warren bedecked with old movie posters and boxes and boxes of reel - she talks about the tribulations that beset Colonel Blimp's filming. London was being bombed in 1942 and the Ministry of Defence erroneously feared the film would depict the British Army as foolish. So - to use Schoonmaker's term - they "freaked out." Their attempts to stymie the film included refusing to release Laurence Olivier from military duty. The lesser-known Roger Livesey was cast in the title role instead - a good thing, thinks Schoonmaker, who thinks Olivier "would have made it probably a more bitter film." Roger Livesey's character is very much about Michael [Powell]. He was Michael's alter-ego, like John Wayne was for Ford, because of his kind of bouncy optimism - there's this lovely commitment to life. Similarly, they had wanted to cast Wendy Hiller, who was then hugely famous, but she became pregnant. "So," says Schoonmaker, "he took a gamble on this beautiful young woman who can act like crazy." This was Deborah Kerr, just 22, who plays three different women throughout the colonel's life - the forthright Edith Hunter, his devoted wife Barbara Wynne and finally, his plucky driver, Angela "Johnny" Cannon. Schoonmaker's favourite scene, that one that always starts her sobbing, involves the colonel parting with Hunter in Berlin. As he leaves her to marry his German friend, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff [Anton Walbrook] he realises, in that instant, that he's in love with her. Oh my God, what a moment. And it's all three shots, right? But it's the look on their faces. She calculates she's seen it 50 times now, none the less: "Marty [Scorsese] and I can watch it over and over again, we never tire of it. There's a letter from Michael to his mother saying he thinks this might be one of the greatest films ever made. They could feel it. There was just something about it. It's got tremendous sadness in it, which Marty describes as an elegiac sadness, but you don't come out of it feeling devastated, you feel the opposite, and I think that's a miracle, to make a film that way. It's hard to see how anyone could object to a film like this, but Churchill did, with a distaste so extreme as to be almost comic. He seemed to think it mocked the British Army and - Schoonmaker lowers her voice a little - "he also might have felt... in his size he looked a bit like a Blimp, the cartoon character." He even took it upon himself to visit Walbrook in his dressing room when he was on stage, to berate him for making the movie. The first time Schoonmaker saw Colonel Blimp in its proper Technicolor version was also the first time she met Powell. She remembers him being very quiet at the screening. He said he was remembering all the people in the film. Including Deborah Kerr, with whom he was madly in love. It was a very touching moment. Soon after this, she and Scorsese were cutting Raging Bull in Scorsese's apartment, reels of film hung all over the bathroom, when Powell accepted an invitation to dinner. So there he was and I was just stunned by him. There was a love of life on his face that was extraordinary. I fell in love with him immediately. I was 45. He was 74. Pretty big gap. But it didn't matter at all, he had the heart of a 16 year-old. Powell would call late at night to talk to Scorsese but if he was busy on another call, Powell would end up chatting to his editor instead. And did she flirt with him? "No!" she protests, laughing, a bit scandalised. At that point I didn't think he had any... I didn't think anything would come of it... It wasn't until they both went to LA for the 1980 Academy Awards, where Schoonmaker won an Oscar for her work on Raging Bull, that their courtship began. By the time we left there it was quite clear that we wanted to be together. And then we were due to start shooting here [New York] so I asked him to come stay with me, which he did. Scorsese and his then-wife, Isabella Rossellini, oblivious to their friends" burgeoning romance, heard about the arrangement and Rossellini, assuming Schoonmaker must be finding it terribly uncomfortable, immediately suggested Powell come stay with her and Scorsese instead. "So I had to tell her," says Schoonmaker, ..." well actually, this is awkward, but we're living together," and she shoots up her eyebrows in an imitation of Rossellini overcompensating for her surprise with effusion: " "Oh! Wonderful!" she said. "Wonderful!."" Scorsese might have taken a moment longer to adjust to the idea of his idol and editor as a couple. He was shocked, she says, "because he was used to having complete control of my time. But, you know," she smiles, "if I said at seven o'clock I've got to go home and cook dinner for Michael Powell he'd let me go!" And presumably he might not have been quite so accommodating if she were married to someone other than his hero of cinema? Exactly! But he loved Michael so much. And it was wonderful for Michael to be around him and for Marty to have him around. Scorsese had been fanatical about Powell and Pressburger's films since the age of around eight or nine and every actor that comes on to his set, says Schoonmaker, is bombarded with Powell and Pressburger DVDs. She describes Scorsese's own all-consuming drive to make movies as similar to that of the ballerina heroine of The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic which she and he completed restoring in 2009. You can't help yourself. There's something inside that is demanding that you make this work of art, it's not in your control - that was the way he was. I was not. I wasn't driven to make movies until I met him. Then he infected me. Which is why he's such a great teacher because he doesn't talk down to you, he excites you. Scorsese has been an indefatigable champion, both bringing Powell and Pressburger's films to a US audience, and, with Schoonmaker, spearheading the restoration of their catalogue. Colonel Blimp is the most recent film to be restored and Schoonmaker, now 72, says the two of them will just keep working their way through Powell and Pressburger's oeuvre, restoring every film, "until we get to the end!." She adds: "It's a great joy because we get to see them over and over again and then launch them and see people's reactions." Peeping Tom, the 1960 thriller about a serial killer that Powell made with Leo Marks, effectively ended Powell's career. He took a great leap forward when he made it and at the time it was considered very shocking. The problem with it was the central part, played by Karlheinz Böhm, a wonderful Austrian - you feel sympathy for him even though he's a murderer. And that, the critics Could. Not. Handle," she says, with emphasis. The distributor withdrew it immediately. Michael had these great ambitious ideas about movies he wanted to make with sets by Matisse, music by Stravinsky, starring Orson Welles... great, great ideas that never got made. But he never stopped believing in film, dreaming of films, writing them. And never became bitter, which I think is one of the great triumphs of his life. Towards the end, he poured energy into his autobiographies. He would dictate into a little recorder and then on the weekends - our favourite time - I would transcribe that and read it back to him and then we would edit it together. She talks wistfully about the outlandish breakfasts he'd make them. He never used recipes, he'd take a banana and an egg or something and make something just sensational, and then we would work all day - probably never get out of our bathrobes - on the book. He was the most wonderful man. He would wake up and just instantly be engaged with life. His heart was like the sun. Every second of living with him was just..." she trails off, gestures helplessly and exhales an "ah!." He died in 1990 and is buried in Avedon, Gloucestershire, in the graveyard of the same church they married in. His gravestone is inscribed, as he asked of her, with the words "film director and optimist." The digitally remastered edition of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray for £15.99 from telegraph.co.uk/cdanddvd or call 0844 871 1519