“How do you replace Robert De Niro’s voice?” veteran film editor Thelma Schoonmaker remarked this evening during a lengthy Q&A session at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
The three-time Oscar-winner, who appeared at Edinburgh to discuss the work of her late husband, Michael Powell, used the rhetorical question to illustrate what she described as her frustration with the practice of sound dubbing on international film releases.
“It’s just impossible,” she said, answering her question.
“One of my problems as an editor is the dubbing that goes on when you send a film to Germany or France,” she continued, describing the practice as “painful” for her as an editor.
Schoonmaker’s remarks were part of a wider story she was telling the audience in Edinburgh about Michael Powell’s impassioned belief in fostering a global cinema community that made films for an international audience.
“Somebody once asked him, What do you think about the British film industry now? And he said, Why should there be a British film industry? We should make films for the world,” Schoonmaker said of Powell.
She continued: “He felt that in the silent era, you could send a film to Japan, because silent films had a card in between shots telling you what had just happened. The Japanese could just translate that card, and the film remained exactly the same. Whereas when sound came in, Michael felt we lost something.”
Schoonmaker described Powell as a consummate optimist who never grew weary despite the difficulties he faced trying to raise cash for projects from 1960 onward, following the disastrous reception to his now-seminal feature Peeping Tom.
“He never became bitter, which I think is amazing. I think it’s one of the great victories of his life that he never became bitter,” Schoonmaker said of her late husband. “He kept on writing ideas for films and tried to sell them. He had almost 100 projects that he drove all over Europe trying to get made.”
Powell died in 1990 in England after living in the U.S. for many years with Schoonmaker, whom he married in 1984. The pair was initially introduced by Martin Scorsese, who was largely responsible for igniting contemporary interest in the work Powell created with his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger.
Powell and Pressburger collaborated on more than a dozen features, many of which are considered to be some of the best films ever produced on British shores. The list includes The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and Black Narcissus.
“Not one British director came to his funeral,” Schoonmaker said of the time after Powell’s death. “Bernardo Bertolucci came, and Martin Scorsese flew across the Atlantic to be there and threw the first club of dirt on Michael’s grave.”
She added: “Their friendship was remarkable.”
The Edinburgh Film Festival runs until August 20.