Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
anymore," and he convinces her he does. They say to each other, in Osage, "I love you," and they touch noses, which is the Osage way of expressing love. During the intimate moment, he improvises, and they laugh, and he says, "You're going to wake up the kids." CineMontage: With your long history of cutting both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro at dierent parts of their careers, how beneficial was that in capturing their specific styles and emotional ranges? Schoonmaker: They are both so dif- ferent in this movie from what I expected, p a r t i c u l a r ly L e o. H e i s w i l l i n g to p l ay someone who is not very smart, who's lazy, but who loves this woman. That's a big departure from the roles that he normally plays. I was astonished to see how skillfully he was able to switch into this kind of a part, and how he was absolutely adamant about staying in it. He never wanted to make him- self look glamorous or romantic. He wanted to develop that part as it should have been. DeNiro is also very different in this. I couldn't believe his voice. He came up with this wonderful voice that shows a bit of age, but it's got a very interesting character. He said at the press conference at Cannes that he really didn't understand his char- acter. He played it beautifully, in spite of the fact that he couldn't really personally identify with such a thing. There are many people in films like that, characters who are double-sided. It's hard to handle, like "Peeping Tom" (1960), my husband Michael Powell's film, where you feel compassion for this man who is killing people. My husband felt this man had been tortured and abused as a child, and he can't help himself. The compassion the critics were feeling when they first saw the movie made them so uncomfortable. They felt they were guilty of supporting his crimes. CineMontage: Scorsese has been criticized sometimes for the female rep- resentation in his films. Lily Gladstone is the soul of the film. What was your process like with her? Schoonmaker: She is such a wonderful actress, a genius. She's a Blackfoot who learned the Osage language. The woman who trained her in Osage said, "She sound- ed like my mother." I noticed sometimes that even after Marty said, "Cut," she would stay in charac- ter for the two or three feet it takes for the film to run out. This is a part to die for. She is the soul of the movie, her dignity, and her willingness to compromise for the man she chooses to be with. She's attracted to him, and he's attracted to her. I didn't have to do anything to make her performance any better than it already is. CineMontage: The FBI investigation is more pronounced in the book. How much did you play around with how you wanted to introduce that element? Schoonmaker: Marty had already had to make big changes once Leo decided he didn't want to play the FBI agent. That work was going on even a little bit during the shooting, particularly building the love story. That it was going on during shooting was a little unusual, but it's happened be- fore. We experimented with placing scenes around the love story, to make sure the love story was strengthened. With editing, you do move things around. CineMontage: Did you watch the early '20s films of D.W. Grith, John Ford, or Erich von Stroheim to get a feel for how things moved back then? S c h o o n m a ke r: M a r t y i s a l re a dy s o familiar with that period of movies that it's sort of in his brain already. I didn't have to look at those movies. I knew a lot of the ones that mean the most to him. CineMontage: The movie was shot on 35mm film. What impact, if any, did that have on your work? Schoonmaker: We do make the tran- sition to digital right away for editing purposes. We had very high-resolution footage all the way through when we were editing. So it wasn't a matter of us having to go back when we did, for example, with an optical visual effect. We didn't have to go back and get the negative because we already had high-quality resolution nega- tive, which meant things were faster and we could manipulate things even more in the editing room. We created some visual effects in the editing room, and that was because we were shooting at a very high resolution. That was really different from previous films. We have this high-resolution element for the final. CineMontage: How do you and Scorsese resolve any dierences you might have? Schoonmaker: There is never an ego battle or anything like Marty used to have in his early days in Hollywood when he was changing the ways movies are made. If we disagree, I show him four or five options of another way to go, and he will look at it, and we will decide together which is better. It's not ever a problem. Sometimes we may want to screen one way, then try screening another way to gauge audience reactions when we debrief them afterwards. We settle these things in the early editing. He trained me. He taught me everything I know about editing. Our sensibilities are the same. CineMontage: With Netflix on "The Irishmen," and now Apple with this film, you are working outside the traditional commercial restraints. Has that been liberating artistically? Schoonmaker: It's the nature of the subject matter, like the long slow builds of how De Niro's character in "The Irishman" evolved to the absolutely devastating last scene, where he's aging and all alone. That's what he's earned from how he ran his life. So that build was very, very important. Similarly with this film, it's a big story, and it needed the length. Most people tell me they have no problem at all with it. So they feel gripped by the movie right away and stay that way. CineMontage: Criterion has recently issued 4K editions of "Mean Streets" (1985), "After Hours" (1985), and your husband's key film, "The Red Shoes" Love CONTINUED FROM PAGE 44 74 C I N E M O N T A G E