How Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker Reworked and Reframed “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker, now 83, is a graceful, generous and fascinating interview subject as she discusses Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

“The love story is the basic thing that Marty decided to focus on,” she told Matt Feury of The Rough Cut podcast. “When the idea about the film changed, because Leo DiCaprio decided he would like to play Ernest instead of the role of the FBI man [Jesse Plemons]. That was a dramatic change you can imagine in the script, and they were still working on that as we were shooting. Lily Gladstone and DiCaprio were working with Marty to create scenes that would show the evolving love story.”

She describes how the film teases out the complex character of Ernest, as someone who seems both to have genuine affection for his Osage wife, and yet is capable of facilitating murder.

“The audience enter this world and learn and experience things through Ernest, but we’re not really aligned with him because we only get a true sense of who he is, the atrocities and the violence, over time.”

The opening scene, for instance, depicts Robert De Niro’s character sizing up his nephew, much as the audience is.

“The way we worked on the rhythm of that scene, was to make sure that we sometimes paused for a few seconds, more than you normally would. Because you see that De Niro’s trying to make up his mind. What questions should I ask next to find out if this guy’s going to be a tool? As Ernest is. It’s obvious in the film that he doesn’t read, for example. He’s been horribly educated, whereas his uncle is much better educated.”

She and Scorsese tend to screen the movies they work on in multiple different cuts, fine-tuning in reaction to select audiences, as she explained to Craig McLean at Esquire.

“With our movies, we do rough cuts — sometimes as many as 12,” she said. Those cuts-in-progress are screened for people in her and Scorsese’s New York and Hollywood inner circles. “Then we start opening up to people we don’t know. Then we go to bigger audiences. And we learn from what we’re hearing, and then we do another cut.

“Then we screen again, and then we do another… we’re very lucky. A lot of editors aren’t given that kind of time, which I think they should be.”

Schoonmaker explains to Art of The Cut, “The fact that somebody who doesn’t know the movie is in the room with you affects you deeply. You’re very very conscious of people moving, or do they laugh? Or don’t they laugh at the right place? Or the wrong place? How are they feeling afterwards? Of course, we do talk to people at length afterwards to find out how they’re reacting.”

Sometimes there are big changes in direction — as was the case for Killers of the Flower Moon. “We usually do move things around when editing, except for Goodfellas where everything was perfect right from the start,” she told Feury. “That movie was like riding a horse. It knew where it wanted to go. We dropped only one shot. That film was just there.”

Honoring the Osage and Recognizing Powerful Scenes

Killers of the Flower Moon is dedicated to the memory of musician and composer Robbie Robertson, someone who’s had a hand in the music in various ways for many of Scorsese’s films since he recorded The Last Waltz (featuring The Band’s last concert) in 1976

Schoonmaker says the score’s throbbing baseline was something that Robertson came up with. “This culture, as you see in the last shot, and the dances that they do, are very sacred, you have to be invited to them, they’re not tourist things. So the drums are incredibly important. The Osage actually consider the drum a person as they do the pipe.

“So I think that Robbie being half Mohawk, Marty definitely wanted an indigenous person to do the music, and felt that this would drive the movie all the way through to the end. You know, it also is probably blood running through your veins. The fact that he continuously employed it meant that in his mind, he was giving it to Marty as a way to move the film along.”

In addition to the scoring, Scorsese wanted to emphasize the indigeneity of the characters. He did so in part by including several pivotal scenes in which Osage is spoken but no subtitles are provided.

Schoonmaker tells Steve Hullfish in an episode of The Art of The Cut, “There are many times in the movie where you do hear the Osage purely, which is a very, very good decision which I resisted at first. Not hearing it by itself. You don’t need to know what he’s saying in the wedding ceremony, for example, you know, he’s marrying them, right?”

However, in a late scene in which DiCaprio and Gladstone’s characters are arguing, Scorsese again opted for no subtitles, which Schoonmaker says “was a very brave and correct decision.”

Although Schoonmaker and Scorsese have worked on many projects together over the years, her instincts don’t always mesh with his, at least initially.

Scorsese knows, she says, he “could trust me to do what was right for the movie, that we weren’t going to have ego battles in the editing room about who’s right and who’s wrong.

“So when there ever is a really major disagreement, which is rare, I am always more than happy to show him what he has asked for. And then if I want to show him options, then I show him options. And he’s very happy to look at those. And then we’ll decide which one is best. But it’s never a battle.”

But, she says, “There’s never a problem when something’s that powerful. There’s never a question” of what to do, referring to DiCaprio’s performance in the courtroom scene.

For maximum impact, Scorsese instructed Schoonmaker to “cut away only when we absolutely have to. I want to just hold on Leo for the entire duration of the testimony because he is so brilliant.

“And he is. So we only cut away when the prosecutor points to De Niro and says he is now talking about this man. And that switch pans over to De Niro because Leo has just incriminated him.”

(And by the way — Schoonmaker is adamant that the film should be viewed in one sitting, with no pauses (even at home) to fully appreciate these cuts, regardless of the 206-minute runtime.

Dazed Digital’s Nick Chen reports that Schoonmaker was incensed to hear some theaters screened the film with an intermission: “That’s really horrible. There’s a build. It’s very important. There’s a long build that you have to feel. If you cut it, you’re not going to feel that! Don’t pause it!”)

Powell Pressburger’s Oeuvre

Her custodianship with Scorsese of the film œuvre of Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus — with Emeric Pressburger — and Peeping Tom), her late husband, crops up time and time again. The BFI in London recently held a career retrospective including newly minted versions of films like The Red Shoes, and Schoonmaker is a more than able commentator.

She tells Feury, “Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger used to do what they called place little bombs in a movie little things that you may just barely notice that explode later. That is something that Marty would have noticed in his, you know, devouring of the Powell Pressburger films.”

“Marty says The Red Shoes are in his DNA,” notes Schoonmaker to Esquire. It’s a film that she first saw aged 12 while living on the Caribbean island of Aruba, in an “American colony” created by Standard Oil.

READ MORE: Thelma Schoonmaker on the Triumph and Tribulation of Working With Scorsese and Preserving a Cinematic Legacy (Esquire)

Returning to the U.S., aged 15, she tuned into a “wonderful TV show called Million Dollar Movie, where they ran one film nine times a week.” She later learned of another avid viewer: “Marty would [try to] watch a Powell and Pressburger movie [all] nine times unless his mother said: ‘If you don’t turn that off, I’m going to start screaming.’

That’s because, with the rise of realism in British cinema — “kitchen sink dramas” such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963) — the films of Powell and Pressburger fell out of fashion in the UK. They were viewed as conservative, colonial, old-fashioned.

Key in that canon is Powell’s transgressive horror from 1960, Peeping Tom. In 1979 Scorsese arranged for Peeping Tom to be shown at that year’s New York Film Festival, and then paid for its redistribution in U.S. cinemas.

To mark the moment, Scorsese held a dinner in New York in Powell’s honor. He invited along the editor he’d hired to cut his latest movie, Raging Bull, partly on the advice of Powell.

“I was just so struck by Michael,” recalls Schoonmaker, who had last worked with Scorsese on his debut feature, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door.

“He was so extraordinary. He came back to talk to me — I was editing Raging Bull in a bedroom, and we had film racks in the bathtub.”

That was how Schoonmaker and Powell met. They married in 1984. He died a decade later. “Marty gave me the best job in the world and the best husband in the world!”