THELMA SCHOONMAKER

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.

It's hard for people to understand editing, I think. It's absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay, and you have to form it - this raw, unedited, very long footage.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

I don't think you can be a great director without knowing a lot about editing.

When you're a film-maker, sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity.

'Silence,' I think, was the hardest, because it's so different from everything we've done before and required very delicate handling and trying to find the right meditative pace.

One day, I read an extremely vague ad looking for someone interested in working in film. Seeing as I loved watching films, I replied, and I found myself working for this guy who did his own personal editing of scenes from Antonioni and Fellini films.

As you can imagine, between Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese, I've had quite a rich life!

The studios are nervous on every movie. It never ends, because Marty's movies are so unusual. He doesn't repeat himself, so they don't know what to expect. We have to fight hard to keep them from being ruined. Film students can't believe that when I tell them, because they think, 'Well, it's Martin Scorsese.'

I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, 'Oh really? Why don't you go try - it's not easy.'

'Raging Bull' was just a dream to work on, but it took a lot of work to get all those fights to work right and incorporate them properly into the story.

'Raging Bull' was badly received at first. It took 10 years for it to be recognised.

I think everyone loves 'The Departed.' That was a movie that had a lot of problems structurally. And we had to battle with it. Fight. Experiment. Try different things. And I think finally we hit it.

You have to have a great director to make a great movie.

I love being around great artists, and I've been around a few of them.

I'm not a big believer in fate, but, boy, I've had a lot of lucky breaks.

I'm very lucky. Most of my friends wait long times for jobs and also don't get the chance to work on 20 films, like I have, with someone like Scorsese. I love working for him. I just would never - I can't imagine working for anybody else.

Throwing things out is one of the most difficult and important things you ever have to do.

Ballet dancers really know how to enter a room.

I never thought I would get married: I'm such a workaholic.

Editing is really like plumbing a good deal of the time. You put two things together, and a current runs through it.

All great directors or anyone who has a strong vision like Scorsese needs to have a lot of support around them. I think from the very beginning - when we met each other - he realised he could trust me to do what was right for his movies.

When you're in a movie with an audience, you can feel where a film is dragging. People start to move. They fidget. You need that perspective. To give it a cold eye.

I don't think enough directors know enough about editing.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.