“Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger” had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, where it received rave reviews for delving into the films and careers of two of the greatest storytellers the medium as ever known: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. From “Black Narcissus” to “The Red Shoes,” to “A Matter of Life and Death,” to “The Tales of Hoffmann,” their collaboration inspired a generation and is still revered for their daring artistry to this day. Director David Hinton and Executive Producer Thelma Schoonmaker (and Powell’s widow wife) were both kind enough to spend a few minutes answering questions about the documentary, which is now playing at Quad Cinema in New York City and will open in Los Angeles at the Landmark’s Nuart Theater on July 26th with a national rollout to occur afterward.
Daniel Bayer: Welcome everyone to the Next Best Picture podcast, where we are talking with David Hinton, the director of “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” and the legendary, the one and only, the woman, the myth, the legend, Thelma Schoonmaker. Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Thelma Schoonmaker: Happy to be here.
David Hinton: Pleasure.
David, I wanted to start with you because I know that you had previously directed a film about Michael Powell for “The South Bank Show” in 1986. Did you ever think that you would be making another one almost 40 years later?
DH: Oh, certainly not. It came as a great surprise to me, but it’s been a joy to be able to do it. Yeah, so it’s been a wonderful thing to do. And it’s all thanks to Thelma. In fact, she recommended me. I’m glad to say she liked the first film that I made with Michael. So she recommended me as the director for this new one.
TS: I both did. Yes
DH: Anyway, it’s been a wonderful experience.
That’s so wonderful to hear. When this project was brought to you, did the producers have thoughts about the angle of the film, or was it just wanting to do a documentary on Powell and Pressburger?
DH: Well, the initial impetus came from the producer Nick Varley, who ran this distributor called Park Circus, and they distributed classic movies. So he approached Thelma, and she recommended that I be the director. That was how it all got started. But, my first impulse was that if we’re going to do a Powell/Pressburger documentary, then Scorsese ought to present it because there’s nobody who I’d rather hear talking about movies than Scorsese. And I knew that he had this deep love of their movies and this deep, personal connection to Michael, so it was just obvious to me that that would be the right way to do it. And then, once Scorsese agreed to do it, then we were off and running.
TS: But the great thing that David insisted on is that it should just be Scorsese. It should be someone other than me, Emeric Pressburger’s grandsons, or film historians. No. Just Marty. And that is the power of the documentary, I think. And his emotional attachment to the movies and to Michael and Emmerich just builds in the documentary until it becomes so powerful at the end [that] some people are weeping, which is wonderful. But David was so right to just have Marty there. That’s it.
It’s really a wonderful thing because it’s like you’re going to a film school lecture with the coolest professor you could possibly imagine and for a lot cheaper than film school would cost you. But was there ever a concern when you brought this idea forward, David, that that would be too limiting, whether in terms of the film’s scope or in terms of a potential audience? Or did everyone agree that this was the best idea?
DH: I didn’t have to have any fights, no; I mean, I think everyone immediately recognized that this was a good way to do it. I mean, some reviewers have said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice to have heard from Jack Cardiff,” or something like that. But, we’ve all heard from Jack Cardiff already, and I much prefer the sort of intensity and the focus of just focusing on Marty’s relationship with these movies. You know, for me, that was the fascination of doing it.
TS: The thing about Marty when he talks about films is he doesn’t behave like a professor. He doesn’t talk down to you. He engages you with his enthusiasm, and he brings you in. That’s what he likes to do in his movies, too. He doesn’t want to tell people what to think, and so his emotion in this particular documentary is so important because it just gets to people’s hearts. It really does, and it makes them want to see the movies, but it’s because of this way he engages you. He does not, you know, he doesn’t teach you, he doesn’t talk down to you, he brings you in.
Yeah, it’s a conversation in a lot of ways, and that makes it very fun to watch. I’m curious, Thelma, as both a fan of the films and also a family member, being Michael Powell’s wife, what it meant to you that these producers wanted to make a documentary about Michael and Emeric and their films?
TS: Oh, well, I mean, it was a brilliant idea. I knew that right away. I mean, we’d never, we’re so busy making these movies that I’d never thought of doing it, and fortunately, it’s happened in a way that after we finished “Killers of the Flower Moon” that Marty and I could participate with David in this wonderful collaboration. It was always a great idea. But I mean, the thought of trying to do it was, I thought, “Oh my God!” I had no qualms about it, but if I had thought to myself, “I should do it,” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. And David knew where to begin. And he was sent all of what Marty has ever written or spoken about Powell and Pressburger and crafted a beautiful script out of that. And then Marty actually engaged with you a bit on it. Is that right, David, in the actual scriptwriting?
DH: Yeah, one fascinating thing was how meticulous Marty was about what he was going to say. He would be very specific about getting exactly the right word in the middle of one sentence, so he really pored over the script on a word-by-word basis and made sure he only said exactly what he wanted to say. That was one of the fascinating and rewarding things about doing this, but the whole thing was very collaborative. I mean, not just the script but the editing, too. While I was editing with my team in London, Scorsese, and Thelma were also editing sequences in New York, and we were sending things back and forth across the Atlantic, and a lot of what’s in the film, they didn’t take credit for it, Marty and Thelma, but a lot of what’s in the finished film is their edits of certain parts of it.
I love that collaboration across the ocean. It’s beautiful.
DH: Yeah, it was fantastic. It was wonderful for me to be part of it.
You brought up something else that I was going to ask about, which is that Marty’s just not speaking off the cuff. This was scripted, yet it comes across as so natural. What was your process for writing this script for him to speak?
TS: Well, it was Marty’s words that he was working with originally, but Marty is a great actor. That’s why he’s such a great director.
DH: Yeah, he knew. Actually, we benefited from COVID. What happened was that, during COVID, like everybody else, Marty was locked down in his house, and he wasn’t able to work on the things he normally would be working on. So, he devoted time to our documentary, which we wouldn’t otherwise have had. The very first version of the narration was sound only, and it was just him in his house during COVID. He just did a fantastic performance of the script because he had lots of time to really do it line by line in just the way he wanted it done. So a lot of that is in the finished film. The actual stuff where he’s on camera, we did later in the process. Once we knew which sections we wanted on camera, we did those again with Marty in vision. But a lot of the editing was done with a sound-only version.
TS: And he directs himself when he does these things, and when sometimes in the editing room we need a line for an actor, and we just need it for a screening, and we’ll record it with the actor later, he comes into the editing room here, and he sits, and he starts to record the line, and he’ll say, “that was no good, don’t use that. Okay, maybe the first two words of this take are okay. No, I didn’t like that.” He’s directing himself constantly, and he actually did that when we recorded him.
I can imagine. The other thing about this film for me is that there are so many incredible archival photos, footage, and documents that you included that you were able to get incredible access to. Where did you start your research, and how deep did you have to dive to find all this?
DH: I often had to fight with Thelma about that because she just wanted to film the documentary with clips from the movies. Is that fair, Thelma?
TS: Yes, well, I don’t know.
DH: You’re less interested in the archival stuff.
TS: Not really, but anyway, you have an incredible way of using stills, by the way, which I’ve never complimented you on; they’re just remarkable the way you use them. You know, he had a wonderful woman named Sam Dwyer who was doing research, and they found these incredible interviews nobody knew existed that have… you see Emeric’s humor in them. They were Canadian. And the footage of Michael directing by the big stairs was just a wonderful find. But anyway, go on, David.
DH: Well, I would say most of our research began in the British Film Institute. But that’s because Thelma has donated a huge amount of the Michael Powell archive to the British Film Institute, and Emeric Pressburger’s grandsons have donated a huge part of Emeric’s archive to the British Film Institute. So, the BFI has a huge amount of wonderful material. But Thelma also gave us a huge amount of personal stuff, stuff that belongs to her. She was incredibly generous in that respect. She gave us access to things that we would never have had without her generosity. But also, we had the two wonderful archive researchers, Jamie Muir, who did the still image research and Sam Dwyer who did the moving image research. You know, they just trawled the world everywhere. Jamie was in touch with Sylvia Younger, Alfred Younger’s daughter, the set designer. So, you know, we went around [to] the families of a lot of The Archers, digging out everything that they had in their attics and things. We were as comprehensive as you could possibly be in trying to find everything that was visually interesting and related to the movies.
It certainly seems that way, yeah.
TS: Those two Canadian interviews were so, so important -the Canadian interview, and then the [one with] Michael on the set – because Emeric came alive in that one Canadian interview. This was the first I had heard of it. The researchers found it, thank God because it really gave you more of an Emeric feeling than we’ve ever had before.
It’s incredible. Other than that interview that you had found that neither of you had known about, did you learn anything that surprised you while you were conducting your research?
DH: Are you talking to me or Thelma?
Both of you, potentially.
DH: Well, a lot of it was just like stumbling across treasures, like you go to the BFI, and you go into a room, and they bring in a trolley, and you open up the boxes, and there’s Emeric’s diaries during World War II. Well, actually, the one that’s featured in the documentary, there’s a little notebook with his very, very early film ideas from Berlin in the 1930s. He’s writing in this notebook in like three different languages, and that tells you immediately so much about Emeric’s history, that he was born a Hungarian, he had to learn German in order to have an apprenticeship in the movie industry in Germany, and then he fled to France and had to learn French in order to work on French movies. And then he had to flee to England, [and] he had to learn English in order to work on English movies. So, just seeing his notebooks cropped up in different languages tells the whole story of what he went through in order toarrive in England before he met Michael.
TS: There’s a treasure trove of stuff. Michael’s diaries, which I’m working on now, and then letters he wrote to his mother during the whole period that he was becoming a filmmaker. We didn’t need them for this documentary, but I do want to publish them. They’re amazing – the way he describes how he’s becoming a director, but also from the moment he was a child, he was writing things, writing diaries. And he was a remarkable person, and his mother was a remarkable person, thank God. She poured into him a love of art. So there are still mounds of stuff to investigate.
DH: And the home movies were a revelation to me, too. I wasn’t aware of the home movies until I did this documentary, and again, they’re at the BFI, and we were very lucky that last year, when we were completing this film, the BFI was also preparing for their big retrospective on Powell and Pressburger, and as part of their preparation, they restored these home movies.
Incredible! Perfect timing.
DH: So, yeah, that worked out beautifully for us, and there are wonderful things in there, like Emeric when he first arrived in England in the ’30s, and things I could never have guessed existed, so that’s wonderful when you make that kind of discovery.
Oh, that’s always fantastic. I love that kind of primary document research. You can feel that connection to the past and everyone that came before. It’s really incredible. I know we’re coming up on the end of our time together, so I wanted to ask before we take our leave: There are several reasons that you go into in the film why Powell and Pressburger’s films fell out of favor and why they were forgotten as filmmakers for some years, and I’m wondering if either of you can think of any other filmmakers who could have a similar critical reappraisal or comeback in the coming years that we should look out for.
TS: Do you mean current ones, or do you mean historical ones?
Either.
TS: Well, I mean, Michael was very aware of great geniuses [whose] careers had been truncated. One of them was Rex Ingram, who taught him how to direct in the South of France, the Irish-American director who squabbled a lot with Louis B Mayer, a very powerful executive in Hollywood. And Mayer killed him; he just absolutely finished his career as a filmmaker. When Michael went to Hollywood after “Black Narcissus,“ which won an Oscar, and he went to see Rex, it was very painful for him because he couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Rex living not as the powerful, wonderful director he knew, but living in obscurity. Rex gave him a book in which he wrote, “Keep on showing them Mickey,“ and Michael was never without that book. It was always with him. We moved to many, many places in our lives together. He was always with that book; it meant so much to him. And he knew historically – I mean, how many people? Van Gogh, Rembrandt – how many great geniuses have been? The great thing is that he never became bitter. He still kept creating ideas that he wanted to make into films. He never could get them funded, but he never became bitter. He asked me to put on his gravestone “Film Director and Optimist,“ and he was. And to live with an optimist is a great thing, let me tell you.
DH: What was that project, Thelma, that he had at the end of his life, was it “13 Ways to Kill a Poet,“ was that right?
TS: “13 Ways to Kill a Poet,“ which Marty tried to get made, and actually Marty loved the idea because Michael’s idea was that you don’t just die by being killed or something, you die because you lost your talent, or you lost your love, or, Oscar Wilde said, for beauty. That’s why his career was ended, right? Marty thought, “Oh, this is great,“ so he got all kinds of people, including Francis Coppola, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, and everybody else, to pick a poet they wanted to do. And they could never sell it back when we first started being with it. And it’s a great idea.
It certainly sounds like it.
TS: Michael was going to do Edgar Allan Poe, and he wrote the whole script for it. And Marty was going to do Ernie Kovacs, a brilliant early television personality who was very experimental and just had incredible ideas about what television should be, and who was driving up Malibu Highway to get to his home and tuning his radio and drove off the road and died when he was in his 30s. A great loss. So it’s a great idea. It would have been wonderful, all these directors making these movies about poets.
Well, maybe one day it’ll still come true. Thelma, David, that’s all the time we have. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
DH: Thank you so much.
TS: Thank you.
“Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger” is now playing at Quad Cinema in New York City and will open in Los Angeles at the Landmark’s Nuart Theater on July 26th with a national rollout to occur afterward. You can watch the trailer below.
You can follow Dan and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on X @thomaseobrien
