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" From the moment I met Martin Scorsese in 1962, he educated me about the films that had taught him so much about filmmaking. He had been deeply affected, even as a child, by great films that stretched his mind and struck into his heart, and he was eager to share them with friends and people who worked with him or with actors who were in his films. "

" It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't. "

Thelma Schoonmaker

Someone

Who

Right

" Even though my parents are American, I spent my whole childhood and adolescence abroad. "

" 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. "

" I do think there's not enough film history being taught and appreciated. Maybe it's being taught, but I've heard from professors that young kids don't want to look at black-and-white movies. And that's 85 years of film history, with masterpiece after masterpiece. "

" I have a great relationship and the highest respect for Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. But working with De Niro has been simply incredible. While I was editing 'Raging Bull,' I was literally unable to take my eyes off him. "

" I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first. "

" It's part of your job always as an editor: you always have to drop stuff. "

" The studio was very nervous about 'Raging Bull.' "

" My job is so wonderful. "

Thelma Schoonmaker

Job

Wonderful

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

" I hope films will be somehow preserved and seen by as many people as possible in the future. There are endless treasures for audiences to discover, if only we can keep them from disappearing. "

" With Technicolor restorations, it's about getting the color right. "

" If I hadn't met Scorsese, I would never have become a filmmaker. He has taught me everything I know about editing and has given me the best job in the world. "

Thelma Schoonmaker

Know

Best

" 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.' "

" There's a great deal of mystery in film editing, and that's because you're not supposed to see a lot of it. You're supposed to feel that a film has pace and rhythm and drama, but you're not necessarily supposed to be worried about how that was accomplished. "

" I won the Oscar for 'Raging Bull' for those fight sequences. If you look at those fight sequences, those were so incredibly storyboarded and shot in an incredible way - that is the conception a good director has to bring. "

" Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he's an editor himself - we cut together. It means he's constantly thinking about my problems while he's filming. "

" When we were cutting 'Raging Bull,' Martin Scorsese was watching 'The Films of Hoffmann' on a 16-mm print over and over and over again. "

Thelma Schoonmaker

Over

Watching

" 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. "

" Cutting improvisation is really hard, because things don't match, and you end up with some bad cuts sometimes. But we'd rather have the bad cuts and the great improv. "

" Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you're frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again. "

" Ballet dancers really know how to enter a room. "

" Doing 3D on 'Hugo' was a big learning curve for me, but fun! "

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

" Some young filmmakers, unfortunately, don't have the ability to resist attempts to maybe cut their films down unfairly. "

" I knew nothing about editing when I met Mr. Scorsese... Through a series of weird events, I ended up at New York University, and there was Martin Scorsese, and he had some troubles with a film I was able to fix. That's the only reason I became a filmmaker. "

" The difference between a film that ends up three hours and a film that is envisioned as three hours is that it's written that way. "

" In 'Casino,' there was this scene where Bob De Niro tape-records Sharon Stone's phone call. Then he asks her about where she's going, and he catches her in a lie. It was a great scene, especially for Bob's work, but we found that, in light of the whole film, it wasn't needed. "

" I have the best job in the world. "