‘Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA’: Thelma Schoonmaker on her life and work with Michael Powell and his friend Marty

Thelma Schoonmaker with a pair of red shoes from Powell and Pressburger’s film, which have been lent to the BFI exhibition by Martin Scorsese. Photograph: Tim Whitby

Thelma Schoonmaker was 15 when she first watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a wartime classic by the British film-making duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one day after school.

“It just so happened to be on, but I never forgot it. It reigned in my brain,” she says wistfully, almost 70 years later. “I had no idea it was made by the man I would later marry.”