Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 film, about a man who has to convince the angels that he deserves to remain on Earth, has a special place in the heart of Scorsese’s Oscar-winning editor – not least because she married its director

One of the most romantic movies ever made began its life in a government office. In 1945, the Ministry of Information suggested to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who had recently scored a success with A Canterbury Tale, that they might make a film to soothe fractious Anglo-American relations. Although Brits and GIs fought alongside each other in the war, American soldiers stationed in the UK had gained the unwelcome reputation of being “oversexed, overpaid and over here”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thelma Schoonmaker with her Oscar, in 2007. Photograph: Jamie Rector/EPA

In response, Powell and Pressburger produced a timeless classic: the romantic, comic, tragicomic, Technicolor fantasy A Matter of Life and Death, a new 4K restoration of which is released in cinemas this week. In the famous opening scene, David Niven plays RAF pilot Peter Carter, whose plane has been shot down over the channel. As he faces his certain end, he shares his last moments with June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator in England, who talks him through the fall. By some cosmic chance, Peter survives the crash, and meets June on the beach. As they fall rapidly in love in a bucolic English village, the bureaucrats of Heaven panic over the glitch in their numbers caused by Peter cheating death. While Peter recovers from his injuries on Earth, he must also defend his right to live by putting his case to the celestial authorities. To do so, he needs an advocate in the afterlife, who can win his case by asserting the power of love.

War, love and weirdness: A Matter of Life and Death – 70 years on Read more

As with Peter, so with the film itself. And the foremost advocate for A Matter of Life and Death and its dazzling director Michael Powell is Thelma Schoonmaker, the Oscar-winning editor best known for her long, brilliant collaboration with Martin Scorsese. Scorsese, she says, had introduced her to the films that Powell made with Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger while they were working on Raging Bull in 1980. “Scorsese had helped with the rediscovery of Powell and Pressburger,” says Schoonmaker. “He brought them to America and began, along with Ian Christie and Kevin Gough-Yates at the British Film Institute, this resurrection of the whole canon of their work.” One fateful evening, Schoonmaker went to dinner with Scorsese and Powell and was immediately stricken. “He was just stunning,” she says. “I’d never met anyone like him. He had this incredible face. He didn’t say much but when he said something it was startling and original.”

A friendship developed via late-night phonecalls in the editing suite – Powell would ring for Scorsese, but, says Schoonmaker, “I would take the call first” – and blossomed into romance when the two spent time together in LA. Powell was working with Francis Ford Coppola, and the Raging Bull team were in town for the Oscars. “So it was all Marty,” she says. “He not only gave me the best job in the world, he gave me the best husband in the world, and the happiest years of my life.”

When Schoonmaker and Powell met, she was in her 40s and he was in his 70s. They married in 1984, for love, but also for his legacy – Powell was no longer making films but he was working tirelessly on his autobiography, A Life in Movies. Schoonmaker became Powell’s executor and now spends “every second I have that is not working for Marty on anything I can do to promote the work of Powell and Pressburger.”

A Matter of Life and Death is particularly special to Schoonmaker. “It was Michael’s favourite. That was very important to me and as I got to know more about him and saw the film more and more with people I really understood there’s something very deep about Michael in it. Michael felt strongly that love is about sacrifice and sacrifice is about love. And that’s what you see in this movie when Kim Hunter steps on the stairway to save David Niven’s life. It’s such a beautiful moment and I always burst into tears … he would have done it for me and I would have done it for him.”

Not only that, A Matter of Life and Death, with its comic tone, literary allusions and fanciful style, was an opportunity for Powell to let his creativity rip. The movie’s earthbound scenes are shot in luscious Technicolor, while the afterlife is black-and-white. Connecting the two worlds is a monumental escalator. Peter is visited on earth by a very arch kind of angel, Marius Goring, as a rouged trickster called Conductor 71 who exclaims “We are starved for Technicolor up there!” Even the village doctor is a speed-addicted motorcyclist played by Roger Livesey, who spies on his neighbours with a camera obscura. “He could create heaven and earth. He could stop time,” says Schoonmaker. “When you’re a film-maker sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity. And here he could do anything he wanted.”

As a film-maker, Schoonmaker values the craft that went into this vision. She tells me with undimmed excitement about how cinematographer Jack Cardiff used Technicolor film stripped of its dyes for the black-and-white sequences, so that the editor could seamlessly dissolve between monochrome and full-colour images. “If you’ve ever seen a nitrate print of this film it has a beautiful pearly quality … Thank God for Jack.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seamless dissolves from colour to black and white … A Matter of Life and Death. Photograph: Ronald Grant

We discuss the editing of the motorcycle crash, which is so astonishing on-screen, and Schoonmaker praises for its economy. “If you look at it, it is just very simple shots,” she says. “A hubcap rolling away. A little burst of flame. It is absolutely made of the simplest things. And it is so effective.”

We return to this subject a lot, how simply the film is constructed, even at its most audacious. Although Schoonmaker uses digital editing software now, she worries about its effect on the industry, not least because her assistants no longer have to be in the same room with her, learning how the edit is made (“I make a thousand decisions a day”). She laments the rapid, repetitive cutting she sees in commercials: “It’s down to two frames now. Almost. Or one. There’s nowhere else you can go after that.”

For Schoonmaker, editing can be as much about delaying the cut, waiting for people to have an emotional response to the image, as she did in Scorsese’s Silence, and as Powell and his editor Reginald Mills did in Life and Death. “Marty keeps saying whatever happened to the shot? The beautiful shots of “The Room” at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey that hold for such an unusually long time and are mesmerising because of the framing and the content and the mood Kubrick creates with the studied pace of the sequence.”

What concerns Schoonmaker most is that young film-makers may not even have seen 2001. “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.” Schoonmaker and Scorsese famously have the vintage movie channel TCM on in the background while they edit (“he’ll sometimes say, ‘Oh look, there’s this great thing that’s just going to happen’”), and are devotees of film history. “That’s why Marty is such a good director,” she says, “because he learned from looking at all those movies.”

No surprise then that the rerelease of A Matter of Life and Death is so important to Schoonmaker. This was the film that, she remembers, British audiences requested most often when she was promoting Powell’s memoir after his death in 1990. “Young men would come up … and say to me how much this movie meant to them.” Just like Conductor 71, we’re starved for Technicolor.

A Matter Of Life And Death is in UK & Irish cinemas from 8th December