PAIR OF ACES

MADE IN ENGLAND David Hinton’s Powell and Pressburger doc calls on Martin Scorsese…

Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. A new doc on the filmmaking duo is hosted by Martin Scorsese (below)

ALAMY; GETTY

Audacity and ambivalence’ are the two words that documentarian David Hinton uses to sum up the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. ‘It’s the audacity of the ideas, the ambivalence of the characters; there’s always this complexity.’

In 1986, Hinton directed an episode of The South Bank Show that explored Powell and his string of idiosyncratic, rapturous, boundary-pushing classics: A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes… The visionary director, then in his 80s and ostracised from the film industry since 1960 serial killer movie Peeping Tom caused outrage, hit it off with the 30-something Hinton. The two remained friends until Powell’s death in 1990. Little wonder, then, that Powell’s wife, Thelma Schoonmaker – the editor of every Martin Scorsese picture since Raging Bull – suggested Hinton to helm feature-length Powell and Pressburger doc Made in England.

Naturally, Scorsese hosts it. ‘Over the years, Scorsese has said a huge amount about Powell and Pressburger,’ says Hinton, who also met Scorsese, through Powell, in the 80s. ‘Marty’s got this full-time archivist, Marianne Bower. So I got her to send me everything that Scorsese had ever said about Powell and Pressburger! And from that, I was able to start shaping the film.’

There was a constant back and forth. Scorsese adopted a deeply personal approach, attaching his own life and movies to P&P’s output (check out the startling comparison between The Red Shoes’ impresario Boris Lermontov and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle) as he discusses how the films have changed for him as he’s grown older. Scorsese would ‘worry about a single word in the middle of a sentence’, says Hinton, and then recorded his script in lockdown, so that Made in England could be built around it. When Scorsese finally sat down to record his commentary to camera, it was done in two days.

‘I was able to start shaping the film around Scorsese’s quotes’

DAVID HINTON

It is, of course, a joy: passionate, insightful, affecting. And equally glorious is the archive material, peppered with previously hidden treasures such as Pressburger and Powell on set of A Matter of Life and Death, and giving a rare joint interview for Canadian TV. ‘Obviously, one great resource was the BFI because both the estates have placed a huge amount of material there,’ says Hinton. ‘The BFI National Archive has all of Emeric’s diaries, his old notebooks, the pencil drafts of the scripts. And Michael and Emeric’s home movies, which were restored last year.

They’re a revelation.’ To quote a character in The Red Shoes, who’s asked to define ballet: ‘One might call it the poetry of motion.’ The same can be said of P&P’s movies, and of this extraordinary doc that does them justice.