Legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker ("Raging Bull", "Goodfellas", "The Wolf of Wall Street"), on her Lifetime Achievement Award in Venice and working with Martin Scorsese. www.moviezine.se
Interesting when she says "Avoid cliches and avoid sentimentality," cause I get the feeling she's saying, "Don't always make your characters come off as sympathetic," which makes sense considering thr type of characters Scorsese likes to explore.
She basically said to avoid cliches, that is if something has been presented before in a certain manner, avoid doing that same thing. Same thing with sentimentality, if you are sentimental, you narrow down yourself to the old ways, so there is no room for creativity. In a way that becomes cliche too Atleast this is my interpretation of a genius' words
I reckon she meant that too many films often force a specific emotion onto the viewer rather than present a situation and let the viewer experience and digest the information by him/herself. avoiding "sentimentality" is avoiding cliches such as when a music is too obvious in the kind of emotion it's trying to make the audience feel, and often comes off as phoney because it feels so artificial. This also applies to dialogue and pretty much any other area of the film. When she talked about putting "emotion" or "humanity" in the films she's likely refering to just telling human stories, with flawed characters, etc, a story that would spark some sort of an emotional reaction in the audience (very different than forcing an emotion onto them). I mean when we think of raging bull and that iconic music comes to mind, yeah sure it's emotional, maybe even depressing, but it's so iconic and unique to this particular film in our minds that it doesn't come off as a cliched souless way to force us to feel something, the story doesn't end with the character learning some important lesson and reforming his life, etc
