Director Martin Scorsese Talks 'Killers of the Flower Moon' and His Body of Work

Opening Goodfellas’).

What is the plot of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’?

Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ tracks the suspicious murders of of the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight after oil was discovered underneath their land.

Who is in the cast of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’?

• Leonardo DiCaprio ('The Wolf of Wall Street') as Ernest Burkhart
• Raging Bull') as William King Hale
• Lily Gladstone ('First Cow') as Mollie Burkhart
• The Power of the Dog') as Tom White
• Dances with Wolves') as Lizzie Q
• Bombshell') as Prosecutor Leaward
• The Whale') as W. S. Hamilton

Robbie Robertson.

You can read about the press conference below or click on the video player above to watch excerpts from the interview.

Scorsese on Accurately Representing the Osage Community

The iconic director began by discussing how he and his production team went about accurately representing the Osage community in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’

Martin Scorsese: Well at first, it was very important for me, as soon as I saw the book, and I said, "Well, if you want me to be involved with anything that has to do with indigenous people and Native Americans, I had an experience in the 70s where I began to become aware of the nature of what their situation was and still is." I'd been blindly unaware of that, I was too young. It's taken me years and I'm fascinated by how do you really deal with that culture in a way that is respectful? How truthful can we be and still have authenticity and respect, dignity and deal with the truth, honestly, as best we can. Having said that, that story, when I read it, indicated to me that this would probably be the one that we could deal with that way. Particularly by getting involved with the culture of the Osage and actually placing cultural elements, rituals, spiritual moments. People talk about mystical realism or something. Now this is real. You see the dream. The dream is real. The ancestors come. So for me, I wanted to know how, I wanted to play with that world in contrast with the white European world. I felt that this could have afforded us the possibility. Ultimately what happened was that we were dealing with the script on the basis of the David Grann’s book, which is excellent, but the book also has the subtitle, the ‘Birth of the FBI.’ For about a year and a half to two years, I was doing ‘Silence,’ they sort of felt a little more comfortable with me doing this. Margie Burkhart said, one has to that Ernest, her ancestor loved Mollie and Mollie loved Ernest. It's a love story. Ultimately what happened is that the script shifted that way, and that's when Leo decided to play Ernest instead of Tom White. By that point, we started reworking the script and it became really, instead of from the outside in coming in and finding out who'd done it, when in reality it's who didn't do it. It's a story of complicity. It's a story of sin by omission, and silent complicity certain cases. That's what afforded us the opportunity to open the picture up and start from the inside out.

Shooting in Oklahoma

Scorsese was determined to shoot the film in Oklahoma, where the story is based. He talked about the first time he visited Oklahoma and how he began to visualize shooting the movie there.

MS: Well, I think the first time was in 2019. It was a little confusing because of shooting ‘Irishman,’ doing the CGI, which was a longer post-production, four or five months, and then COVID hitting, but I know we were there before COVID. We at least had two trips there before COVID. For me, I am a New Yorker. I grew up in the lower East side of New York. I'm very urban. I don't understand weather that much or where the sun is when you're on the set. I was very surprised to learn that it's set in the West. That's because I was driving down Sunset Boulevard one time about 30 years ago, and I saw the sun setting and I said, it's great. It's “Sun-set Boulevard.” The sun sets in the West, I go, "oh, now I get it." Anyway, when I got there, all I can tell you is those prairies are quite something and they open your mind and your heart. They are just beautiful. Especially driving on these roads, straight roads were prairie and on both sides, wild horses, bison and cows, but the wild horses just out to pasture for the rest of their lives and it was like idyllic. So I said, "Where do I put the camera at this point? How much of the sky? How much of the prairie?" Should it be 1.85 or should it be 235? We got to go 235. You're going to want to see more of this land. Then I began to realize that the land itself could be sinister. In other words, you're in a place like this and you don't see people for miles. You could do anything. Particularly, it turns out a hundred years ago, for me, 1920 is like fifty years ago because I was born in 1942, so the 1920s are to me the way the 1990’s are now to younger people. So when they told me, “Marty, this is a hundred years ago,” I keep thinking, “why are we making a period piece? It's like normal.” I mean, yes, they were old cars. So I said, "It's not really a Western, it's normal." But when I saw that and I realized this is a place where you don't need the law. I mean, you have the law, but the law isn't working that way. You can make the law work for you if you're smart enough, as we know now, many people do. What I mean by that is that it's still a wide open territory. You have law, but it's a wide open territory. So the place, as beautiful as it is, can shift to being very sinister. What I wanted to capture ultimately was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of an easygoing genocide. That's why we went with the story with Mollie and Ernest because that's the basis of the love. The love is the basis of trust. So when there's betrayal that way, that deep, and we know that for a fact that it was that way. Here's our story.

Related Article: 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Teaser Trailer

Historical Accuracy vs. Emotional Resonance

Scorsese also talked about balancing historical accuracy with what he calls the “emotional resonance” of the movie.

MS: This was a constant, historically accurate, and I should say the word “truthful.” You can have a ritual and you shoot a ritual is the way it should be, but it may have been slightly different at the time. We had a lot of from the Osage authority, the experts who were giving us the indication of how to go about these things, Marianne Bower, for example, one of our producers and she's like my archivist, and she was able to help keep it all together between myself and the Osage.

Casting Lily Gladstone

The director discussed casting actress Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart and why her casting was pivotal to the film’s success.

MS: Well, I believe Kelly Reinhardt’s film. I thought she was terrific and then COVID hit and we weren't able to meet. So after the pandemic was calming down, we met on Zoom. I was very impressed by her presence, the intelligence and the emotion that's there in her face, but you see it. You feel it, but it's all working behind the eyes. You could see it happening. Also, her activism, which wasn't overtaking the art, in other words, the art was in the activism in a sense. So the art takes over and in a way which we think then would be more resonant later on after you see the movie, you may be thinking about it more rather than a person preaching at you. I think the first big scene we did was one of my favorite scenes where she has dinner with Earnest alone and she's questioning him, a little bit of an interrogation. “What are you doing here? Are you afraid of him? What's your religion?” All this sort of thing. Then you begin to see the connection between the two. When she says, "Ha, coyote wants money." And surprisingly he said, "That's right, I love money." So she knows, this is the other thing, she knows what she's getting into. Even her sisters later, which is also a scene that we put in with the Osage and the Native American actors. They said, "What if we're talking about the guys while they're playing that game and we're talking about my husband and talking about that guy with the blue eyes likes you and, you know, I don't think he just wants money. It doesn't matter. He's nice. He wants to settle down." Why don't we just show that that's how it could happen? So that's the way the script was ultimately created by these moments. So with Lily, there was that scene, and of course the scene where he's driving her in the taxi and it's only one shot. He says something about, “I want to see who's going to be in this horse race.” And she says something in Osage and He goes, "What'd you say?" And she says it in Osage again. And he says, "Well, I don't know what that was, but it must've been Indian for handsome Devil." That's an improv, and you see her laugh for real. So that moment you have the actual relationship between the two actors. These were the two moments. We felt very comfortable with her. Also we had a feeling that we needed her. We needed her to help us tell the story of the women there. We would always check with her and work with her on the script. There were scenes that were added and rewritten constantly.

Reuniting with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro

Martin Scorsese has made ten movies with Robert De Niro, and five with Leonardo DiCaprio, but ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ marks the first Scorsese movie to feature both actors. The director discussed his working relationship with both De Niro and DiCaprio.

MS: Well, in the case of Robert De Niro, we were teenagers together, and he's the only one who really knows where I come from, people I knew and that sort of thing. Some of them are still alive. He knows them. I know his friends, his old friends, and we had a real testing ground in the 70’s where we tried everything and we found that we trusted each other. It was all about trust and love. That’s what it is. That's a big deal because very often if an actor has a lot of power, and he had a lot of power at that time, an actor could take over your picture, the studio gets angry with you, and the actor comes in and takes it over. With him I never felt that. I never felt that. There was a freedom. There was experimenting and also, he's not afraid of anything. He wasn't afraid to do something. He just did it. Years later he told me he worked with this kid, Leo DiCaprio, a little boy in ‘Margot Robbie, or him and Lily, and suddenly they're all like, "Hey." I said, "Okay, let's work."

The importance of Music in his Movies

Finally, Scorsese discussed the importance of music in his movies, and how it influences the way he moves his camera. He also spoke about his longtime collaborator, the late musician Robbie Robertson, and his musical contributions to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’

MS: The way I like to make pictures, for the most part I've learned, not intentionally, but I feel it is like the pacing of music. The boxing scenes in ‘Raging Bull’ are like the ballet scene in ‘Hank Williams later on, but this was the first. So it's all that's in there, but the drive of the movie is what Robbie put down, and we pulled it through that way.

Other Martin Scorsese Movies:

• 'Mean Streets' (1973)
• 'Taxi Driver' (1976)
• 'The Last Waltz' (1978)
• 'Raging Bull' (1980)
• 'The King of Comedy' (1983)
• 'The Color of Money' (1986)
• 'GoodFellas' (1990)
• 'Cape Fear' (1991)
• 'Casino' (1995)
• 'Bringing Out the Dead' (1999)
• 'Gangs of New York' (2002)
• 'The Aviator' (2004)
• 'The Departed' (2006)
• 'Shutter Island' (2010)
• 'Hugo' (2011)
• 'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013)
• 'Silence' (2017)
• 'The Irishman' (2019)

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