Ahead of the release of the highly anticipated film Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese admitted he overhauled the script and re-cast leads after realizing he was writing a movie ‘all about the white guys.’
The film is based on David Grann’s 2017 book about the FBI’s investigation into a string of murders among the Osage Indian community in the early 1920s in Oklahoma.
The Osage Nation is a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains and developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 BC.
Originally Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth centered the film adaptation around the narrative in which Leonardo DiCaprio would play the head FBI investigator Tom White.
‘After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,’ Scorsese told Time.
Ahead of the release of the highly anticipated film Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese admitted he overhauled the script and re-cast leads after realizing he was writing a movie ‘all about the white guys’
‘Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.’
Scorsese and Roth decided to overhaul the entire script and change the perspective of the film this time recasting DiCaprio to play Ernest Burkhart – a World War I veteran who gets enticed into stealing riches from Osage Nation.
The film now centers on DiCaprio’s character and his marriage to an Osage woman Mollie played by Lily Gladstone.
Jesse Plemons stepped into DiCaprio’s previous role as the FBI agent who is not a supporting character in the film.
In an interview with Variety Gladstone said that she’d gone to her audition with one script only to return to her audition with a completely different script.
‘Before the rewrites, I had three pages of some pretty mouthy dialogue,’ Gladstone said.
‘But I was struggling so much with the scenes that when COVID shut everything down and the project went quiet for a minute, I assumed that I’d blown the audition.
Gladstone goes on to say that a year later she got a request to zoom Scorsese saying that she’d ‘heard that the rewrites did a 180.’
‘The focus would’ve been the FBI, with Mollie and Ernest being part of the supporting storyline, instead of the central one,’ Gladstone said about the original ‘Flower Moon’ script.
Words like ‘searing and ‘masterpiece’ were bandied about by critics who managed to get their hands on a ticket to the first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May
She previously told Vulture that the rewrite meant the film ‘is not a white-savior story’ but the Osage saying: ‘Do something. Here’s money. Come help us.’
The Western true-crime thriller stars DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, who arrived in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and married Mollie Kyle, played by Gladstone at the behest of his uncle, William Hale played by Robert De Niro.
Scorsese and his team worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office, the director’s consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time that hundreds of Osage were involved in making the film.
‘The first day of filming, we had an elder, Archie Mason, come and say a prayer,’ Renfro said.
The three-hour epic will receive a limited theatrical release, including on Imax screens, on Oct 6, before streaming globally on Apple TV+ on Oct 20.
In May, Killers of the Flower Moon received a rapturous nine-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes Film Festival.
As early reviews for the three and a half hour epic roll in, it was safe to say the iconic director’s first ever Western would go down as a ‘triumph’ when it hits cinemas.
A wide array of film critics have already given the DiCaprio led movie five stars across the board, with one even hailing it as the best of its genre.
Words like ‘searing and ‘masterpiece’ were bandied about by critics who managed to get their hands on a ticket to the first screening.
IndieWire said DiCaprio gives ‘his best-ever performance,’ while The Guardian awarded five stars for a ‘remarkable epic about the bloody birth of America’.
Scorsese unveiled the $200 million film at Cannes, debuting a sweeping American epic about greed and exploitation on the bloody plains of an Osage Nation reservation in 1920s Oklahoma.
Addressing the crowd after the screening, he said: ‘We shot this a couple of years ago in Oklahoma. It’s taken its time to come around but Apple did so great by us.’
Scorsese unveiled the $200 million film at Cannes, debuting a sweeping American epic about greed and exploitation on the bloody plains of an Osage Nation reservation in 1920s Oklahoma
The red carpet drew a wide spectrum of stars. Along with the film’s expansive cast, attendees included Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as actors Cate Blanchett, Salma Hayek, Paul Dano and Isabelle Huppert.
It marks DiCaprio’s first film on the big screen since 2019 Quentin Tarantino Flick Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. He also starred in 2021 film Don’t Look Up which streamed on Netflix.
Set in the 1920s, it centers on the FBI’s investigation into a string of murders after several members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma were slaughtered.
Killers of the Flower Moon focuses on a little-publicized chapter of American history involving the Osage Nation.
In the 1920s, the Osage tribe became wealthy almost overnight after oil was discovered beneath their land, earning them more than $30 million in annual revenue at the peak of the boom, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Subsurface minerals within the Osage Nation Reservation were tribally owned and held in trust by the government.
Mineral leases earned royalties that were paid to the tribe as a whole – with each receiving one equal share also known as a headright.
But these headrights could only legally be attained by outsiders if they married into the tribe.
It was during this time that rancher William K. Hale, a native of Greenville, Texas, encouraged his subservient nephew Ernest Burkhart to wed Osage member Mollie Kyle (later Mollie Burkhart).
After hours of waiting in the rain that has drenched the French Riviera town all week, fans went wild as the trio arrived for the premiere alongside several native Americans in traditional outfits.
The three-hour epic will receive a limited theatrical release, including on Imax screens, on Oct 6, before streaming globally on Apple TV+ on Oct 20
Co-star Jesse Plemons arrived with his wife Kirsten Dunst, while Salma Hayek, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire were also present.
Based on a nonfiction bestseller, the film sees DiCaprio play a weak-willed man who marries a wealthy Osage Indian and is drawn into the deadly schemes of his kingpin uncle (De Niro).
Killers of the Flower Moon was screening out-of-competition in Cannes.
It is the first time Scorsese, who won the Palme in 1976 for Taxi Driver, has presented a film here since 1985, though he served as jury president in 1998.
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