Martin Scorsese He is one of the most important directors in history and his status in Hollywood is so relevant that the public and critics simply look forward to his next projects. On top of it all, his association with Leonardo Dicaprio is usually quite fruitful, so the mixture between both visions always gives a lot to talk about and this year they seem to exceed expectations with Killers of the Flower Moon – 100%. The project has just premiered in Cannes with great success and is already one of the favorites of the season, but the path to carry it out was not easy, and the director himself remembers how he came to change the entire script he had already worked on to focus on what was really important to portray this terrible and cruel chapter of American history.
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Scorsese is someone who is always aware of the scripts he works on, even if he doesn’t write them alone, since from this point in the production he already has a vision that he wants to complete with the filming and subsequent editing of his final cut. Killers of the Flower Moon It is one of his most ambitious projects, and one that took a long time to take off due to budget issues and risk at the box office in the face of the action franchises that dominate practically every month. Although a production company picked up the rights to the original book in 2016, things didn’t move forward until Scorsese and DiCaprio were involved.
Once these colleagues returned to their old ways, the adaptation went well, but then came other challenges to overcome, such as the high budget that was needed, the distrust of the producers, and the global pandemic that stopped productions in their tracks. global level. In 2021 they finally began filming in the Osage Nation itself where the events occurred, but shortly before taking this step, the director decided to change the initial focus of his work to put it on the real victims of what happened. The original book, called Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBIputs a lot of priority on how the FBI began to investigate these murders and that’s how Scorsese raised it in the first place, before he was shown that it was more powerful to give light to the nation that was assaulted by the corruption of others.
Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the murders in the Osage Nation that were organized by a tycoon who wanted to keep the oil that had recently been found in that territory. In an attempt to legally control the land, William Hale, played in the film by robert deniro, he looked for a way to marry his family among members of the reservation and then kill them and keep their property. How could it be otherwise, many things immediately got out of control and this man’s ambition reached critical points that eventually brought to the table issues such as racial injustices, the rights of Native Americans, and how easy it was for the law forgets its purpose.
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In 2019, Scorsese himself met with the head of the Osage Nation to find out how they could come to a deal to film there and to add native people in front of and behind the cameras. Eventually, lily gladstoneone of the protagonists, spoke with the director about the script and he acknowledged that his suspicions were true, the story had to be told from the community and not as a classic FBI criminal story, something that has also been seen many times in movies and television.
During the press conference in Cannes to promote the film (via indiewire), Martin Scorsese He revealed how he changed the entire initial script and why it seemed to him that the decision became a responsibility that he could not and should not ignore. Initially, the director explained that the writer Eric Roth treated the adaptation like a run-of-the-mill crime film:
we address [esos cambios] after Eric Roth, myself and all of us tried to tell the story from the point of view of the FBI. And I said, ‘I think the audience is one step ahead of us. They know it’s not about who did it, but who didn’t.
Martin Scorsese also clarified that Leonardo Dicaprio had agreed to play FBI agent Tom White, but when they decided to make the changes, the actor gave up that role to Jesse Plemons and he kept that of Ernest Burkhart, William Hale’s nephew.
The director revealed how he and DiCaprio realized they had to change the script:
At some point, after two years of working on the script, Leo came to me. He was going to play Tom White, who’s playing Jesse, and he said to me, ‘Where’s the heart of this story? And I had had some meetings with Osage. And I learned a lot about them in those three hours. I learned about the people who settled and the stories. They are all related to each other, and there are still relationships and there are still problems and this person is in love with this other… and it goes on like this. And I said: ‘there is the story’.
With this in mind, both decided that the character of Ernest was ideal to represent the betrayal of the natives, the blind loyalty to the family and the ambition that seems to dominate everything, including the decisions that one makes day to day and without hesitation. Considering the reception in Cannes, the standing ovation and the excellent reviews, it seems that the two made the right decision, because now Killers of the Flower Moon It’s officially one of the most anticipated releases of the year and one that’s sure to catch the eye of the year’s biggest hits.
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