Mar­tin Scors­ese: ​‘What is it about us as human beings that allows for us to be so compartmentalised?’

Killers of the Flower Moon, Mar­tin Scorsese’s sor­row­ful epic of twist­ed love, geno­cide, and the evil­do­ing of white Amer­i­ca, hits cin­e­mas this week­end to over­whelm­ing acclaim. Adapt­ed from jour­nal­ist David Grann’s book about a rash of wealth-moti­vat­ed mur­ders of Osage peo­ple on their oil-rich Native Amer­i­can reser­va­tion back in the 1920s, it’s a film of dev­as­tat­ing cumu­la­tive power.

Scors­ese brings in Lily Glad­stone, Leonar­do DiCaprio, and Robert DeNiro as the tri­umvi­rate of major play­ers in a sprawl­ing tapes­try of con­spir­a­cy, greed, and racist betray­al. At the glob­al press con­fer­ence for the film, the vet­er­an direc­tor spoke about the impor­tance of his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy, the pow­er of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with actors, and…Leonardo Dicaprio’s love for the Cri­te­ri­on Channel.

What steps did you and the pro­duc­tion team take to ensure that the Osage com­mu­ni­ty felt accu­rate­ly represented?

It was very impor­tant for me, as soon as they gave me the book. 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 had been blithe­ly unaware of that, in my 20s. How do you deal with that cul­ture in a way that’s respect­ful and also not hagio­graph­ic or falling into the Rousseau noble native thing? How truth­ful can we be and still have authen­tic­i­ty and respect?

Ulti­mate­ly, this was sup­ple­ment­ed by the times that we went out to Okla­homa and met with the Osage. My first meet­ing was with Chief Stand­ing Bear and his group: Julie and Addie Roan­horse, and Chad Ren­fro. And it was very dif­fer­ent from what I expect­ed. They were nat­u­ral­ly cau­tious. I had to explain I was just gonna try and deal with them as hon­est­ly and truth­ful­ly as pos­si­ble. We weren’t going to fall into the trap; of the cliché of vic­tims, or the drunk­en Indi­an, and tell the sto­ry as straight as pos­si­ble. What I didn’t real­ly under­stand is that this was an ongo­ing sit­u­a­tion in Okla­homa. The fam­i­lies and descen­dants are still there.

And what I learned from meet­ing with them, hav­ing din­ners with them – even Margie, the rel­a­tive of Ernest Burkhart – was that a lot of the white guys out there, they were good friends. Hen­ry Rome was Bill Hale’s best friend, and yet he killed him. So what is it about us as human beings that allows for us to be so compartmentalised?

The film takes place in Okla­homa, and you were adamant about shoot­ing there. What was your impres­sion of it and how did you begin to visu­alise the film tak­ing place there?

MS: I think the first time was in 2019. there before COVID. And for me, you know, 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 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, ​“That’s great. It’s Sun­set Boule­vard. The sun sets in the west. 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. And espe­cial­ly, dri­ving on these roads and on both sides, wild hors­es, bison, and cows. And 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 2.35? We got­ta go 2.35, you know, ​‘cause I wan­na see more of this land.” And 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 can do any­thing. Par­tic­u­lar­ly, it turns out, a hun­dred years ago. It’s a wide-open territory.

You have the law, but the law doesn’t work the same way. The place, as beau­ti­ful as it is, can shift to being very sin­is­ter. And what I want­ed to cap­ture, ulti­mate­ly, was the very nature of the virus or the can­cer that cre­ates this sense of a kind of easy­go­ing genocide.

Can you dis­cuss how you want­ed to tell the sto­ry in a way which was both emo­tion­al­ly res­o­nant but also his­tor­i­cal­ly accurate?

That was the con­stant: his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate. Or, truth­ful. We had a lot of sup­port from the Osage author­i­ty, the experts who were giv­ing us indi­ca­tions of how to go about these things. John­ny Williams, and a num­ber of oth­er peo­ple. We test­ed the accu­ra­cy of the rit­u­als, the baby nam­ings, the wed­ding, the funer­als. In some cas­es, there was wig­gle room because hon­est­ly, the last two gen­er­a­tions of Osage were tak­en out of their expe­ri­ences because they had to become White Euro­pean. They had to become Chris­tians, Catholics, what­ev­er. But in fact, now there’s a new resur­gence of learn­ing the lan­guage. And we had lan­guage teach­ers there, and Lily Glad­stone, Leo, and De Niro learned the lan­guage. De Niro real­ly fell in love with it, and want­ed to do more scenes in Osage. So they were learn­ing to put their cul­ture back togeth­er again through this movie, and we were going with them.

Peo­ple are going to be real­ly impressed with Lily Gladstone’s per­for­mance. Can you talk a lit­tle bit about the first thing you shot with her?

[Cast­ing direc­tor] Ellen Lewis showed her to me in Cer­tain Women, Kel­ly Reichardt’s film, and I thought she was ter­rif­ic. Then Covid hap­pened and we weren’t able to meet. But we met on Zoom. And I was very impressed by her pres­ence, the intel­li­gence, and the emo­tion that’s there in her face. But you see it – there’s some­thing work­ing behind the eyes.

And I think the first big scene we did was one of my favourite scenes, where she has din­ner with Ernest alone. And she’s ques­tion­ing him, a lit­tle bit of an inter­ro­ga­tion. What are you doing here? All that sort of thing. [….] And of course there’s the scene where he’s dri­ving her in the taxi, in only one shot. […] She says some­thing in Osage. […] And he goes, ​“Well, I don’t know what that was, but it must have been Indi­an for hand­some dev­il,” And that’s an improv, and you see her laugh for real. So in that moment, you have the actu­al rela­tion­ship – and it’s actu­al­ly between the two actors.

So these were the two moments we felt very com­fort­able with her. We had a feel­ing that 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, scenes were rewrit­ten constantly.

You’ve formed a 20-year part­ner­ship with Leo DiCaprio and a 50-year part­ner­ship with Robert De Niro. Why have you returned to them both so often over the years, and what has stood out to you most about their work on Killers of the Flower Moon?

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, the peo­ple I knew, and that sort of thing. We had a real test­ing ground in the ​’70s, where we tried every­thing, and we trust­ed each oth­er. It’s all about trust and love. And 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. If the stu­dio gets angry with you, the actor comes in and takes it over. With him, I nev­er felt that. I nev­er felt that. There was free­dom; there was experimenting.

And years lat­er, he told me he worked with this kid, Leo DiCaprio in This Boy’s Life, and he said, ​“You should work with this kid some­time.” It was just casu­al. But it wasn’t casu­al. He rarely gave rec­om­men­da­tions. Years go by, and I’m pre­sent­ed with Leo, with Gangs of New York. He made Gangs pos­si­ble, actu­al­ly. He loved the pic­tures I’d made, and he want­ed to explore the same territory.

We real­ly found out that even though there’s 30 years dif­fer­ence, he has sim­i­lar sen­si­bil­i­ties. You know, he’ll come to me and he’ll say, ​“Lis­ten to this record,” and it’s Louis Jor­dan and Ella Fitzger­ald. I grew up with it. But it’s inter­est­ing. He’ll call me and say, ​“You know, I had a cold and I was look­ing at Cri­te­ri­on films, and, you know, I want­ed to catch up on some of these clas­sics, and I saw this incred­i­ble movie. It’s incred­i­ble. It’s a Japan­ese pic­ture. It’s called Tokyo Sto­ry. Did you ever see it?” This was last year. It’s inter­est­ing to me that he’s open to old­er parts of our culture.

Your films have a musi­cal­i­ty through fram­ing, cam­era move­ment, sounds, silences, and cut­ting. What informs the rhythm of your work, and what music were you hear­ing for this film?

The box­ing scenes in Rag­ing Bull are like the bal­let scene in The Red Shoes, where every­thing is seen and felt from inside the ring, inside the fighter’s head, the way every­thing is felt and seen inside the dancer Moira Shearer’s head in Red Shoes. So the cov­er­ing of the band, singing The Weight in The Last Waltz, doing it in the stu­dio was very much accord­ing to the music, to the dif­fer­ent bars of music and how a cam­era would move, et cetera.

And some­times I play the music back on the set. In the case of Good­fel­las, for a num­ber of times the end of Lay­la was played back as we were doing the cam­era moves. And so for me, ulti­mate­ly, the movie get­ting to being like a piece of music. That’s why this pic­ture is more like, some­body point­ed out recent­ly, like Bolero, where it starts slow­er and moves slow­ly and in cir­cles and in cir­cles, and then sud­den­ly gets more intense and more intense, and sud­den­ly goes more and more until it explodes, yeah, right?

I couldn’t ver­bal­ize it the way I am now, but I felt it in the shoot and in the edit. And a lot of the music that kept push­ing me was what Rob­bie Robert­son had put togeth­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly that bass note that he was play­ing when when Ernest drops Mol­lie off for the first time at her house. She looks at him, she turns, and all of a sud­den you hear boom, boom, boom, boom. I said I want­ed some­thing dan­ger­ous and fleshy. And sexy, but dan­ger­ous. And that beat took us all the way through.

I added some music from Har­ry Smith’s anthol­o­gy of folk music – one par­tic­u­lar piece called The Indi­an War Whoop by Hoyt Ming and His Pep Step­pers was very, very impor­tant. Bull­doze Blues by Hen­ry Thomas, which became Going Up The Coun­try by Canned Heat. […] But the dri­ve of the movie is what Rob­bie put down, and we pulled it through that way.