‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: New Details Emerge Ahead of Cannes Premiere
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon, coming soon to Apple TV+.
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a loose adaptation of the 2017 David Grann novel of the same name, which was the subject of a heated bidding war going all the way back to the book’s release. Imperative Entertainment’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas acquired the rights for $5M, far more than what other competitors like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, or JJ Abrams were willing to pay, and the movie was set up at Paramount Pictures with Martin Scorsese directing and Leo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro starring. That is a recipe for success if we’ve ever seen one, at least on the side of the critics.
Scorsese set off to write the script with Eric Roth, planning on doing a straightforward adaptation of the novel, a murder mystery thriller set in 1921 in Osage Country, Oklahoma. Soon after the Osage Indian Nation discovered oil in the region, they became the richest per capita people in the world, which immediately set off plenty of alarms among white supremacists. The story of the novel follows the investigation by the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigations of a series of murders among the residents of the region. And even though the script was coming together quite nicely, there was something that didn’t quite click.
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, coming soon to Apple TV+.
One day, DiCaprio, talking to Scorsese, simply asked the question — “Where’s the heart in this movie?” That set the director on a path to discover the soul of the story they were trying to tell and with the help of his lead actor, they decided to shift the focus from the FBI point of view to the love story at the very center of the murders between Ernest and Mollie. That realization was an inflection point for the film. DiCaprio was originally going to play Tom White, “an incorruptible Texas Ranger-turned-FBI agent sent to Oklahoma in the early 1920s by J. Edgar Hoover to answer a desperate call from the Osage Indian Nation”. He now plays Ernest, one of the leading suspects in the investigation.
In the film, Jesse Plemons will be playing Tom White, which is why some outlets were initially describing him as the lead of the movie as opposed to DiCaprio — it’s because White is the lead role in the book, but not the film. That would belong to DiCaprio’s Ernest and Lily Gladstone’s Mollie; the actress, of Native American descent, has been getting Oscar buzz for her performance long before the campaign for the last Oscars started. Speaking to Deadline regarding the forthcoming screening of the film at the Cannes Film Festival, here is how Scorsese explained this paramount shift in the story:
“Leo DiCaprio looked at me and said, ‘Where’s the heart in this movie?’ This was when Eric Roth and I were writing the script from the point of view of the FBI coming in and unraveling everything. Look, the minute the FBI comes in, and you see a character that would be played by Robert De Niro, Bill Hale, you know he’s a bad guy. There’s no mystery. So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares! We’ve got fantastic ones on television.
The least material available to us was about Ernest. There’s much written about Bill Hale, Mollie, and many of the others. Eric and I enjoyed working on that first version; it had all the tropes of the Western genre that I grew up with, and I was so tempted to do it that way. But I said, “The only person that has heart, besides Mollie Burkhart, is her husband Ernest, because they’re in love.”
We went to Oklahoma to the Gray Horse settlement, the Osage gave us a big dinner, and people got up and spoke. One woman got up and said, ‘You know, they loved each other, Ernest and Mollie. And don’t forget that. They loved each other.’ I thought, ‘Whoa. That’s the story. How could he have done what he did?’”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, coming soon to Apple TV+.
De Niro’s Bill Hale is Ernest’s uncle, who cannot see Mollie’s family get rich because of their skin color, and starts corrupting his nephew’s soul to commit heinous acts. In the book, Bill Hale’s role is quite limited, which is also why some reports were suggesting that De Niro’s part would be less than a glorified cameo in the film. While we don’t know how much De Niro is now in the film, the Raging Bull actor did clarify that the new version of the script takes its time to explore the relationship between nephew and uncle:
“I’d read the book a few years earlier and the Tom White character was more prominent. That was right for the book, but Marty and Leo’s idea to focus on the relationship between Bill and Ernest made sense to me. They wanted to focus more on that dynamic instead of Tom White coming in and saving the day.
It made the most sense to show what’s going on in that world, the dynamic between the nephew and the uncle. I don’t know if you would call it the banality of evil, or just evil, corrupt entitlement, but we’ve seen it in other societies, including the Nazis before WWII. That is, a depressing realization of human nature that leaves people capable of doing terrible things. [Hale] believed he loved them, and felt they loved him. But within that, he felt he had the right to behave the way he did.”
DiCaprio also explained how the previous version of the script felt off, like it was missing something:
“It just didn’t get to the heart of the Osage. It felt too much like an investigation into detective work, rather than understanding from a forensic perspective the culture and the dynamics of this very tumultuous, dangerous time in Oklahoma.
We did a lot of work to try to help Marty do what he does best, which is to tell a very human story. To get to the dark side of the human condition but also understand the complexities. Here you had the wealthiest nation, the richest per capita people in the world. You had this melting pot in Oklahoma where freed slaves had created their own economy, and the Osage emerged as this wealthy culture. But you also had during that period the rise of the KKK and white supremacy and this clash of cultures. For some of these white settlers, it was like a gold rush to take advantage of people of color.”
That creative overhaul had a few implications beyond casting. Production was postponed as Roth and Scorsese continued to develop the script, and the director also saw an opportunity to make another gangster film, one that he’d wanted to do for a long time. It’s called The Irishman, and it finally made its way to Netflix in late 2019. On the financial side, though, Paramount backed out, which eventually resulted in a streaming company, Apple TV Plus, getting into business with Scorsese for a second time. The deal they reached left the door open for Paramount to come in as a distributor worldwide later on, and guaranteed the film a theatrical release before moving over to streaming.
Lily Gladstone joined the project as Mollie, as well, following her breakout role in Certain Women. The actress also talked to Deadline about her own knowledge of the massacre after growing up in a Native American family:
“I didn’t have language for it being the reign of terror, until David Grann’s book reached the cultural zeitgeist,” she says. “I was aware of it in passing from my dad when I homeschooled in fifth grade. He told me about how Osages were killed for having oil money. I remember being upset about it, and then I would hear Osage stories make the rounds across Indian country. My father joked about how he’d heard that Osages had so much money they would buy a Rolls Royce, and when it ran out of gas, they’d go, ‘Oh well, I guess it’s time for another one.’ And then they’d go buy another car.
It’s a funny story, until you think about the implications. You had all these people who moved to Osage County to take advantage of this first wave of folks with headrights to oil, at a time when people were moving from a horse cart to driving automobiles. Nobody was going to say to those first generations of Osage, ‘No, you just fill the tank up with gas.’ All these people set up businesses around Osage wealth. Grann mentions it in the book, and this is something that a lot of families talked about, how there was this ‘Osage tax’, which meant things were horribly overpriced.”
According to her, Scorsese and DiCaprio consulted her a lot regarding the script and the culture, and to make sure they were getting to the underlying themes of good and evil:
“Marty and Leo had conversations with me about what the nature of evil is, and how evil doesn’t see itself as evil. Can somebody really love and honor another, feel all these things in one aspect of their psyche, and then turn around and do all of these other hateful, evil, entitled things? The tightrope walk was exploring the relationship between Ernest and Mollie.
Killers of the Flower Moon will be released in theaters on October 6. It will screen out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, May 20. The first trailer for the film will come out on Thursday, May 18.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
