I’ve only begun this year to read emails. “I’ve got films, I’ve got books, I’ve got people. I get distracted as it is,” Scorsese says. “I don’t use a computer because I tried a couple times and I got very distracted. For him, preparing a film is a meditative process. COVID-19, he says, was “a gamechanger.” For a filmmaker whose time is so intensely scheduled, the break was in some ways a relief, and it allowed him a chance to reconsider what he wants to dedicate himself to. “Killers of the Flower Moon” for Scorsese grew out of a period of reflection and reevaluation during the pandemic. He wrote a story about betrayal of trust.” “It took somebody who could know that we’ve been betrayed for hundreds of years. That’s never happened before as far as I know,” says Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of Osage Nation. “It’s historical that Indigenous Peoples can tell their story at this level. ![]() ![]() Consultations with the tribe continued and expanded to include accurately capturing language, traditional clothing and customs. Scorsese, after conversations with Leonardo DiCaprio, pivoted to the story of Ernest and Mollie and a perspective closer to Osage Nation. “It represented a certain time in who we were as a nation and a certain time in the world – and the end of the studio system. Your Westerns are the Westerns you saw in the late ’40s and early ’50s, that’s it. But while developing Grann’s book, which chronicles the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI, Scorsese came to the realization that centering the film on federal investigator Tom White was a familiar a type of Western. Scorsese considers “Killers of the Flower Moon” “an internal spectacle.” The Oklahoma-set film, adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, might be called his first Western. “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a $200-million, 206-minute epic produced by Apple that’s in theaters Friday, is an audacious big swing by Scorsese to continue his kind of ambitious, personal filmmaking on the largest scale at a time when such grand, big-screen statements are a rarity. “I found that this story lent itself to that exploration further.” “That’s been my whole life, dealing with who we are,” says Scorsese. All of which, to Scorsese, harkens back to the tough guys and the weak-willed go-alongs he witnessed in his childhood growing up on Elizabeth Street in New York. It’s a disturbingly insidious one, where greed and violence infiltrate the most intimate relationships - a genocide in the home. More than the back-room dealings of “Casino,” the bloody rampages of “Gangs of New York” or the financial swindling of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the story of a crime wave. But as a story of trust and betrayal - the film is centered on the loving yet treacherous relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a larger Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (Robert De Niro) - it’s a profoundly personal film that maps some of the themes of Scorsese’s gangster films onto American history. ![]() His latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is in many ways far outside Scorsese’s own experience. In recent years, his films have swelled in scale and ambition as he’s plumbed the nature of faith ( “Silence” ) and loss ( “The Irishman” ). Scorsese’s lifelong exploration has seemingly only grown deeper and more self-examining with time. How much further can you explore who you are?” These are just tools, the lights and the camera and that stuff. “I’ve lived long enough to be his age and I think I understand now,” Scorsese said in a recent interview. Even now, Scorsese says he’s just realizing the possibilities of cinema. It wasn’t until Scorsese also turned 80 that he began to comprehend Kurosawa’s words. ![]() It struck Scorsese, then in post-production on “Goodfellas,” as a curious thing for such a master filmmaker to say. When Akira Kurosawa was given an honorary Academy Award in 1990, the then 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker of “Seven Samurai” and “Ikiru,” in his brief, humble speech, said he hadn’t yet grasped the full essence of cinema. A moment from years ago keeps replaying in Martin Scorsese ’s mind.
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