Movies can take years to make, and at age 80, director Martin Scorsese realizes he has a finite amount of movies and years left.
“He’s got a lot of things on his mind that he wants to do, and I don’t know if we’ll live long enough to do them,” his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, 83, said at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
That’s why everything Scorsese commits to should be worth double, said the man behind classic movies like “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas” and “The Departed.”
“I’m at an age now where everything I try, I want it to matter to me,” Scorsese said. “It always has, but now even more so because we’re running out of time.”
His latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, took about seven years to make, Scorsese and his collaborators explained on a sunny terrace in Cannes the day after the Apple-funded project premiered there to rave reviews. reviews. (It will hit theaters in October and will hit the streaming service at a later date.)
Still, the finished movie is very different from the one Scorsese and his star, Leonardo DiCaprio, originally planned to make: The material couldn’t be cracked until they were willing to throw away any idea of what they first thought was “Killers of the Flower.” to throw. Moon” should be.
The first draft was intended to be a gripping mystery, much like its source material, David Grann’s non-fiction book that follows direct FBI agent Tom White as he investigates a series of murders of Native Americans in 1920s Oklahoma. There, the Osage Nation is the most prosperous tribe in the country; indeed, the discovery of oil on their land has made them the richest people per capita in all of America. But members of the Osage regularly die in suspicious ways, and while the tribe has received help from wealthy cattle baron William Hale (played by Robert De Niro in the film), no one has yet been brought to justice.
White eventually uncovers a massive conspiracy involving not only the wealthy rancher, but also his cousin Ernest, who is married to an Osage woman, Mollie, and benefits from other members of her family perishing, as their land rights eventually lose their will find their way to his wife (and then him). This true-to-life twist is the reveal the book builds towards, but when Scorsese and Eric Roth’s screenplay was similarly structured, it never came to life.
“I think Marty and I just looked at each other and we felt there wasn’t a soul in it,” said DiCaprio. “It was about an investigation and I said to Marty, once you see De Niro as Hale, you’re going to go, ‘I think I know who did it.’ What are we going to unravel?”
Rather than hide those plot points, Scorsese and DiCaprio decided to lean in: Over the film’s sprawling three and a half hours, they’d let us know about the murders as soon as Hale and Ernest started plotting them. And as the story leaned toward those evil men, DiCaprio decided he’d rather play Ernest rather than cop Tom White, a role Jesse Plemons (“The Power of the Dog”) fills.
“The tricky thing was going against this white savior cliché,” Plemons said. After all, it is also white people who committed these crimes. But the subjects of his character’s investigation often have baffling motives, such as DiCaprio’s Ernest, so loving and considerate of his wife.
“It was one of the craziest love stories I’ve ever come across,” said DiCaprio. “I can’t even believe it myself that these two people were in love and stayed together.”
De Niro was still at a loss for words when asked to unwrap Hale, who goes out of his way to endear himself to the Osage Nation, even as he reduces numbers. Did playing the role help him reconcile the man’s tendencies?
“In some ways not,” De Niro said. “He’s a sociopath. You don’t know why he would love them and betray them like that.’ It wasn’t all about money, De Niro said: Hale had had enough already. “Greed is a real condition, but it seems like a simpler word than what happened,” he said. “Greed can make greedy people, but they don’t behave that way That.”
So what was that extra motivation that led Hale and Ernest down such dark paths? When asked, Scorsese didn’t mince words: It has to do with white supremacy, he said.
“It’s about someone who isn’t from European culture or white culture,” the filmmaker said. “Just ‘not okay’, which is why it might be easier to kill them. I mean, whoa! And I think that’s real thinking.”
And it also has many contemporary parallels, Scorsese and De Niro said. At the film’s press conference yesterday, De Niro spoke of the film’s depiction of “the banality of evil,” saying, “We’re seeing it today and you know who I’m talking about, but I’m not going to say his name — that dude is stupid.” Later he couldn’t help it: “I mean, look at Trump!”
With Scorsese, I shared how Ernest’s willingness to carry out his uncle’s cruel orders reminded me of another Cannes film, “The Zone of Interest,” which follows a Nazi commander and his family living next door to Auschwitz and ruthlessly compartmentalize the atrocities. on the other side of their garden wall.
“What scares me is how easy it is for all people — well, I hope not all people, but most people — fall into that,” Scorsese said. “I’ve heard some people say, ‘No, I think anyone can do that.’ “I hope not. I wonder how I would act.”
To broaden the film’s perspective beyond the evil deeds of these white men, Scorsese consulted extensively with the Osage to base the film on their traditions and lived experiences. “Killers of the Flower Moon” has already provided a creditable breakthrough for Native American actress Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, Ernest’s wife. She more than holds her own against DiCaprio and De Niro with her sly smile and formidable center of gravity, and after the film’s premiere, cameras in the theater caught tears in her eyes in a moment that went viral online.
Yesterday on the terrace of Cannes I asked her about it. “You mean the moment when you see me visibly tearing up and breaking down and trying to chase everything away,” she said, “and I turn around and Cate Blanchett and I look at each other — my favorite actress since I was 15? ”
Gladstone said she felt a lot of things at the time, but what she felt most of all was that the applause was largely for Mollie, a character who grew in importance as Scorsese continued to revise and shape his film.
“I was grateful that the audience saw Mollie as it should, and as it should be,” she said. “It was a confirmation of what a beautiful story this is. What people thought would be an impossible feat is the story we could do.
