Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese said he rewrote Killers of the Flower Moon after realizing he “was making a movie about all the white guys.”
The movie, which hits theaters next month, is based on David Grann’s non-fiction 2017 bestseller about how a series of murders among the Osage Indian Nation helped to create the FBI. According to Scorsese, an early draft of the script centered on Tom White, an FBI agent who uncovers a murder plot driven by greed after oil is found on the reservation.
“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese told far-left Time. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
So Scorsese and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, revamped the script to focus more on Ernest Burkhart, a white man played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his wife, an Osage woman played by Lily Gladstone. Ernest is torn apart after he gets embroiled in this murder plot through his uncle, who’s played by Robert DeNiro.
Overall, per Scorsese, the movie focuses on how the murder plot affects the Osage people.
I haven’t seen Killers of the Flower Moon, so I can’t comment on the result, but this sounds like a good move to me, a much more interesting one.
From a political point of view, I’m not interested in seeing the fascist FBI lionized.
From a historical point of view, what the federal government and its allies in Big Business did to the American Indian cannot get enough exposure.
From a movie lover’s point of view, this sounds like the best kind of movie: one that takes me on a tour of something I haven’t seen before. In this case, a tour of a subculture, and nothing reveals who people are more than when they are under extreme stress. We’ve seen all kinds of procedurals where the authorities rush in to save the day but know nothing about the Osage.
The question is this…
Did Scorsese simply switch out the “white savior” trope and replace it with the equally tired “noble Indian” trope? Is this another one of those dull movies where a condescending white filmmaker portrays the Indians as one-dimensional, walking totems (pardon the pun) of all that is right and good with the world, or are they portrayed as actual human beings, flaws and all?
This is all going to come down to execution, to how Scorsese portrays the Osage. The overall idea, however, of focusing on them is a good one.
And I have faith in Scorsese. After the magnificent Casino in 1995, Scorsese did hit a 17-year dry spell — Kundun (1997), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), The Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), Shutter Island (2010), and Hugo (2011)… Those are just bad movies. The only oxygen in that run was The Departed (2006), which won a bunch of Oscars but is still no classic. Then, in 2013, at the age of 71, Scorsese came back to life with The Wolf of Wall Street, followed by Silence (2016). In 2019, he hit it out of the park with The Irishman, which might be my favorite of his. So I’m looking forward to Flower Moon.
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