In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese aims a righteous fury at American history
When Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and screenwriter Eric Roth first set about adapting David Grann’s penetrating nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, about the wholesale murder of the oil-rich Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s, the idea was that DiCaprio would play the hero. His original role: Tom White, a former Texas Ranger and investigator for the then-nascent FBI who brought some of those responsible to justice, including local cattle baron William King Hale and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart.
But deep into development of the script, DiCaprio turned the film on its head. As Scorsese has told the story in several interviews — most recently with The New Yorker — DiCaprio sat Scorsese down and suggested that instead, he should play Burkhart: a craven, complicit man who married an Osage woman named Mollie and wound up caught between two worlds.
Although that meant ripping the script apart and starting almost from scratch, Scorsese leapt at DiCaprio’s suggestion. This was partly to bring the tribe’s perspective closer to the heart of the story via Mollie, and to swerve away from a white-savior narrative. But as Scorsese told The New Yorker, he had other reasons to do this, too. Prior to the change, the film was shaping up to be a detailed, methodical procedural, like the book it was based on, and something in Scorsese’s nature rebelled against that. He found he didn’t know how to tell that story. It was too simple. It lacked mystery. Through surviving members of Ernest and Mollie’s family, Scorsese discovered something that didn’t factor into the book, something unknowable that couldn’t be solved like a crime: In spite of everything, the couple had loved each other.
This is how the 80-year-old master arrived
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