Martin Scorsese interview: Wide-open Oklahoma gave filmmaker a canvas for 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, shot his new film — “Killers of the Flower Moon” — in Oklahoma.

“When I got there, all I can tell you is those prairies are quite something, and they open your mind and your heart,” Scorsese said. “They are just beautiful.”

Scorsese said he drove down roads on those prairies in Oklahoma and saw bison and cows and wild horses that had been put out to pasture for the rest of their lives. It was idyllic.

“And so I said, ‘Where do I put the camera at this point? How much of the sky (should you show)? How much of the prairie?’”

Scorsese said he wanted to see more of this land.

“And then I began to realize that the land itself could be sinister,” he said. “In other words, you’re in a place like this and you don’t see people for miles. You could do anything — particularly, it turns out, 100 years ago.”

The story depicted in “Killers of the Flower Moon” is based on the Osage Nation “Reign of Terror” of one century ago. The Osage people were made wealthy by the discovery of oil, but they became targets for people who were motivated by greed.

Based on David Grann’s best-selling book of the same name, “Killers of the Flower Moon” will get its much-anticipated release in theaters this Friday, although tickets can be purchased for Thursday screenings.

Scorsese took part in a global and virtual press conference Monday in advance of the release. Invited journalists were asked to submit as many as three questions each for the press conference. Scorsese answered six questions during the 26-minute Zoom meeting, including one about his introduction to Oklahoma and one about his recurring collaborations with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, who star in “Flower Moon” alongside Lily Gladstone.

De Niro plays William Hale, who wields influence over many, including his nephew Ernest Burkhart, played by DiCaprio. Burkhart marries into oil money when an Osage woman (Mollie, played by Gladstone) becomes his bride.

One by one, Mollie’s family members die.

DiCaprio initially was going to play Tom White, an FBI man dispatched to investigate serial murders within the Osage Nation. When it was decided the core of the movie should be the Ernest-Mollie relationship, though, DiCaprio forfeited the FBI role to Jesse Plemons.

When talking about the prairies of Oklahoma, Scorsese said: “I realized this is a place where you don’t need the law. I mean, you have the law, but the law isn’t working that way. The law, you can make the law work for you if you’re smart enough, and as we know now, many people do.

“But what I mean by that is that it’s still a wide open territory. You have law, but it’s a wide open territory. The place, as beautiful as it is, can shift to being very sinister. And what I wanted to capture ultimately was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of a kind of easygoing genocide.”

That, said Scorsese, is why the “Killers of the Flower Moon” team chose to focus on Mollie and Ernest. Trust should be a big part of love — right?

“So when there’s betrayal that way, that deep — and we know that for a fact that it was that way — here’s our story,” he said.

Also, building the film around Mollie and Ernest allowed Scorsese to share the story from the inside out. It’s not a whodunit. It’s “who didn’t do it?”

“It’s a story of complicity,” he said. “It’s a story of sin by omission — silent complicity in certain cases.”

Scorsese recalled his first meeting with Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and other Osage Nation representatives. He said they were naturally cautious and that he had to explain that he was going to deal with the story as honestly and truthfully as possible and wasn’t going to fall into the trap of portraying Natives in a cliched way.

“What I didn’t really understand the first couple of meetings was that this is an ongoing situation, an ongoing story, out in Oklahoma,” Scorsese said. “In other words, these are things that really weren’t talked about, the generation I was talking to and the generation above them — before them, I should say. It was the generation before them that it happened to, so they didn’t talk about it much. And the people involved are still there, meaning the families are still there — the descendants are still there.”

Scorsese said it was very important to him that the Osage be accurately represented. Osage consultants helped with that mission. Gladstone, DiCaprio and De Niro speak the Osage language in the film. De Niro fell in love with the language and wanted to do more scenes speaking the language, according to Scorsese.

“He just liked the sound of it,” the filmmaker said.

Scorsese was asked questions about each of the film’s stars. Casting director Ellen Lewis alerted Scorsese to Gladstone’s work in the 2016 film “Certain Women.” Scorsese thought she was terrific.

“Then COVID hit, and we weren’t able to meet,” he said. “So after COVID — after the pandemic was calming down — we met on Zoom, and I was very, very impressed by her presence, the intelligence and the emotion that’s there in her face. You see it. You feel it. You know that (there is) something working behind the eyes. You could see it happening.

“Also, (there was) her activism, which wasn’t overtaking the art. In other words, the art was in the activism in a sense. So the art takes over and in a way which we think then would be more resonant later on. After you see the movie, you may be thinking about it more rather than a person preaching at you.”

Asked about a 50-year relationship with De Niro and a 20-year relationship with DiCaprio, Scorsese said he and De Niro were teens together.

“He’s the only one who really knows where I come from — the people I knew and that sort of thing, some of them still alive. I know his old friends. And we had a real testing ground in the ’70s where we tried everything and we found that we trusted each other. It’s all about trust and love.

“It’s what it is, and that’s a big deal because, very often, if an actor has a lot of power — and he had a lot of power at that time — an actor could take over your picture; the studio gets angry with you, and the actor comes in and takes it over with them. I never felt that. There was a freedom.”

Years later, De Niro suggested that Scorsese work with this “kid” he had worked with in 1993’s “This Boy’s Life.” The kid was DiCaprio. De Niro said it casually, but he rarely made such suggestions, according to Scorsese.

DiCaprio and Scorsese also developed a kinship and trust. Referencing their team-up on “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Scorsese said, “He came up with wonderful stuff that was outrageous. So I pushed him; he pushed me; then I pushed him more than he pushed me. Suddenly, everything was wild. It’s really quite something.”

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