Leonardo DiCaprio opens up about shaping ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
As they prepare for the 2024 Oscars ceremony, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, the leading stars of Martin Scorsese’s 2023 historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, met to discuss their roles and the movie’s important message.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio portrays Ernest Burkhart, who marries a local Osage woman, Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle, at the request of his uncle William Hale. Hale’s motivation lies in hopes of inheriting the oil fields owned by the Osage people.
Scorsese co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth as an adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name. As one of Scorsese’s long-term collaborators, DiCaprio also had a hand in adapting the book.
In a new interview with The Guardian, DiCaprio discussed his role in developing the movie and his complex character. “Well, it was a long development process,” he sighed. “We got the option to the book, and that was particularly exciting for me because it was this lost chapter of American history.”
“In a lot of the environmental work that I do, you see Indigenous communities all around the world with similar stories,” he noted. “Some of these environmental heroes are at risk of perishing from major oil companies, drilling companies, mining companies. So, this story is not something that we could just look at as being 100 years old. This was a place rich with oil and resources and rife with conflict, and that’s happening everywhere now.”
Having noted the story’s enduring relevance, DiCaprio continued, outlining the meticulous adaptation process. He explained that Grann’s book focuses on “the birth of the FBI”, in which Jesse Plemons’ character, Thomas Bruce White Sr, plays a central role.
DiCaprio was initially set to take on the role of Thomas White, but “after a year or two of developing that, we started to have these read-throughs, and we just didn’t feel anything emotionally,” he explained. “I remember we had a roundtable before Lily was involved, and we kind of just looked at each other. And we’re like: ‘OK, well, this is a pretty great whodunnit.’ A Hitchcockian murder mystery. But I’m not interested in plot. I’m not interested in that type of structure.”
They finally found their focus for the movie when examining the relationship between Mollie and Ernest. “Then we started to look at these few scenes between Mollie and Ernest, and we realised that was really the heartbeat of the story,” DiCaprio continued. “That also brought us into the Osage world and community more, which led us to scrap the whole script and start anew.
“Then, after we got our new draft, which was largely based on films like A Place in the Sun and The Heiress – this very twisted, bizarre love story – Marty was invited by the Osage to listen more deeply to their story and their version of what happened. And then after Lily came on as well, the whole story started to take on an entirely new structure.”
On January 23rd, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce this year’s Oscar nominations, several of which Killers of the Flower Moon expects to earn. Watch the movie’s official trailer below.
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