Lily Gladstone says indigenous story like ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ was “long overdue”
With the 2024 Oscars ceremony fast approaching, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, the leading stars of Martin Scorsese’s 2023 triumph, Killers of the Flower Moon, have met up to discuss the movie’s vital message.
Based on David Grann’s intensely revealing non-fiction book of the same name from 2017, Killers of the Flower Moon follows a true tale of corruption and greed in 1920s Oklahoma. It exposes the unsightly truth behind the mistreatment of Native Americans during the country’s first oil prospecting wave.
Speaking to The Guardian in a recent interview alongside DiCaprio, Gladstone highlighted the importance of Scorsese’s movie in educating modern society and correcting long-ingrained misconceptions.
“It’s long overdue, this particular story,” she said. In the story, DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart marries an Osage woman, Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle, just so he can inherit her family’s oil rights.
“The Osage community didn’t speak about it for such a long time – it’s such a fresh trauma,” Gladstone pursued. “When David Grann’s book was written, it opened a lot of old wounds. But sometimes, you need to open wounds to begin a healing process.
“The book is not taught in public schools in Oklahoma because teachers have been made too afraid to teach it on any curriculum. So it’s important to have a film out there that people can connect with and be shown as part of history. It’s a long-overdue moment of representation.”
Concluding her point, Gladstone felt enthusiastic about the future following Scorsese’s example. “I think we will get a lot of other TV shows and films that are made by Native people,” she said, adding that we have seen the back of “the era of the ‘classic western’, which relegated us to being bloodthirsty savages.”
“We didn’t have our leading ladies in our sweeping, tragic love stories like classic old Hollywood. So placing this incredible Indigenous cast in these roles that we’ve been excluded from in film history is very restorative. We had so much Osage input into Killers of the Flower Moon, and that really shaped everything you see on screen. I hope this will set a new precedent for people working with communities in Hollywood,” she added.
Watch the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon below.
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