Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Martin Scorsese has the best curveball in the business. His 2013 film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on the true story of a large-scale financial fraudster, is also his wildest and wackiest comedy, closer in inspiration to Jerry Lewis than to Oliver Stone. His modern-gothic horror-thriller “Shutter Island,” from 2010, is primarily a refracted personal essay about his childhood spent watching paranoid film-noir classics in the shadow of nuclear war. And now his forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” his first attempt—as an octogenarian—at a Western, is essentially a marital drama akin to Stanley Kubrick’s final film, “Eyes Wide Shut.” It borrows more from such intimate psychological dramas as “Phantom Thread,” “Suspicion,” and, yes, “Gaslight” than from any of the Western classics of John Ford. In other words, the first of the mysteries that Scorsese’s new film poses isn’t in the plot—it’s the mystery of its own genesis.

When I met Scorsese several weeks ago, I told him, before we got started, that I do very few interviews, because, well, I have a director’s films, and, if watching them doesn’t give me enough to think about and to write about, then I’m in the wrong profession. That said, there was much that I wanted to know about Scorsese, not least because of the paradox of his artistic position: he directs extraordinary movies on hundred-million-dollar budgets yet makes them deeply personal and packs them with artistic flourishes—spectacular camera moves, intimate observations, dramatic shocks, and moments of performance—that are as daring as they are distinctive. I wanted to ask about his methods because I’ve long felt that a huge part of the art of directing is producing—that the originality of a finished film usually has its roots in the distinctiveness of its director’s approach to the systems and methods that get it made.

I’d seen something of Scorsese’s behind-the-scenes originality in Jonas Mekas’s documentary about the making of Scorsese’s 2006 gangland drama “The Departed”—the movie for which Scorsese finally won the Oscar for Best Director, after five previous nominations ended in disappointment—and which heralded his great outburst of work in the past decade and a half. I’d also seen it in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in the way that Scorsese took the increasingly commonplace technology of C.G.I. and proceeded to use it like a painter. But the part of his process on “Killers of the Flower Moon” that I was most curious about involved the subject matter. Set in Oklahoma in the nineteen-twenties, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, a colleague of mine at The New Yorker. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a white man who marries an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), under the direction of his gangster-like uncle (Robert De Niro), as part of a wide-ranging and murderous scheme to pry away the wealth of the Osage Nation, on whose territory oil has been discovered.

One of the common frustrations of watching movies adapted from books is the inevitable abridgment of the source material. Reading a book several hundred pages long takes many more hours than watching even a longish feature, and, often, one can sense an adaptation’s compression and gaps without having read the book. Scorsese’s new film is colossal—three hours and twenty-six minutes—but even that duration could never encompass the plethora of incident that Grann delivers in his fascinating, horrifying book. Scorsese escapes this dilemma with a move of almost Houdini-like ingenuity, zeroing in on something that even Grann’s voluminous research couldn’t shed much light on: what was that couple’s relationship like? Thanks to this change in emphasis, the task of writing the script became not one of condensation but one of expansion—of filling a historical gap by means of imagination. And the way in which the couple’s relationship is reimagined, as Scorsese made clear to me, embodies his own grappling with the underlying morality of Grann’s tale—a responsibility to place the Osage people at the center of the story that turned out to shift the very aesthetic of the movie.

Almost all directors are also actors; they just happen to reserve their performances for their cast and crew. Some also perform in movies, their own or those of other directors; Scorsese has done both, albeit in incidental roles. In “Killers of the Flower Moon” he appears in a small but crucial dramatic role, a performance that is far more powerful than a Hitchcockian wink or a cameo to please connoisseurs. Scorsese won his Oscar at a time when the studios had already become inhospitable to his kind of large-scale yet artistically ambitious filmmaking, and the ensuing rise of superhero movies and other primarily youth-centered I.P. franchises made matters worse. Scorsese has leveraged his eminence to take a leading role in advocating for studios to both invest in the preservation and distribution of classic movies and release new and substantial movies by ambitious directors. In effect, he has become the face and the voice of the cause of cinematic art—past, present, and future. No spoilers, but, when he acts in “Killers,” he nonetheless speaks for himself and speaks, too, for the cinema at large.

In person, Scorsese has a lot to say, and the fascination of what he says is heightened by his way of saying it. Just as a scene in a movie may be made of dozens of shots of diverse durations, assembled in various ways, and often ranging far in time and space and tone, so Scorsese speaks in a free-associative, quick-cut, montage-like manner that is entirely his own, building drama as the details accrete and connect with verbal counterparts to cuts, dissolves, superimpositions, and other kinds of cinematic punctuation. His conversation is the image of a mind in motion, ranging freely between memory and perception, between practical specifics and ideas, between firsthand experience and notions gleaned from watching movies—all infused, like his films, with purpose and passion. Just as “Killers of the Flower Moon” was the fastest three and a half hours of my moviegoing life, my conversation with Scorsese about it was the fastest hour of conversation I’d ever experienced. Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s something special about “Killers of the Flower Moon.” You always tell good, moving, passionate stories, but here I felt like you were doing something more than telling a story. I felt like you were bearing witness. Did you have that feeling when you were making the film? Was that part of what went into the project?

Definitely. And I think it goes back to a time in ’74, when I had this opportunity to spend some time, only a day or two, maybe two days, with the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe, in South Dakota, and I was involved with a project that didn’t work out. It was a traumatic experience, and I was so young I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the damage and the poverty. I grew up with poverty in another way, which was working-class men and women on Elizabeth Street and Mott Street and Mulberry, but we also had the Bowery. So I grew up with that poverty. But I never saw anything like this, and I can’t describe why—it was hopeless. I met some Native Americans again in L.A. at the time, and we talked about another project, and I saw too that this incredible fantasy that we had growing up as children was something that—even despite the wonderful attempts at righting the wrongs of the Hollywood films with “Broken Arrow,” “Drumbeat,” “Apache,” “Devil’s Doorway”—all the films that were pro-Native American, there were still American white actors playing the Native Americans. But the stories were balanced toward not only who had right on their side, but also a respect for the culture, particularly in “Broken Arrow,” I thought.

But, in any event, no, I was always aware of poverty, and I always felt I was witness to it there only for a couple of days. But culminating in the end of the Western with Sam Peckinpah, there was a new territory then: how are we to think, what are we to make of all this in terms of the Native American experience? Are they really gone? In a way, as children, we thought, Well, they’re with us, but they’re like us now. We were children and, I think, meant to think that way of the forced assimilation, to a certain extent, of the Native populations. But I didn’t know. When I got out there and I saw what it was, it was different.