For Killers Of The Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese wanted to “do right” by Osage people

Following a presentation of the first look at footage from Killers Of The Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese (and The A.V. Club’s Matt Schimkowitz) hustled over to a luncheon held in his honor at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Nevada. As previously announced, Scorsese was presented with the “Legend of Cinema” award for his contributions to the medium over a nearly six-decade career. Though the show started with a presentation from sponsor Fathom Events, trying to push Bush-era conservatism back on our deteriorating democracy via trailers for a Golda Meir biopic starring Helen Mirren in very sketchy make-up and a biopic on Duck Dynasty patriarch and noted bigot Phil Robertson.

Nevertheless, after we sat through trailers for Fathom Events we hope never to see, Martin Scorsese took the stage to accept his prize. Admittedly, when Scorsese thinks of legends, he thinks of Fellini, Hitchcock, Brunel, Ford, and the many heads that would make up his Mount Film-more. Eventually, he accepted the honor. “I understand that the goal should be to infuse excitement and enthusiasm to the next generation of artists,” he said, “to inspire and ultimately, really to be a good teacher.” Mission accomplished.

In addition to receiving the honor, Scorsese sat down for a conversation with his old pal Leonardo DiCaprio. The two discussed how Scorsese got into the movie business (he was a sickly kid, and his parents “didn’t know what to do with me, so they took me to the movies”) and when he started to notice directors. But it was toward the end of their brief talk that they got to his new movie Killers Of The Flower Moon.

DiCaprio, who stars as Ernest Burkhart, offered words from writer David Gran, the author of the book the film is based on, to contextualize the movie.

“Late in the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the wealthiest people per capita in the country, because oil had been discovered under their land, and one by one, they began to die of mysterious circumstances,” DiCaprio read. “Killers Of The Flower Moon tells the story of one of American history’s most sinister conspiracies and terrible racial injustices, like the Tulsa race massacre, which occurred only 30 miles away. During that exact same time period, this critical chapter has long been erased from the nation’s history books a century after these crimes.”

“Killers was filmed in Oklahoma, the very place where these events took place and several Osages whose relatives perished appeared in the film. It is an American crime story. It is less about who did it and who didn’t. It is about widespread complicity and conspiracy, and ultimately it is about a reckoning with our past that is long overdue.”

The actor turned to Scorsese and asked why it was so important to film in Oklahoma. Scorsese was concise in his explanation: “To do right by them.”

“My great interest was how some of these guys could have done what they did,” Scorsese said. “And yet, at the same time, accepted it. At the same time, saying, you know, we love you and then rationalized it by saying, you know, civilization, one comes in, the other goes on. It’s just a natural tragedy.”

To do that, Scorsese said he shifted the focus from the F.B.I. coming in and solving the crime to DiCaprio’s character Ernest “because actually, the heart of the picture—we learned from many in the Osage that Ernest and Mollie really were in love with each other, really in love. Yet what he did and how she trusted him. How does that happen; how can we create that? We just put ourselves in that world with those people. His character developed that way, line by line, scene by scene. We kept working on that script until the last day of shooting.”

He explained that it was “key” for Scorsese to work with the Osage people. “It was about immersing see ourselves in that world, and the only way to do that was to go there and be there and stay there and be with the Osages.” However, it wasn’t always easy for the vertically challenged New Yorker. “They rented a house for me. It was big because an oil man had had it. It was a big place, and I’m a small guy,” Scorsese said while he adorably pretended to be in an oversized chair.

“It was tough. It was not an easy film to make. And I am a New Yorker, and there are prairies out there. The wild horses. We immersed ourselves in it and tried to do right by them as much as possible.”

Killers Of The Flower Moon hits theaters on October 6.