Inside Scorsese’s Meeting With the Osage That Changed ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
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On a November evening in 2019, Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese and about a dozen members of his production team for Killers of the Flower Moon settled into folding chairs in a wood-paneled community hall in the Osage Nation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
They had flown more than 1,300 miles after members of the tribe’s Grayhorse community wrote to Scorsese to express their concerns that he would be the next in a long line of white Hollywood filmmakers to distort Indigenous history on the big screen.
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Scorsese was about three years into working on his film adaptation of David Grann’s bestselling 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which is based on the true story of the Reign of Terror, which lasted from 1921 to 1926. After oil was discovered below the reservation in 1897, some tribal members became among the richest people in America, since each Osage had been granted 657 acres of land. As Grann wrote, “In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than thirty million dollars, the equivalent today of more than four hundred million dollars. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. ‘Lo and behold!’ the New York weekly Outlook exclaimed. ‘The Indian, instead of starving to death… enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.’”
But that wealth attracted hordes of white men who tried to steal the rights to their land and oil royalties through fraud, marriage, and murder. Estimates place the number of unsolved killings of Osage tribal members during this time in the hundreds.
Like the book, Eric Roth’s original version of the screenplay to Killers of the Flower Moon largely focused on the federal agents sent in to investigate the violence, which led to the birth of the FBI. Megastar Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as the lawman in charge of investigating the killings.
But over the course of three hours that night, many of the more than 200 Osage people who gathered at Wakon Iron Hall in Pawhuska told Scorsese that the oft-told storyline lacked their voices and perspectives and failed to capture the lasting trauma from that era, according to at least six people who attended the meeting. Some also told Scorsese that they wanted him to put the Osage at the forefront of their own story and not just cast them as victims of horrible acts, as Hollywood so often did to Indigenous peoples.
“Maybe most of all, I remember the mood and the emotion of it,” Scorsese tells Rolling Stone. “When we walked into the Wakon Iron Hall, everyone in the community was lined up to greet us and shake our hands.”
The Reign of Terror may feel like a distant historical event to some viewers, but for many of the people who came to speak with Scorsese, it was a moment in time that continues to shape their lives.
When Scorsese agreed to make the film adaptation, there was a palpable sense of concern in the Grayhorse community, the smallest of the three districts in the Osage Nation that is central to the story. Wilson Pipestem, an Osage attorney who organized the letter inviting Scorsese to the dinner, says their message was straightforward: “You need to listen to us.”
“People were legitimately concerned that we were getting exploited all over again if this movie isn’t done right,” explains Jim Gray, the tribe’s former principal chief and the great-grandson of Henry Roan, whose 1923 murder is central to the plot. Roan was discovered shot in the back of the head, his body slumped behind the steering wheel of his car. More unsolved murders followed, including two of Roan’s cousins, while other Osage tribal members became afflicted with mysterious illnesses, only later discovering that they were being poisoned.
“You don’t have to embellish this story,” Gray recalls saying to Scorsese that night. “You just got to tell it. Tell it with the context of the Osage as human beings.”
According to the Osage News, Scorsese listened intently to all of the Osage who wished to share their thoughts and feelings with him. Then he stood up to speak.
“My heart is in the right place,” Scorsese said. “I hope I can give you that sense of knowing that what you’re giving to me, in my hands, that I’m going to try better than my best, I can tell you that. We’re working as hard as we can … we won’t be finished with it until it’s right, I can promise you that.”
After the meeting, Scorsese rewrote portions of the script, adding in the stories and perspectives he heard from Osage people. The script had already been reworked to focus more on the marriage of Mollie Burkhart (an excellent Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who’d inherited considerable wealth, and a Texas Rancher and WWI veteran named Ernest Burkhart (whom DiCaprio was recast to play), and Scorsese says he walked away from the meeting with a deeper understanding of their love and the strength of their marriage.
That dinner also led to a remarkable level of Osage involvement in the movie, says Gray, who was able to see a private screening of the film. Several members of the Osage Nation were cast to play their relatives; others helped create accurate wardrobes and taught cast members, like Gladstone and Robert De Niro, who plays the villainous mastermind William Hale, how to speak Osage.
The result is a film that, according to Gray, bursts with Osage culture. He says that he and many other Osage people weren’t sure if Scorsese would even respond to their letter, but now they can’t deny the power it had.
“You feel like you watched an Osage film,” Gray says. He and several other descendants of Osage people portrayed in the film were flown to New York City earlier this year for a private screening. “The white savior narrative isn’t really there. And it’s been replaced largely by the Osage.”
I was being entrusted with their story, which was momentous — it was as if I’d been handed a precious ancient object to guard and protect. I was deeply moved. I was also daunted, in a good way.
Martin Scorsese
Brandy Lemon, an Osage Nation congresswoman and a consultant on the film, says the recasting of DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart also forces the narrative to center more around the experiences of his wife, Mollie, and the Osage people.
“It’s about the strength of a woman to survive somehow, some way, against all odds,” Lemon says. “It’s about so many more things than just the Reign of Terror.”
Looking back, Gray believes that the Grayhorse community’s letter “worked.” And Scorsese, for his part, says that on the night of the 2019 dinner, Gray “used an expression — ‘make it right’ — that spoke volumes to me.”
The relationships built that evening — over a meal of meat gravy, fry bread, corn, and squash — “became a touchstone for me. I kept returning to it again and again for sustenance, for inspiration, for particular details, turns of phrase,” Scorsese says.
“I was being entrusted with their story, which was momentous — it was as if I’d been handed a precious ancient object to guard and protect. I was deeply moved. I was also daunted, in a good way,” he adds. “That evening put a human face to every detail, and it gave it a heart. A beating heart. It was transformative for me, and it was a great privilege.”
Scorsese says those relationships only strengthened throughout production and had a heavy influence on every aspect of the film. The filmmaker, as well as his star and executive producer DiCaprio, continued to meet and maintain a dialogue with the Osage Nation.
“I could never have made the picture in any other way, but then I would never have wanted to. For me, every movie is an exploration, a search, a discovery. It has to be — for me, for my collaborators, for the audience, and for the people who make up the world we’re entering into,” offers Scorsese.
Jason Asenap, a Comanche and Muscogee filmmaker and critic who writes about Indigenous cinema, says Scorsese’s decision to make a film with the Osage rather than simply about them is unheard of. He hopes that choice has a lasting impact on the industry.
“This is a huge, huge movie, and it’s supposed to be, like they’re saying, an American classic,” says Asenap. “So, I think it speaks to, hopefully, how to do it properly.”
Killers of the Flower Moon received a nine-minute standing ovation at its premiere last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where Scorsese sat among dozens of the Osage people who helped make the film. It will release theatrically Oct. 20 before streaming on Apple TV+, and Scorsese hopes it will bring awareness to an important but overlooked part of American history.
“I hope we’ve made something that the Osage community can see and absorb and accept as an offering,” Scorsese says. “A movie, yes. But an offering that acknowledges the extent of the terror, but that might also give some kind of solace. That’s my hope.”
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