Martin Scorsese Recalls Paramount Backing Out of ‘Flower Moon’ After Script Change, Says DiCaprio’s Improv Caused Some Eye Rolls: ‘You Don’t Need That Dialogue’

Zack Sharf
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In a new interview with the WSJ Magazine, Martin Scorsese recalled Paramount Pictures execs telling him point blank they would not be backing the overhauled script for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The rejection came before the new script was even finalized.

“The studio said, ‘We backed the other version, we can’t back this one,’” Scorsese remembered.

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Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth originally planned to faithfully adapt David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name. They collaborated on a script for “Killers of the Flower Moon” that was told from the perspective of the FBI agents who investigated a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to play Tom White, the lead FBI agent on the case. This is the movie Paramount was willing to back, but that changed when DiCaprio requested a script overhaul two years into the writing process.

“Myself and Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese said in a recent interview with The Irish Times. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”

Scorsese recently admitted to The New Yorker that this first attempt at “Flower Moon” failed because it was a straightforward procedural drama, which is not something he knows how to pull off. The draft for this iteration of the movie was over 200 pages long and would take “four-and-a-half hours just to read it.”

Once DiCaprio asked for the change, Scorsese and Roth went to work overhauling the script and changing the perspective of the film to focus on the marriage between Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who is pulled into his uncle’s greedy plot to rob the Osage Nation of its wealth, and his Osage wife Mollie (Gladstone). In this new script, the FBI storyline became a subplot and Jesse Plemons stepped in to play Tom White, now a supporting role.

Paramount preferred the procedural take on “Flower Moon,” according to Scorsese, and the film’s new script and ballooning budget forced them to drop the project. It was not the first time Paramount parted ways with Scorsese, having bailed on “The Irishman” due to its own lofty budget (Netflix ended up financing and distributing it). When Apple stepped in to finance the $200 million “Flower Moon,” Paramount rejoined as a theatrical distribution partner.

Elsewhere in his WSJ Magazine interview, Scorsese briefly reflected on how “Flower Moon” brought together his two longtime muses: Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The two actors could not be more different, the director explained. Scorsese remembered DiCaprio’s set discussions and dialogue improvisations being “endless, endless, endless” during production.

“Then Bob didn’t want to talk,” Scorsese added. “Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we’d tell [Leo], ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” opens in theaters Oct. 20 from Apple and Paramount.

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