Martin Scorsese reveals the “Killers of the Flower Moon” opening scene he scrapped

The director and co-writer Eric Roth explain how their script evolved, shifting focus from the FBI investigation to Mollie and Ernest Burkhart.

Killers of the Flower Moon almost had a very different opening.

Martin Scorsese's sprawling crime epic chronicles the Osage Reign of Terror, when a group of white men in 1920s Oklahoma targeted and murdered countless Osage people, hoping to steal their wealth and obtain their valuable oil headrights. The film begins years before the murders, opening with an Osage pipe ceremony before revealing the first discovery of oil on Osage land. But in an interview with EW, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth reveal that they almost started the film with a very different historical event: the infamous Oklahoma Land Rush.

At first, Scorsese and Roth planned to focus the film more on the FBI investigation into the murders, with Leonardo DiCaprio originally set to play FBI lawman Tom White (the role that later went to Jesse Plemons). In their initial drafts, the film would have started with a lengthy one-take sequence, exploring how white settlers encroached upon Oklahoma in the late 19th century. After the Civil War, the federal government opened up millions of acres of land in what was formerly known as Indian Territory. At noon on April 22, 1889, an estimated 50,000 settlers rushed across the border, determined to claim their own slice of land.

“It was five pages or so, and it would have taken three weeks to shoot, even with CGI,” Scorsese says. “The idea would be that it was the Land Rush, and you pull back and see the Native Americans just watching. I thought it was a perfect metaphor for what we’ve done. But Eric pointed out that there was so much distance from the Oklahoma Land Rush and the discovery of oil in the late 1890s, and it was too far from this story. But I loved all the detail he put in. It was all going to be done in one take, too.”

“Marty said, ‘Eric, you’ve got to write the details of what we’re going to see,’” Roth remembers. “I must have written 60 little vignettes of furniture falling off wagons or fights breaking out.”

“It was incredible, and everybody loved it,” Scorsese adds. “I know that if I said, ‘That’s the way the picture’s going to open,’ I think they would have set aside a separate unit, like the chariot race in Ben-Hur. But ultimately, we found it was too distant from the actual story."

As the script developed, Scorsese and Roth shifted the perspective of the film to focus on real-life Osage woman Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her white husband Ernest (DiCaprio), the latter having conspired with his uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) to murder multiple Osage people.

Before production began, Scorsese met with Osage leaders like Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, who urged him to shoot on location in Oklahoma and connected him with experts in Osage language, culture, and history. The goal, Roth explains, was not to tell a story about a couple of bad apples and the FBI agents who stopped them, but a more expansive story about how an entire community could be complicit.

“I’m a fairly educated guy, and I’ve been around,” Roth adds. “How did I not know anything about this? One thing that was shocking that I ended up adding was reading about the Tulsa massacre, which was the same year basically. I included it in a slightly different way than Marty ended up doing it, but it was the right thing to do.”

Scorsese says he was particularly inspired by the time he spent in Oklahoma, from meeting with Osage leaders to exploring the open plains. (The one thing he doesn’t miss, he notes with a laugh, was the 110-degree heat while filming.)

“I must say, I’m not a country person,” he admits. “I’m urban. I come from New York. But once you get to this landscape, it’s like the Sahara, or it has certain elements of the desert in North Africa. You think differently. You see things differently. You even hear differently, listening to the coyotes or the thunderstorms way out there.”

Killers of the Flower Moon is in theaters now.

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