Martin Scorsese Says He Couldn’t Have Made Killers of the Flower Moon “Even 10 Years Ago”
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The post Martin Scorsese Says He Couldn’t Have Made Killers of the Flower Moon “Even 10 Years Ago” appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.]
One of the fascinating things about a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese is that film lovers have literal decades of his work to explore, and with it the opportunity to observe how he’s evolved as a filmmaker since his earliest triumphs — an evolution Scorsese himself seems quite conscious of. “In effect, you always make the same film, but does it always have to be the same way?” he told an audience at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on Oct. 18th, following a screening of his newest production, Killers of the Flower Moon.
Added Scorsese, “Maybe the way changes.”
Based on the book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon finds the famed director exploring the Western genre for the first time, as he depicts the brutal murder spree orchestrated by white men like William King Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to rob the oil-rich Osage people of the 1920s. During a post-screening Q&A, Scorsese was asked by the moderator if Flower Moon was a film that he could have made years ago, and his answer to that was a long, but frank, “no.”
As he put it, many factors contribute to how a filmmaker might change with the passing of time: “It’s possible that you might mature in a certain way as a person, whether that’s just on the surface or that’s spiritually or whatever — and, somehow, the work has to reflect that. And then the technique and style has to reflect that.”
For Scorsese, the scene from Killers of the Flower Moon that encapsulated this change in approach was the scene set directly after a bomb has killed the last remaining sister of Mollie Burkhart, played by Lily Gladstone.
As Scorsese described it, the original plan for the shot involved Ernest running back into the house he shares with Mollie, to find her in the living room with their children, with a tracking shot. “I said, ‘That’s boring, we can’t do that.’ So then Lily said, ‘What about the storm basement?’ And I said, yeah, every house here has gotta have a basement for the tornado. It’s great. Let’s go in there.”
This led to a completely different concept for the scene, a shot that required less forced movement, instead capturing the raw grief of Mollie as she realizes what’s happened. “We start the camera here and we move through the house and we look around and we go to the door, the door opens, and we look down. There she is. And then Leo says it, and she screams.”
Said Scorsese, “The camera needed to move and it needed to discover them, just hovering together. And then of course it needed to experience, from that angle, her cry — which is like the scream of all the injustices of the world, and all the Indigenous right there. And if you notice, if you see the picture again, the baby stops [crying]. Everybody freezes. They froze because it came from the depth of her soul.”
It was a profound moment that was only possible because of an important lesson Scorsese has learned over the years: “The story you’re telling is the key, and you shouldn’t get in the way of the story.”
That’s a lesson he confessed to not having learned right away, while reflecting on his earlier films. “Yeah, we got in the way of the story,” he said with a laugh, reflecting on bolder days. “‘Watch this!’ You know? But you have to find a peace with the style. Be at peace with it and say, that’s enough here, so we should move on.”
It’s a journey that’s continued for him since that time. Which is why, he said, “this film ultimately could not have been made by me — even 10 years ago.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is in theaters now. Read our full review of the film, as well as our updated ranking of Scorsese’s filmography.
Martin Scorsese Says He Couldn’t Have Made Killers of the Flower Moon “Even 10 Years Ago”
Liz Shannon Miller
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