When Martin Scorsese took to the stage at the Royal Festival Hall last week to chat with fellow director Edgar Wright, it was like stepping into the arena of a rock star. The director behind it Angry bull, Good people AND taxi driver was met with a standing ovation from an enthusiastic audience. Even if he had Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the stars of his new film, an epic 1920s crime novel, by his side. Flower Moon KillerThey suspect the biggest applause will still go to “Marty.”
After all, this is the man who revolutionized cinema. Scorsese’s early films addressed masculinity and violence with a sensibility that fell somewhere between pop culture and counterculture. Cue scenes like Joe Pesci’s terrifying riff on “Funny How?” Good peopleor De Niro’s explosive denouement taxi driver. In recent years, his cinema has conquered new directions: spiritual (Kundun, Be quiet), historical (Age of Innocence) – even a family film (Hugo).
And even at the age of 80, the New Yorker, who now wears an olive green jacket, appears to have lost none of his passion for cinema. “I don’t know what the secret is,” he says. “Maybe the secret is that I’m curious. About many things. I mean science too… I don’t understand it. [it] but I like it! I’m interested in reading, discovering new authors, discovering old authors and books,” he breathes. “Old movies. Or new cinema from different parts of the world.”
That’s certainly part of it. Flower Moon Killer, a book Scorsese has wanted to adapt for years. This true story, written by David Grann, tells how members of the Osage Indian Tribe of Oklahoma were systematically murdered in the 1920s in a brutal robbery of oil buried under their allotted land. It took Scorsese and his co-writer Eric Roth years to get their bearings.
“We entered the world of Oklahoma from the outside—the outside was Washington, D.C., and the Bureau of Investigation was trying to unravel the mystery of who did it,” Scorsese says. “And when I started reading it, I said, ‘It doesn’t matter who did it or who didn’t, because they all did it.’ “We all did it. Ultimately it is part of our human nature… the civilization of Europe and Northern Europe that created this America.”
The film can be seen as an indictment of white America’s rampant imperialism, corporate greed, or a biblical tale of envy (Grann calls it a parable of the country’s original sin).
“The film alludes to this when it says: “I work for my money.” “These Osages are not in it for their money, so God should not give them the grace of oil,” Scorsese said. Resentment builds, and then the killings begin. Scorsese dispassionately depicts a series of Osage murders that seem straight out of his mafia masterpiece. Good people.
DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran and husband of Molly (Lily Gladstone), a resident of the Osage settlement. De Niro is Ernest’s uncle, Bill “King” Hale, a local powerful man who declares, “The Osage are the best and handsomest people on God’s earth” and encourages his cousin to marry into the community. “What really interested me was the fact that they started marrying families,” Scorsese says. “And the basic rights—the rights to oil—were passed down through the female line of the family. So, if you get married, you will inherit money when your wife dies. So I’m wondering: did everyone do this?”
To convey this increasingly menacing story, Scorsese turned to two of his favorite characters as members of Molly’s family are sent away. He never put them together. “It was Bob De Niro who told me about Leo years ago when he did it. This boy’s life“,” the director tells me. Michael Caton-Jones’s 1993 film was to date the only time De Niro and DiCaprio worked together.
“He usually never said, ‘You have to work with this person or that person.’ DiCaprio was different. One day, during a phone conversation about something else, De Niro told Scorsese that he had just worked with this guy, Leo DiCaprio – you should meet him, you should work with him, he’s really good.
De Niro working with Scorsese for the first time Average streets 50 years ago he documented his tenth collaboration with the director here. For DiCaprio, this is the sixth appearance; a fruitful period began in the 2000s. New York criminal organizations – a film in which De Niro was originally supposed to star. “We never thought we’d all be working on a movie like this,” Scorsese says. “But it worked. And you see on the screen that the relationship between De Niro and DiCaprio is very similar to the relationship between Bill Hale and Ernest, and so they took advantage of it. And I have to say it was very inspiring when we were able to enjoy those moments on set.
But the De Niro-DiCaprio axis is just one aspect of the film that explores this dark and dismal period of Osage history with absolute accuracy. “It was the first film I’d ever seen where Native people told their story,” says Osage Chief Jeffrey Standing Bear, “from their point of view… I’ve never seen anything like it.” The Hollywood films that have come close to representing the Native American voice in the past are Kevin Costner’s, he adds. Dances with Wolves and Arthur Penn Little big manwith Dustin Hoffman.
Chief Standing Bear first met Scorsese in July 2019, when the director came to Pawhuska for a meeting. “When he first came, [despite] “Knowing that he was a world-class director, we were still worried,” admits Standing Bear.
“You could be the best in the world, like him, and still tell the story in someone else’s voice. We kept hearing that this film could have been made in other places, in other states where financial incentives were offered. So we weren’t sure. But he comes in, sits down and one of the first words he says is: “We will film here.” And immediately he and his team began working with community members.”
Given the complexity of the story, Scorsese also makes no apologies for the film’s 206-minute running time. No surprise: his last film Irishman the time was three hours and 29 minutes. “That’s how long it took to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it,” he shrugs. “I think now you watch a show on TV, sometimes for five hours at a time. You go to the theater and watch plays that often last three and a half hours. And, as adult viewers, they usually respect the work and look at it as a whole. So why can’t we do the same with movies?”
Scorsese has been a leading voice in the fight for the cinematic experience for many years. Although both Irishman AND murderer…supported by streaming platforms (Netflix and Apple), Scorsese has been supporting film preservation and restoration for many years through the Film Foundation, an organization he co-founded in 1990. He also didn’t shy away from criticizing Marvel and DC fans when he said comic book movies don’t feel like movies and are more like theme parks – a statement he doesn’t shy away from. “There will be generations now who will think… these are films,” he said recently. GQ.
Now it’s about wanting to “share” my encyclopedic knowledge of cinema with young people and ignite their passion. “I like to excite them,” he says. “I love seeing how people react to a film I recommend to them. And maybe this will help them. And if they don’t come up with anything artistic, maybe their life will be a little enriched. I like it. I just really like it. I once said that I am more of a teacher than a director.”
He is also far from finished making films. Already at the bank Identity crisis: just one night, a documentary about New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, which he co-directed. This is what he plans to do Dispute, another adaptation of David Grann’s book – again starring DiCaprio and again for Apple Original Films. Based on Grann’s Headquarters: A Tale of a Shipwreck, Mutiny and murderThis is an 18th century story about survival on a desert island.
This sounds tiring to anyone, let alone someone over 80. Doesn’t he get tired? “Yes, I’m tired,” he says. “But even when you’re physically tired, I still have five or six ideas that I want to pursue… movies that I’d like to do.”
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.