Read David Grann’s best-selling non-fiction book Flower Moon Killers and you spend a lot of it with the federal government. Originally the upcoming movie was also supposed to focus heavily on the FBI. But the filmmakers decided to make the story of Osage history the main objective, with law enforcement being mere supporting actors. Now, Leonardo DiCaprio explains why they actually turned the movie inside out.
In a film profile by British Vogue, DiCaprio opened up about how he let himself be recast. Initially, he was to play Tom White, the Texas Marshal turned federal agent. He ended up playing Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran who marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and becomes involved in a sinister plot hatched by her uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). (White ended up going to Jesse Plemons, who is still in fourth place.) Focusing on the federal government ultimately felt wrong, he said.
“I just didn’t feel like it got to the heart of the matter,” DiCaprio explained. “We weren’t immersed in Osage history. There was this tiny little scene between Mollie and Ernest that sparked such emotion in us while reading it, and we just started to get into what that relationship was, because it was so twisted and weird and was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. »
Director Martin Scorsese also spoke about the change in a cover story by Time. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all white men,” Scorsese said. “That meant I was taking an outside-in approach, which was something I was concerned about.”
Scorsese and the screenwriter therefore decided to radically rework the original script, which, among other things, gave Gladstone a much more important role.
“Before the rewrites, I had three pages of fairly wordy dialogue,” Gladstone revealed in a statement. interview for Interview:
“But I was having so much trouble with the scenes that when COVID shut everything down and the project went quiet for a minute, I assumed I had missed the audition. About a year later, I got a request to Zoom with Martin Scorsese. And then I was sent new sides with beats on them. Suddenly it was a scene with minimal dialogue… And I was like, “Oh man, I can plug a character in here now.” This is incredible.’ Because I had heard that the rewrites did a complete 180. Leo was supposed to play Tom White, Jesse Plemons’ character.
Flower Moon Killers East scheduled to hit theaters October 20.
(Via British Vogue and variety)