How Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio tackled America’s original sin

Martin Scorsese still remembers Robert De Niro calling him in the middle of shooting This Boy’s Life, where he played Leonardo DiCaprio’s abusive stepfather. “He said ‘I’m working with this kid, he’s really good. You should work with him sometime’.”

That was Leonardo DiCaprio’s first movie role; he was 18, fresh out of television and could hardly believe he was working with the star of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. “I didn’t have a template of what acting really was. I’d taken acting classes, I’d read up on it, but until you see that man walk into the room and the respect he commands by his sheer presence and his commitment to his craft … the entire generation of actors I grew up with look at him as the gold standard, and here he was.”

Scorsese laughs, of course, as DiCaprio tells that well-worn story. It would be another nine years before he cast the kid in Gangs of New York but, six collaborations later, their names are welded together. De Niro, who came from his neighbourhood – they knew each other well enough to say hello from childhood before making Mean Streets, set in Little Italy, in 1973 – was his leading man for the first half of his career. DiCaprio took the baton for the second half.

Scorsese, right, on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon with Jesse Plemons and Robert De Niro.

De Niro and DiCaprio, however, hadn’t worked together again until Scorsese brought them together for his vast new film, Killers of the Flower Moon. “To be there, 30 years later,” says DiCaprio solemnly, “was a very special and meaningful moment for me.”

Killers of the Flower Moon stands out from Scorsese’s other work as an angry film. Scorsese’s characters are habitually tormented, trapped in wrong lives by the expectations of others and in perpetual trouble with God; they are mafiosi or failed sportsmen or men who simply lack the courage to make their own moral choices, like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, however, the director ranges outwards to rub at one of the greatest stains on American history: the crushing of the country’s First Nations people. His antihero here, Ernest Burkhart, is a cold-blooded murderer, but he is nothing like Travis Bickle, the lone-wolf killer; he is just a cog in the wheel. The real target of Scorsese’s film is systemic racism.

It is a true story, drawn from David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same title, which has the secondary title The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The Osage tribe were rounded up into a reservation in Oklahoma in 1870. When oil was discovered there almost 50 years later, they became fantastically wealthy - in 1923, the tribe earned US$30 million - which meant they also became magnets for every snake-oil salesman, grifter and conman the Wild West could trick up.

JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion as members of the Osage.

Osage women, who, under tribal law, owned their families’ houses, were not deemed competent under the law, so they needed a white man to sign off on their bank withdrawals. White men who married Osage women acted as agents and were also able to inherit from their wives. They were sitting pretty. They could also get impatient.

Ernest Burkhart arrives in town penniless, having been recently demobbed after the First World War. His protector is his uncle Bill Hale, a cattleman and landowner played by Robert De Niro at his gruffest. Hale is considered and considers himself a friend to the Osage, offering his help when the murders start even as it is obvious to us that he is behind them. So when Ernest marries Mollie, it is no surprise that she starts to sicken. What is stranger is that he clearly loves her. And that she loves him, even as she realises he is poisoning her.

Leonardo DiCaprio spoke to anyone he could find who could remember the Burkharts. “I got to do a lot of research about Ernest and you know, as guilty as he was and as cowardly, almost nobody denied there was a true love between those two characters. I saw one little video of him in his 90s, when he was living in a trailer park, talking about Mollie, and I incorporated one line he said. ‘She was a good one, she was a good one’. Even then, he was in denial about what he did.“

Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie Burkhart, nods and smiles. “It boggled my mind how she stuck with him through that entire tragedy, but it was true and real,” she says. “The big challenge for both of us was: are we going to make this believable?”

Robert De Niro says Hale was just as much of a puzzle to him. A sociopath, of course, but it still seemed incredible he could have cynically killed off the people among whom he had spent his life. He came to explain it to himself by comparing Hale to an incest perpetrator. “Where he feels he has the right to manipulate the situation and that they should almost be grateful to him that he loves them as much as he does, I guess you’d say to take advantage of them in this way,” he says. “But in his case it’s not taking advantage, it’s taking what should be his.”

Martin Scorsese is 80. Given the number of ideas buzzing around his head and desk, that means he is working against the clock. Killers of the Flower Moon took seven years to make, its adaptation a slow process.

Lily Gladstone as Mollie and Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest.

After many murders and many petitions by the Osage to federal government to intervene, the newly formed FBI belatedly intervened and a dogged agent, Tom White, played by Jesse Plemons, investigated. An earlier version of the script followed White as he interviewed the townsfolk, turning up clues. Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play that character. He would be both star and hero.

Somewhere along the track, they realised that would never play. “I said to Marty: once you see De Niro as Hale, you’re going to go, ‘I think I know who did it’. What are we going to unravel?” DiCaprio told The New York Times.

But there were other concerns. It read like the story of a white saviour, Western-style: a Wyatt Earp figure who came to town and cleaned it up. But the story wasn’t about one good, or at least conscientious, white man. It was a story of a society made up of cruel, conniving white men and their victims. That story clearly belonged to the Osage.

With a new version of the script in hand, Scorsese took himself to Oklahoma to consult with Osage Chief Standing Bear and his people. The success of that mission is borne out by the fact that the chief was in Cannes to walk the red carpet with the rest of the film’s entourage.

“I think it was a two-part process, the first part being shifting it away from being the story of Tom White saving the Osage from these incredibly racist white grifters,” says DiCaprio. “The second part was Marty going in and sitting with the Osage community and getting an entirely new perspective.”

“I got to do a lot of research about Ernest,” says DiCaprio - here with De Niro - of his role.

Scorsese admits he didn’t find that easy. “I was very nervous. I’d had some experience with Native Americans in the 1970s at Pine Ridge and I was shocked by how much I didn’t know.” Growing up in New York, he adds, he lived within a village that might as well have been in Sicily. It had been the effort of years to get over a discomfort with people who were different.

“I’ve tried and it has happened. But this was the most comfortable I’ve been, just being there, hanging out with them. It was really hot, like 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and this lady would be sitting there saying ‘Hey, Uncle Mar, are you drinking that water now? You keep drinking!’ We were just there, everyone together.” It reminded him of filming Woodstock, back in 1969, as an Italian kid out of the city. “Four days and nights on the stage with all the hippies. I had cufflinks!” He gives out his infectiously gravelly guffaw. “I just didn’t know.”

What Scorsese knew now was that he still didn’t know enough. “I looked at the thing and said if we’re going to deal with the Osage, it’s going to be with the utmost respect and as much understanding of who they are, who they were then and who they were before then,” he says.

Director Martin Scorsese attends the Killers Of The Flower Moon premiere in London.Credit: Getty Images

“Respect for other people is the key, it really is. To be as straight and honest as possible, without being a condescending , and I hate to use this word, because it comes from the ’60s and has changed meaning completely, so now I think of myself as this, liberal. That condescending thing of tokenism. No, this is what it is. We deal with it. If I have a problem with it, that’s my problem and I have to learn to face it in myself.”

The character at the very heart of the film is Gladstone’s still and impenetrable Mollie Burkhart, so much so that Gladstone’s name is the one most commonly mentioned as a hot Oscar contender, reflecting not only the Academy’s belated leaning into diversity but the fact that here is a role for a Native American with enough substance to allow an actor to shine. “What it means for representation in a broader sense is that here is a story that cares enough to invite the audience to care about this human,” says Gladstone. “And that really is the turning of the tide.” Not entirely coincidentally, Mollie Burkhart is also the strongest role for a woman in a Scorsese film for a long time - at least since Sharon Stone’s turn in Casino. Men have always been his business.

The film ends with a coda: the recording of a radio show about the murders and investigation that includes the reading of an obituary for the dead. It isn’t imaginary. “They did the radio shows of that time of the Osage murders - which weren’t very good, but they existed,” says Scorsese. But that speech is also an act of reparation, acknowledging that these things happened and that they were not some freakish horror, but the logical culmination of white exploitation of indigenous people. Scorsese chose to read it himself.

He imagined the bodies of Mollie’s family, laid out for burial after they were murdered, a child among them. “I didn’t think I could direct another actor to say it,” he says. “But I thought I could feel it. Anyway, it’s going to come down on me. I might as well take it.”

Killers of the Flower Moon opens on October 19.