Martin Scorsese worked on his crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon for half an eternity – long before the actual shooting began. The story is based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, but Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth made some changes.
And that’s not all: the director spoke about the original opening scene of Flower Moon in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly staging monster missed (which didn’t end up in the film for good reason).
“Like Ben Hur”: The original opening scene of Flower Moon sounds powerful
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Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon is set in America in 1920. The plot is triggered by the murder of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, who owned land with a lot of oil reserves. Scorsese wanted to start the story with a brutal flashback. The scene was in the script “five pages long, or something, and it would have three weeks took a long time to shoot it, even with CGI.”
But what exactly was supposed to happen?
The idea was to show a land rush. You step back and watch the Native Americans just watching. I thought that was a perfect metaphor for what we did.
By “land rush” Scorsese means the storm of the Anglo-American settlers on the valuable land of Oklahoma in the 19th century. The historical event was also known as Oklahoma Land Run.
“It was amazing and everyone loved it,” he says of the scene. “I know that if I had said, ‘This is how the film will begin,’ they would have formed a separate filming unit, like the chariot race in Ben-Hur.”
Scorsese and his writer had already written down all the details of the scene, but abandoned the idea.
Why the opening scene ultimately didn’t end up in the film
In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese retells the gruesome series of murders of the Osage people. At the same time, as in most of his films, he probes the American soul. It was therefore tempting to expand the historical arc of the original. But would that have served the actual, already complicated story? No, probably not.
[Autor] Eric Roth pointed out that the Oklahoma land rush and the discovery of oil in the late 1890s were so far apart that it was too far away from each other [unserer] history is. But I liked all the details he brought in. Everything should be shot in one take.
So we were denied another mega sequence in Killers of the Flower Moon. But in return we got a more focused film. If you can say that about a 206 minute long work.
Killers of the Flower Moon has been in German cinemas since October 19th.