Martin Scorsese is back on the big screen with a new work: Killers of the Flower Moon has been in German cinemas since Thursday and features some big names. In addition to Lily Gladstone, familiar Scorsese faces like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are in the film Epic about the Osage murders to see.
The plot takes you to the early 1920s, where several members of the Osage tribe were murdered in cold blood. The motif: oil and land. Scorsese tells the story that led to the founding of the FBI in epic 206 minutes. As monumental as the film now seems, the production was anything but easy.
New Martin Scorsese film: Hollywood has been trying to film Killers of the Flower Moon for 7 years
Killers of the Flower Moon has an eventful genesis behind it. The film adaptation of the non-fiction book of the same name by journalist David Grann goes back many years and presented some challenges. The production company Imperative Entertainment secured the rights to the template back in 2016.
You can watch the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon here:
Killers of the Flower Moon – Trailer 2 (German) HD
In 2017, the project began to gain momentum with Scorsese as director. Filming was scheduled to begin in early 2018, eventually stopped pre-production But when Scorsese moved to Netflix and instead of Killers of the Flower Moon, he implemented his long-held passion project The Irishman, which was released in 2019.
Only then did Killers of the Flower Moon become concrete again, this time with Paramount as the big studio behind it. However, one point of contention remained: the budget. For a long time it was unclear whether the film ever be funded before the streaming service Apple TV+ came on board as a partner in May 2020 to cover the production costs.
Killers of the Flower Moon cost $200 million and had to be completely reworked
However, the final hurdle had not yet been overcome: After Scorsese secured a budget of $200 million, the film was released completely overturned and re-wrote the script. At the same time, DiCaprio also changed roles. He was originally supposed to portray FBI agent Tom White.
While preparing for filming, Scorsese and his team realized that the story wouldn’t work if it were taken from the FBI perspective was told, even though it corresponded to the original book. Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth then rebuilt the entire film and sought advice from Osage members.
Paramount/Apple TV+
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killres of the Flower Moon
The focus now turns to the relationship between Ernest Burkhard (DiCaprio) and the Osage woman Mollie (Gladstone). Family killed in series of murders becomes. Burkhart returns as a World War I veteran to his uncle William King Hale (De Niro), who is targeting the land of the Osage Nation.
As part of the Realignment of Killers of the Flower Moon DiCaprio took on the role of Ernest Burkhard, while Jesse Plemons was cast as FBI agent Tom White. Scorsese explained his decision to Time as follows:
At a certain point I realized that I was making a film only about white men. That means I have them Perspective from outside to inside chosen, which worried me.
Although the corona pandemic was a major setback for many film projects, the production stop in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon turned out to be an important moment for the script to be fundamentally revisedso the film in its current form did more justice to the history of the Osage.
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