Killers of the Flower Moon is Leonardo DiCarpio’s sixth film with TikTok icon Martin Scorsese, and yet they’re still capable of surprising each other. That’s not always a good thing, though. Indeed, on this, their latest collaboration, the legendary filmmaker didn’t take too kindly to one of DiCaprio’s favorite working methods: ad-libbing.
During a recent chat with The Telegraph, Scorsese admitted he was a bit incensed by DiCaprio’s yen for improvisation, which he described as “endless, endless, endless.” Scorsese wasn’t alone in his occasionally exasperation: Instead of being inspired by DiCaprio off-script dalliances, co-star Robert De Niro simply “didn’t want to talk.”
Scorsese added, “Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we’d tell him: ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’”
Mind you, DiCaprio’s love of improvising lines can pay handsome dividends. James Cameron may have also been annoyed with him taking the role of Jack in Titanic too seriously, but it was DiCaprio who came up with perhaps its most famous line: “I’m king of the world!”
Scorsese himself hasn’t always been immune to ad-libbing. It was De Niro who famously came up with the most famous line in Taxi Driver: “You talkin’ to me?”
Despite Scorsese and De Niro’s grumblings, DiCaprio has been earning some of the best notices of his career for Killers of the Flower Moon. He plays one of the filmmakers’ loser protagonists: a WWI vet with few scruples and no backbone, who falls prey to the murderous machinations of his uncle (De Niro), who hatches an elaborate plan to murder members of the nouveau riche Osage for their oil wealth. If he had to do some bad ad-libbing to ultimately get that performance, then so be it.
(Via The Telegraph)