Read David Grann’s non-fiction bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon and you spend a lot of it with the feds. Originally the forthcoming movie was supposed to focus heavily on the FBI, too. But the filmmakers decided to make the story of the Osage story the main focus, with law enforcement mere supporting players. Now Leonardo DiCaprio is opening up about why they effectively turned the movie inside out.
In a profile of the film by British Vogue, DiCaprio talked about how he let himself be recast. Initially, he was to play Texas Marshal-turned-federal agent Tom White. He wound up playing Ernest Burkhart, a WWI vet who marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and gets involved in a sinister plot hatched by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). (White wound up going to Jesse Plemons, who’s still fourth-billed.) Focusing on the feds ultimately felt off, he said.
“It just didn’t feel like it got to the heart of it,” DiCaprio explained. “We weren’t immersed in the Osage story. There was this tiny, small scene between Mollie and Ernest that provoked such emotion in us at the reading, and we just started to penetrate into what that relationship was, because it was so twisted and bizarre and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Director Martin Scorsese also opened up about the switch in a cover story by Time. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese said. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
And so Scorsese and the screenwriter decided to dramatically overhaul the original script, which, for one thing, gave Gladstone a far meatier role.
“Before the rewrites, I had three pages of some pretty mouthy dialogue,” Gladstone revealed in an interview for Interview:
“But I was struggling so much with the scenes that when COVID shut everything down and the project went quiet for a minute, I assumed that I’d blown the audition. About a year later, I got a request to Zoom with Martin Scorsese. And then I got new sides sent to me that had beats. Suddenly it was a scene that had minimal dialogue…And I was like, ‘Oh man, I can plug a character in here now. This is amazing.’ Because I’d heard that the rewrites completely did a 180. Leo was supposed to be playing Tom White, Jesse Plemons’s character.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is scheduled to hit theaters on October 20.
(Via British Vogue and Variety)