Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon disturbing

Lily Gladstone, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from Killers of the Flower Moon, which is screening at the Odeon Multiplex. Picture via AP

A moment from years ago keeps replaying in Martin Scorsese’s mind.

When Akira Kurosawa was given an honorary Academy Award in 1990, the then 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker of Seven Samurai and Ikiru, in his brief, humble speech, said he hadn’t yet grasped the full essence of cinema.

It struck Scorsese, then in post-production on Goodfellas, as a curious thing for such a master filmmaker to say. It wasn’t until Scorsese also turned 80 that he began to comprehend Kurosawa’s words. Even now, Scorsese says he’s just realising the possibilities of cinema.

“I’ve lived long enough to be his age and I think I understand now,” Scorsese said in a recent interview. “Because there is no limit. The limit is in yourself. These are just tools, the lights and the camera and that stuff. How much further can you explore who you are?”

Scorsese’s lifelong exploration has seemingly only grown deeper and more self-examining with time. In recent years, his films have swelled in scale and ambition as he’s plumbed the nature of faith (Silence) and loss (The Irishman).

His latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is in many ways far outside Scorsese’s own experience. But as a story of trust and betrayal  the film is centred on the loving yet treacherous relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a larger Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (Robert De Niro). It’s a profoundly personal film that maps some of the themes of Scorsese’s gangster films onto American history.

More than the back-room dealings of Casino, the bloody rampages of Gangs of New York or the financial swindling of The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of a crime wave. It’s a disturbingly insidious one, where greed and violence infiltrate the most intimate relationships — a genocide in the home. All of which, to Scorsese, harkens back to the tough guys and the weak-willed go-alongs he witnessed in his childhood growing up on Elizabeth Street in New York.

“That’s been my whole life, dealing with who we are,” says Scorsese. “I found that this story lent itself to that exploration further.”

Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200-million, 206-minute epic produced by Apple that’s in theatres on Friday, is an audacious big swing by Scorsese to continue his kind of ambitious, personal filmmaking on the largest scale at a time when such grand, big-screen statements are a rarity.

Scorsese considers Killers of the Flower Moon “an internal spectacle”. The Oklahoma-set film, adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, might be called his first Western. But while developing Grann’s book, which chronicles the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI, Scorsese came to the realisation that centring the film on federal investigator Tom White was a familiar type of Western.

“I realised: ‘You don’t do that. Your Westerns are the Westerns you saw in the late ’40s and early ’50s, that’s it. Peckinpah finished that — The Wild Bunch, that’s the end.’ Now they’re different,” he says. “It represented a certain time in who we were as a nation and a certain time in the world — and the end of the studio system. It was a genre. That folklore is gone.”

Scorsese, after conversations with Leonardo DiCaprio, pivoted to the story of Ernest and Mollie and a perspective closer to the Osage Nation. Consultations with the tribe continued and expanded to include accurately capturing language, traditional clothing and customs.

“It’s historic that Indigenous Peoples can tell their story at this level. That’s never happened before as far as I know,” says Geoffrey Standing Bear, principal chief of Osage Nation.

“It took somebody who could know that we’ve been betrayed for hundreds of years. He wrote a story about betrayal of trust.”

Killers of the Flower Moon for Scorsese grew out of a period of reflection and re-evaluation during the pandemic.