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The “Killers of the Flower Moon” star spoke about his goal during an interview with “Good Morning America.”
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Tag: leonardo dicaprio
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AFM Flashback: ‘Gangs of New York’ Staked a Claim on Foreign Territories
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Thanks to enthusiastic buyers at the 2000 American Film Market, Martin Scorsese was finally able to begin filming Gangs of New York, a project that had been germinating for nearly 30 years. Based on Herbert Asbury’s 1927 book The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, the film, with its detailed re-creations of 19th century Manhattan, follows an Irish immigrant, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who confronts his father’s murderer, the ruthless gang leader Bill the Butcher, portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis.
With a screenplay by Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks — which would eventually be reworked by Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan — the project was originally announced in 1977, but at the time Scorsese instead opted to direct 1980’s Raging Bull. Over the years, as budget estimates rose from $30 million to around $100 million, the project drifted from Universal to Disney. Unable to secure a green light, Scorsese also offered it to Warners, and other studios, which all turned it down. Finally, Miramax Films’ Harvey Weinstein stepped forward in 1999.
But Weinstein needed a financial partner, so he sold foreign rights to the film for $65 million to Graham King, chairman of overseas distribution company Initial Entertainment Group. Sales were brisk: For example, the Japan rights went for $18 million, while the price tag in Italy was $7 million, and IEG was reportedly in the black even before the movie was released. As King told the Los Angeles Times when 20 minutes of the film was previewed at the Cannes Film Festival, “For me to bring [these distributors] a Leonardo DiCaprio picture is huge, because Leo only goes through studios. For us, we wanted to be in the big boys’ game, and this was a way to start.” He added, “It was like a circus. … The Koreans, the Swedish, the Malaysians are coming over to me, ‘Do you really have Leo’?”
Gangs would mark the first of six films that DiCaprio would make with Scorsese, culminating in the current Killers of the Flower Moon. Having shot on elaborate sets built at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, the film finally opened after a yearlong delay in late December 2002, grossing $77.8 million domestically and $193.7 million worldwide.
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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Author David Grann Picks the Three Best Movies Based on Nonfiction Books (That He Didn’t Write)
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Anyone who reads a lot of popular non-fiction is accustomed to the inevitable disappointment of the movie version. Stinkers like Unbroken, In The Heart of the Sea, and He’s Just Not That Into You… (and the list goes on) are barely-remembered for a reason, but even relatively-successful, positively-reviewed films like The Blind Side, Moneyball, or Into The Wild still pale in comparison to the books that spawned them, at least for those of us who read them. “The book was better” isn’t just something book readers say to be pedantic; most of the time, it’s true.
That’s part of what makes Martin Scorsese’s take on David Grann’s 2017 best-seller Killers of the Flower Moon stand out. While it’s certainly a different story than the book, as all good non-fiction movie adaptations necessarily should be, Scorsese still gets to the heart of its most important themes (the banality of evil and the lawlessness of frontier capitalism especially) and lends them an emotional gravity and visual power beyond words that books can’t. This is especially true of the movie’s ending, which condenses hundreds of pages of often dense (and brilliant) historical exposition into a single, invented scene that somehow captures perfectly the commoditization of the Osage Reign of Terror without repeating any of the details, imbuing them with the added thump of Scorsese acknowledging his own mortality.
Simply put, it’s hard to remember a non-fiction movie adaptation as successful as Killers of the Flower Moon. (In this writer’s opinion, even the previous film based on a David Grann book—2016’s The Lost City of Z, by the much-loved director James Gray—doesn’t measure up.)
To help us remember some nonfiction-to-movie adaptations that did work, we turned to someone who’s both an expert at researching the recent past and someone who might have some opinions about book-to-movie adaptations: David Grann himself, who agreed to share a few of his favorites.
Zodiac
“I’ve grown a bit exhausted by films about serial killers, but this adaptation is about so much more. It is a deep exploration of the nature of obsession—of the killer’s fixations and our fixations with unraveling the mystery of the killer. And the movie grapples with a question that has always haunted me as a reporter: What happens when the facts we frantically seek to make sense of murderous evil—including the identity of the perpetrator—elude us?”
All the President’s Men
“I recently rewatched this film and I found it no less gripping than when I first saw it decades ago. The movie manages to capture not only the historic Watergate conspiracy but also the deep, unsettling paranoia that can eat away at society when institutions are unstable—something that feels unnervingly familiar today. Plus, the film helped to unleash a whole new generation of investigative reporters—though none of them looked quite like Robert Redford.”
Adaptation
“This ‘adaptation,’ if you can call it that, of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief brilliantly and hysterically gets at the essential conundrum of transforming a work of facticity into a work of cinema. They are such wildly different mediums. One is bound by the literal truth, the author’s decisions dictated by the underlying source materials; the other is visual and elastic, with invented scenes and dialogue, illuminating realms inaccessible to a reporter or a historian. In the case of Adaptation, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman madly shows what happens when these two equally passionate art forms collide.”
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Vince Mancini
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“Letting” Foxes in the Henhouse: Killers of the Flower Moon
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It’s only fitting that the word “Osage,” what the French decided to call the Native American tribe that’s actually named Wazhazhe, loosely translates to “calm water.” For, after enduring what was done to their tribe by the white men they “let” into the fold, the persistent stoicism of the Osage people is something that very few others would be able to uphold. Not in the wake of so much pain and suffering. Perhaps, though, part of the “calmness” that remained upon realizing the white men they “allowed” into their insular, oil-drenched world were nefarious as all get-out stemmed from a feeling of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. As one Osage elder phrases it, “When this money started coming, we should have known it came with something else.” Knowing, somewhere just beneath the surface, that to trust a white man was to make deal with the devil (#whitedevil). After all, it was no secret that 1) white men’s involvement with anything meant exploitation and 2) white men never took (/take) kindly to the wealth of other races, always trying to characterize it as “unfair” or “rigged” or just plain “false.”
This, too, is why Martin Scorsese deftly opts to incorporate newsreels of the Tulsa massacre that were being played in Oklahoma theaters in 1921. A scene of Killers of the Flower Moon’s, er, chief villain, “King” William Hale (Robert De Niro) shows him watching the footage with rapt interest rather than horror. For it seemed to not only give him permission to keep murdering the Osage as part of his elaborate plan to gain access to various tribe members’ oil rights, but also provided further “creative inspiration” for how he could commit those murders. Of course, like most “kingpins,” he wasn’t wont to do the dirty work himself. Instead, he left that to his various lackeys, including his own nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). It was he who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of the many wealthy Osage of Fairfax, where the reservation boundaries are coterminous with the town. While, in the movie, co-writers Scorsese and Eric Roth would have viewers believe that Burkhart really did marry Mollie out of love (at first), simple logic and reason tells us he knew damn well the core of that “love” was rooted in Mollie’s familial wealth. For the Osage were the rare tribe in the U.S. able to hold onto their mineral rights (through various conditions established in their treaties) once oil was discovered on their reservation territory.
Naturally, having unbridled control and access to their wealth would have been too good to be true. For, thanks to the Burke Act of 1906, Native Americans with any amount of sizable income (via a land allotment) were appointed white conservators to “help” them manage their finances. Of course, as we saw with Britney Spears, there isn’t much altruism in conservatorships when large sums of money are involved and the conservatee can be so easily exploited. Not only that, but consistently demeaned every time they had to meet with their conservator and say aloud, about themselves, “Incompetent” before proceeding to tell that conservator what amount of money they wanted and how they would be using it. Scenes of Mollie having to endure this utterly debasing practice is complete with her obsequiously agreeing to “keep a better eye out” for how her mother is spending, as though Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) doesn’t have every goddamn right to spend her oil money how she pleases.
For those wondering why so many Osage women would “let” the (rather dumb) white foxes into their utopian henhouse, so to speak, one must consider that, as an indigenous person, even having money didn’t assert one’s power in the “white world” (that is to say, a world where white hegemony had asserted itself for centuries). The “best” way to do that, some women figured, was to marry white and let the power of having Caucasian male authority at one’s side work its “charms.” Charmless though it might have been. Mollie even jokes with Ernest that she’s well-aware he’s a coyote, after her money. And, appropriately, the movie opens with the Osage elders lamenting the next generation’s seemingly blithe “conversion” to whiteness. Having lost all sense of their heritage with this mixing of their blood with a race so prone to subjugation and erasing all other cultures to fit in with the mold of their own. Among the most memorable scenes to emphasize this “conversion” of the new generation—the one that has benefited from their headrights inheritances—occurs after seeing the elders lament the loss of their culture. Viewers are then presented with the sight of the younger generation gleefully and greedily dancing in shirtless slow motion as oil gushes from the ground, covering them in more symbolic wealth. This shift in ideals from those of pure, nature-oriented and -respecting ones to cold, hollow capitalistic ones demarcates the notion that Native Americans were finally being “modernized,” brought into the twentieth century, as it were. As though that was the “right” and “generous” thing for white men to “facilitate” (read: foist).
At the same time, white men never really wanted Native Americans (or any people of color) to get “too modern.” In other words, they still wanted them to remain powerless and dependent, subject to the unjust systems set up to benefit whites and punish or subdue anybody else. Not just that, but to debase or belittle any success they did manage to carve out for themselves. Hence, the constant running commentary among white men in Killers of the Flower Moon about how “these Indians” didn’t “work” for the money they have. That it was just luck and happenstance that bestowed them with such bounty. As though to say that the white men’s “work” of plundering the riches of others is far “nobler.”
And oh, how Osage wealth is plundered, as we see repeatedly throughout Killers of the Flower Moon. In fact, perhaps what’s most standout about the way the murders are committed is how they’re presented by Scorsese, interspersed throughout as “non sequitur” scenes designed to reveal just how callously and casually they’re done. With no feeling, no second thoughts whatsoever.
The film’s title plays into a metaphor for white oppression, with the book (written by David Grann) the movie is based on describing the phenomenon in nature it refers to as: “In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma… In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms… The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage… refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.” Obviously, the white man is represented by the larger blooms overtaking and suppressing the tiny ones, until they’re stamped out completely.
This is conveyed even in how the story of Mollie and the Osages who were killed ends up being overshadowed by white use of those stories for “entertainment” (as paraded in the final scene when the “tale” is being presented as a true crime radio show…how relevant to the present). Roth, a tour de force in screenplay adaptations (see also: Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Dune), assists in revealing the ouroboros of exploitation that goes on vis-à-vis the handling of the stories of the marginalized, with the audience watching Killers of the Flower Moon in the theater contributing to that endless cycle.
Scorsese, no stranger to showing his attraction for stories of indigenous exploitation, also harkens us back to his 1986 film, The Mission, with this latest behemoth. The Mission was described by James Shofield Saeger, a scholar of Spanish missions in the New World, as a “white European distortion of Native American reality.” There’s no doubt that, despite Scorsese’s assurance of consulting with the Osage tribe’s current chief, Standing Bear, throughout the making of the film, many will still take issue with a white man retelling this painful part of Osage history. Indeed, as is the case with the barrage of movies that come out about Black slavery, some Native Americans weren’t happy with the idea that, yet again, their only representation in cinema is that of their historical pain with Killers of the Flower Moon.
For example, Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs had plenty of criticism to lob at the film, stating, “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire… I can’t believe it needs to be said, but Indig ppl exist beyond our grief, trauma & atrocities. Our pride for being Native, our languages, cultures, joy & love are way more interesting & humanizing than showing the horrors white men inflicted on us… All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film. Give Lily [Gladstone] her goddamn Oscar. But while all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
But what does one expect when you “let” a fox in the henhouse? A.k.a. submit to the constantly brushed-aside reality that, for BIPOC stories to be told at all, they must still somehow land in the hands of white people. Ergo, that ouroboros of exploitation constantly feeding on itself.
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Genna Rivieccio
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Box Office: ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Terrifies With Monstrous $78M Opening
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Universal and Blumhouse‘s Five Nights at Freddy’s is off to a historic start at the domestic box office, helping drive overall revenue
The latest horror offering from Universal and Blumhouse opened to a record-smashing $78 million, despite debuting simultaneously on sister streaming service Peacock. It started off with a monstrous Friday haul of $39.5 million, including $10.3 million in Thursday previews.
The pic — which came in notably ahead of industry expectations — scared up the third-biggest horror opening of all time behind New Line’s two It movies, as well as the best showing ever for Halloween weekend. It’s also the biggest horror opening of 2023 to date, besting Scream VI ($44.4 million), and the second-biggest opening of all time for a video-game adaptation behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($146.3 million), not adjusted for inflation.
The news is just as good overseas, where Five Nights at Freddy’s opened to an estimated $52.6 million from 60 markets for a global start of $130.6 million against a modest $25 million production budget. It supplants New Line’s The Nun II ($88.1 million) to boast the year’s biggest worldwide start for a horror film.
Freddy’s passed up Halloween, which started off with $76.2 million in 2018, to mark the biggest domestic opening ever for Blumhouse, not adjusted for inflation. It is also Blumhouse’s top global launch. Other honorable mentions: Freddy’s supplants The Mummy Returns ($68.1 million) to rank as the top opening ever for a horror pic rated PG-13, not adjusted for inflation.
While most critics bashed Freddy’s, the audience graced the movie with an A- CinemaScore (it is rare for a horror pic to receive an A or any variation thereof).
Universal insiders say the decision to do a day-and-date release is a win-win for the overall ecosystem (only paid-tier Peacock subscribers have access). Those who want the communal experience of watching a horror movie in a theater can do so, while Peacock can woo much-needed subscribers. Streamers see notable growth in October because of Halloween-themed offerings.
Before the pandemic, most theaters would have outright refused to book a title already available in the home. The COVID-19 crisis changed everything, however, with the traditional 72- to 90-day theatrical window shrinking dramatically to as little as three weeks for films that open to less than $50 million. Day-and-date releases aren’t the norm, but no cinema operator was going to refuse to play Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Directed by Emma Tammi, Freddy‘s stars Josh Hutcherson as a washed-up security guard who has no choice but to take a crappy job safeguarding a long-shuttered family-themed pizza restaurant. The only problem — the pizzeria’s giant animatronic animal characters spring to life and go on murderous rampages. He’s also trying to maintain sole custody of his 10-year-old sister (Piper Rubio) and prevent her from falling into the clutches of their Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson).
Things go from bad to worse when a group of local toughs hired by Jane break into Freddy’s while Mike is off-duty to trash the joint so he’ll lose his job. Needless to say, the giant animatronic animals don’t like the intrusion and try to exact their revenge.
Kat Conner Sterling and Matthew Lillard also star. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop created the animatronic characters.
Elsewhere, Taylor Swift and AMC Theatres’ Eras Tour achieved another huge milestone in singing past the $200 million mark at the worldwide box office, a first for a concert film. It earned another $14.7 million domestically to finish its third weekend with a North American cume of $149.3 million and $203 million globally (the pic only plays Thursday-Sunday).
Martin Scorsese‘s adult-skewing Killers of the Flower Moon came in third behind Freddy’s and Eras Tour with an estimated $9 million, a sharp decline of 61 percent. Apple Original Films produced and financed the $200 million film, with Paramount handling distribution duties. The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro, is counting on being a slow burn as Oscar season unfolds, but the producers had hoped for a smaller drop in the film’s second weekend.
Killers of the Flower Moon earned another $14.1 million from 64 markets oversea for a foreign tally of $44 million and $88.6 million globally.
Angel Studios opened its first release since its indie film Sound of Freedom took the summer box office by storm. Its new faith-based movie, After Death, took in $5 million to come in No. 4.
Blumhouse and Universal’s The Exorcist: The Believer, which is now available on Premium VOD after a disappointing showing at the box office, rounded out the top five in its fourth weekend. The movie grossed $3.1 million for a domestic total of $61 million and $120.4 million globally.
The specialty box office saw two high-profile Oscar hopefuls enter the fray, Focus Features’ The Holdovers and A24’s Priscilla. The two films opened in several locations both in New York and Los Angeles, with each reporting a promising per-location average in the $33,000 range.
The Holdovers grossed $200,000 from six locations for a per-theater average of $33,333. Priscilla, launching in four cinemas, earned $132,139 for a location average of $33,035.
Oct. 29, 8:10 a.m.: Updated with revised weekend estimates.
This story was originally published at 7:55 a.m. Saturday.
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Killers Of The Flower Moon Movie Review
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4.0/5The Osage Indian murders were a series of murders of Osage Native Americans in Osage County, Oklahoma, during the 1910s–30s. American journalist David Grann investigated the case for his 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book is the basis for the present film. In 1897, oil was discovered on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma.. As part of the process of preparing Oklahoma for statehood, the federal government allotted 657 acres to each Osage on the tribal rolls in 1907. The film depicts the greed of white Amercans in all its varying hues. The white citizens are resentful of the wealth being distributed to the natives. They resort to the tactic of getting married to Native American women and then killing them, thus gaining the title to the land deed. Some resort to outright murder, while others let poison do the dirty work. The 1921 brutal murder of Anna Brown brought into fray the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation. The resultant enquiry led to the arrest of the mastermind William King Hale and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart in 1926. Burkhart later turned state’s witness and gave evidence against his uncle. Ernest had married Mollie Kylie, wealthy native women at the behest of his uncle. After the marriage, her relatives started dying under mysterious circumstances. First to go was Minnie Smith, who died of probable poisoning, another sister, Rita Smith and her husband were killed by explosion, while Mollie herself was being poisoned through her insulin injections. The title is a metaphor for smaller flowers dying when taller plants take over. This usually happens during May, that’s when Anna Brown was killed.
In the film, Robert De Niro plays William King Hale, while Leonardo DiCaprio plays his nephew, Ernest Burkhart. Lily Gladstone, who has Native American blood, plays Mollie Burkhart. Ernest is presented as being a simple minded ex-soldier who has returned from World War 1 and is in need of occupation. His brother Byron (Scott Shepherd), was already working with their uncle. The three, over the years, conspired to kill as many Native Americans as possible, through professional hunters and hitmen, making sure that their direct involvement was kept to the minimum. When the investigation took place, Hale was able to bump off several key witnesses and participants. However, it was the testimony of his nephew which finally condemned him.
The film depicts the tragedy in all its visceral glory, sparing the viewer nothing of the horror. It’s a three-and-a-half hour film, which flows at its own pace. At one level, the whites are shown to be god-fearing, church going men and women, who are more than happy to rub shoulders with their rich, Native American neighbours. But as time goes by, we see their true faces. It’s a war of a community against the other, a mini-genocide, with the entire white populace guilty of being perpetuators. Hale might be the face of this evil but this cankerous roots lie at the heart of everyone white person in the community. There is a chilling scene in the film where a gathering of prominent white men and women put pressure on Ernest not to testify against his uncle. Every person in the room is a killer to some degree but don’t see their actions as crime, believing that white people have a God-given right to rule the other races. Another horrifying set of scenes involve the slow poisoning of Mollie. She has diabetes and her own husband is mixing poison in the insulin and injecting it to her. It’s betrayal and deception played out at so many levels.
Martin Scorsese, who famously ranted against the so-called degradation of cinema, had a point to prove about what proper cinema should be and has answered his critics through this film. Given the length of the film, he does grow self-indulgent at times, though you never feel bored, given the human drama being unfolded. Why he deviated from the whodunit, investigative viewpoint of the book beats us. The linear progression jars your interest at times. Also, given the fact that the film shows crime against the Native Amercians, shouldn’t the film be told from their point of view, rather than that of the white villains? Molly should have been the centre of it all, than Ernest, though you can’t expect your top-billed star to take a back seat. The actual investigation reportedly took place over a period of two years but here, it is hurried along and looks forced.
The movie is supposedly shot using film cameras, giving them an old world quality, reminiscent of John Huston’s films. The daylight photography is a treat to watch and even the night scenes, shot mostly in true light, have a picturesque quality to them. For example, the scenes depicting Molly’s illness, where she lies sweat-drenched in a room lit by oil lamps lend a poignant touch to the proceedings. The background score too is phenomenal, so is the sound design.
Scorcese has chosen his actors with care. Robert De Niro is spot on as Hale. He’s the perfect godfather figure to the community, playing everyone’s friend but secretly coveting their wealth. This Jekyll and Hyde personality has been perfectly brought to life by the consummate actor. Lily Gladstone is cast as the perfect Native American beauty. She doesn’t have robust expressions but her eyes say it all. The tragedy reflected in them as she catches on to her husband’s lie is almost haunting. Apart from perhaps De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio is said to be Scorcese’s favourite actor. This is the sixth collaboration between them, and the actor does full justice to his director’s confidence in him. He is shown to be a simple individual at first, then slowly gets addicted to a life of crime, indulging in robbery and gambling and doesn’t bat an eye even when it comes to arranging murders. The actor brings out the remorse and guilt of his character admirably in the scene where he breaks down in jail after hearing of his younger daughter’s death. It’s a scene which punches you in the gut, and you feel the impact long after you have left the theatre. On the other hand, one also feels DiCaprio is paying homage to such actors as Marlon Brando and Paul Muni in the latter half, especially in portions where he’s jailed and asked to testify. He isn’t just himself in those scenes but represents a wealth of actors specialising in tragedy, who have graced American cinema.
Watch the film for its true-to-life depiction of one of the harshest chapters of American history. And also for the wealth of acting talent displayed by all.
Trailer : Killers of the Flower Moon
Neil Soans, October 26, 2023, 2:47 PM IST
4.5/5
Story: When Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) moves to an oil-rich Osage Nation in the 1920s, looking to make a living after the war, little does he know what awaits him.Review: Trust the man who riled up a whole generation of fans with his commentary on what cinema isn’t, to show us how impactful it can be by flipping the script on whitewashed history. Based on the book of the same name, Martin Scorsese adapts this screenplay with Eric Roth to bring an essential yet little-known true and tragic story of Native American history to the big screen. The runtime of three and a half hours does sound daunting, but not a minute is wasted throughout the film, as the screenplay is honed down to each beat. Scorsese gradually builds on various pieces of this intricate tale, and if a filmmaker is to be judged by how they end their movies, then that’s where he truly delivers.
Underlying the complexities of human emotion, especially greed and deception, that the director deploys to keep us engaged, the most surprisingly effective one is ‘love’, or rather how it can blind those afflicted by it. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart is critical to that narrative; he meets and falls head over heels with Lily Gladstone’s Mollie. Ernest makes no bones about his intent, and despite being no pushover, Mollie can’t resist his charms. But the extent of Ernest’s aims is determined by his uncle William Hale, otherwise known as King, played by Robert De Niro. These three form the key players, and each respective actor deserves all the accolades inevitably coming their way. Scorsese arguably brings out the best in De Niro, so seeing the veteran actor back in form is excellent. Then again, so does the director with DiCaprio, and to say this probably could be the latter’s most layered work wouldn’t be an understatement. However, the most impressive is Lily Gladstone, who is a devastating force amidst DiCaprio and De Niro in a career-making performance.Be prepared for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to have a strong presence during awards season because all the vital ingredients are in place, not just for Oscar bait. Scorsese maintains a critical balance between storytelling and technical elements, such as the unmissable and uneasy score by Robbie Robertson. Whether the lengthy runtime is justified is debatable, but what isn’t is Scorsese’s vision and memorable execution of a complex, heart-breaking tale of lies and deception.
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Devesh Sharma
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Leonardo DiCaprio is 2023’s Most Promising New Character Actor
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Before his solemn turn in The Revenant, DiCaprio had been on a run of playing doomed titans. In 2013, he starred in both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, respectively playing literary icon Jay Gatsby and disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Gatsby and Belfort are, if nothing else, smooth operators, and DiCaprio tackles them with a twinkle in his eye. While Gatsby is mysterious and Belfort is a little stinker, DiCaprio leans hard into their charm. Both characters throw the sickest parties ever and lord over them like bacchanalian gods.
The biggest criticism of The Wolf of Wall Street was that Scorsese and DiCaprio weren’t hard enough on Belfort, that an uncritical eye could still read him, despite it all, as a Dude Who Rocks. Both Gatsby and Belfort obtain their wealth and status through nefarious means, but they’re also cool. And this is a mode in which DiCaprio is extremely comfortable. It’s one he deploys in Catch Me If You Can, way back in 2002—the first post-Titanic movie to really test what he could do. There he plays con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., who uses his boyish good looks and gift for sweet-talk to cash forged checks and pose as a doctor or an airline pilot.
Time and time again, DiCaprio has played guys who experience monumental highs and even greater lows. The lows were what made the work dramatically stirring, but having been one of the most-desired celebrities who ever lived, he could also channel the feeling of having the world at your feet, only to lose it all. As Howard Hughes in 2004’s The Aviator, his second collaboration with Scorsese, he starts out palling around with movie stars and ends up an emaciated recluse peeing into jars in his screening room. Frank is finally caught, the feds catch up to Belfort, and Gatsby is shot by his pool. And yet at certain points in all of these films, these guys are living out some sort of dream.
Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon never does that. From the outset, it’s clear he’s pretty dumb, and people around him treat him as such. In the very first scene they share, Ernest’s uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), repeats questions to emphasize how slow on the uptake Ernest is. This is a grim movie about the systematic genocide of the Osage people, but there’s a pitch-black humor to the way Hale and his lackeys berate Ernest throughout the film. The character has all the greed and ambition of a Gatsby or a Belfort, but none of the savvy, and DiCaprio, with his mouth near-permanently downturned, leans into Ernest’s confusion and his worthlessness. He plays the fool extremely well, and it’s to the movie’s benefit—for this story to work, you have to believe that Ernest is dim enough to convince himself he still loves his wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) even as he orchestrates the murder of her family members. In turn, Mollie seems to love him because of his naivete.
Ernest and Rick feel like echoes of one another. They’re both trying to emulate others they perceive as successes; they’re both their own worst enemies. (In between these movies, DiCaprio played an astronomer in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, channeling his earnest passion for the environment into a self-deprecating performance as a nerd who everyone ignores.) In both parts, you can see DiCaprio wrestling with the limits of being Leonardo DiCaprio. For years, no matter how hard he tried to subvert it in his work, DiCaprio was defined by his beauty—as tragic as they are, Gatsby and Belfort are still desirable. Now, at 48– past the point where he can play with a Super Soaker in public without looking goofy—he’s embracing the character actor he’s clearly always longed to be, exploring what it feels like to get older and feel unwanted, allowing himself to be a punching bag, fully debasing himself and his image to the needs of the film he’s in. It’s utterly captivating.
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Esther Zuckerman
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‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Has 1 Key Difference From The Book
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In describing the development of his new film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese has said the long-gestating project went through a significant rewrite when he made a crucial choice: reframing the story to not make a white man the hero.
Based on New Yorker reporter David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name, the movie was originally about how a federal investigation into a string of murders involving members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became a foundation for the FBI. The lead investigator was Tom White, an agent for the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI’s precursor.
Frequent Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio initially signed on to play White. But as Scorsese has recounted in recent interviews, such as one with Time magazine: “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” he said. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
The legendary director realized it should really be about the complex marriage of Ernest (now played by DiCaprio) and Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), and the crimes Ernest committed at the behest of his powerful uncle, Bill Hale (Robert De Niro). As the film depicts, Bill — a Godfather-like figure in town whom everyone calls “King” — orchestrates a yearslong scheme to extort Mollie’s family and other Osage community members in order to seize their wealth and the rights to their oil-rich land. (The character of White, played by Jesse Plemons in the final version, is now much more scaled back and appears only late in the film.)
Scorsese is getting a lot of praise for focusing on the story’s brutality rather than centering a white man as the hero. It’s a better movie for it: an epic and unflinching story of racism, greed, exploitation and plunder.
Bill Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple TV+
There’s a bone-chilling brazenness to Bill’s evil. He views everything as a transaction. As part of his long game, he encourages Ernest to marry Mollie, explaining to his nephew in no uncertain terms what marrying her will mean financially. Bill then gradually plots the murders of members of her family, and takes advantage of Mollie and her mother’s ailing health. And the cowardly Ernest is too easily persuaded into becoming his uncle’s accomplice in gradually defrauding his wife’s family, even though he seems to genuinely love her.
The film’s 3-hour-and-26-minute run time is a lot. But it’s hard to imagine a shorter version. You need to see the full scope: the way the film methodically lays out Bill’s sliminess, such as how he positions himself as an ally of and benefactor to the Osage community while plotting to destroy them. Ernest carries out his uncle’s orders even though he knows he’s actively participating in the exploitation of his wife’s family. And throughout the film, many of these crimes happen in plain sight.
By framing the film this way, it also spotlights Gladstone, who has deserved a major role like this ever since her breakout role in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” in 2016. Gladstone delivers the film’s most layered performance and serves as its emotional anchor. Through her resolute gaze, we can sense Mollie knows something is up. But what, if anything, can she do to stop it? If it wasn’t Ernest, it would be some other white man trying to exploit her family and community.
Mollie (Lily Gladstone) with her sisters Reta (JaNae Collins), Anna (Cara Jade Myers) and and Minnie (Jillian Dion) in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple TV+
But something has kept gnawing at me. While Scorsese warrants praise for the choices he has made here, why must it be exceedingly rare for a white filmmaker — and especially a cinema legend — to do some reflection and realize the story he’s trying to tell shouldn’t solely be about the white men? And to do the work of reframing that story, such as how Scorsese worked extensively with Osage consultants to portray their community’s history with accuracy and dignity? It would be nice if this was just a normal occurrence and not such an unusual one. And in retrospect, framing the story this way should have been more obvious from the outset.
It brought to mind the conversation this summer around Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” That included criticisms that the movie, which depicts the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, doesn’t include the perspectives of the Native communities in New Mexico that were displaced by the Los Alamos facility and harmed by radiation, or the Japanese civilians who experienced the bomb’s devastating impact — and whose descendants continue to grapple with the effects of that history today.
These questions aren’t on “Oppenheimer” or any one movie to solve. These are historic problems with framing and who gets to tell stories and decide how to tell them. For decades, Hollywood has loved to make World War II movies, and the vast majority of them are about heroic white men. That’s not to say they aren’t good movies, and some of them do complicate the conventional narrative and decline to glorify war. But it’s unusual when they deviate from the form, and there are so many more stories left to tell.
One compelling variation on the World War II genre is Steven Spielberg’s 1987 epic “Empire of the Sun,” about a British boy (played by Christian Bale and based loosely on author J.G. Ballard) living in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. He becomes separated from his diplomat parents and spends several years as a prisoner of war in a Japanese concentration camp. I think it’s one of Spielberg’s more underrated movies, and in some ways, a more complex one than some of his better-known war films. But still, whenever I rewatch it, I wonder about the Chinese civilians who appear in background shots of the movie. What about their stories of death and destruction? In this story, they are both figuratively and literally relegated to the background of a far more privileged white male protagonist’s story.
There’s the old adage that history is written by the victors. Perhaps a better way of looking at it: History is written by those who have power. It’s certainly a common pattern, whether in classroom textbooks or on screen. It’s especially present in stories about war and conquest, which routinely gloss over acts of evil. Just look at the ways those of us in Western societies have historically been fed stories about colonialism as tales of adventure and discovery — not of genocide and plunder.
At many points, “Killers of the Flower Moon” plays around with familiar tropes and genres, like true-crime sagas and Westerns. By doing so, Scorsese reminds us of how stories like this are typically framed. It’s easy to imagine those versions of this movie: a suspenseful true-crime caper and a swashbuckling Western. It’s also easy to imagine the original iteration of this movie with a white law enforcement official as the hero, played by a giant movie star. We’ve seen that movie before so, so many times. All of these versions would be doing audiences a disservice, simply entertaining us and sugar-coating the truth.
The film’s ending is both a clever framing device and an absolutely haunting coda, underscoring the ways history all too often erases the kinds of evils Mollie’s family and the Osage people faced — and pretends they never happened. Still, the film could have widened its lens even further. As I watched, I couldn’t stop thinking about the story’s parallels to the current epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Gladstone herself also stars in Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance,” a film about a Native woman trying to investigate the disappearance of her sister while taking care of her niece, set in present-day Oklahoma.
And while in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the federal government does belatedly intervene and prosecute the crimes by Bill and Ernest, that certainly hasn’t been the norm. If anything, the federal government has been responsible for centuries of Native exploitation — and today continues to neglect and marginalize Native communities. Maybe Scorsese doesn’t need to draw the line between past and present, given the film’s already vast scale and scope. But what’s past is prologue.
Mollie, Bill and Ernest at Mollie and Ernest’s wedding, in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple TV+
There’s also a version of this movie that could have centered Mollie herself, rather than opposite her white husband and his uncle. That’s an important point that one of the film’s Osage language consultants, Christopher Cote, raised when asked about his reaction to the final product.
“As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” Cote told the Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere last week. “Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart, and they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.”
Once again, this is about who gets to tell stories and decide how to tell them. The cold, hard reality is that it takes the clout of a legendary filmmaker like Scorsese and mega stars like DiCaprio and De Niro to get a movie of this scale made.
Cote went on to point out that it’s also about who the story is for. “I think that’s because this film isn’t made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage,” he said. “For those that have been disenfranchised, they can relate, but for other countries that have their acts and their history of oppression, this is an opportunity for them to ask themselves this question of morality, and that’s how I feel about this film.”
Scorsese’s choice to reframe this story goes a long way toward making us consider these moral questions and sit with that dark history. But it’s going to take plenty more filmmakers at his level interrogating their choices and challenging engrained ways of telling stories in order to rewrite our existing narratives about history into something more honest.
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Martin Scorsese Still Curious At 80 As Latest Epic Hits Theaters
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NEW YORK (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 realizing 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 centered 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 theaters 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 realization that centering the film on federal investigator Tom White was a familiar a type of Western.
“I realized: ’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. ‘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.
Director-producer Martin Scorsese, center, signs autographs upon arrival for the premiere of the film Killers of the Flower Moon, in Mexico City, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte) Scorsese, after conversations with Leonardo DiCaprio, pivoted to the story of Ernest and Mollie and a perspective closer to Osage Nation. Consultations with the tribe continued and expanded to include accurately capturing language, traditional clothing and customs.
“It’s historical 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 reevaluation during the pandemic. COVID-19, he says, was “a gamechanger.” For a filmmaker whose time is so intensely scheduled, the break was in some ways a relief, and it allowed him a chance to reconsider what he wants to dedicate himself to. For him, preparing a film is a meditative process.
“I don’t use a computer because I tried a couple times and I got very distracted. I get distracted as it is,” Scorsese says. “I’ve got films, I’ve got books, I’ve got people. I’ve only begun this year to read emails. Emails, they scare me. It says ‘CC’ and there are a thousand names. Who are these people?”
Scorsese is laughing when he says this, surely aware that he’s playing up his image as a member of the old guard. (A moment later he adds that voicemail “is interesting to do at times.”) Yet he’s also keen enough with technology to digitally de-age De Niro and make cameos in his daughter Francesca’s TikTok videos.
Scorsese has for years been the preeminent conscience of cinema, passionately arguing for the place of personal filmmaking in an era of moviegoing where films can be devalued as “content,” theater screens are monopolized by Marvel and big-screen vision can be shrunk down on streaming platforms.
“I’m trying to keep alive the sense that cinema is an artform,” Scorsese says. “The next generation may not see it that way because as children and younger people, they’re exposed to films that are wonderful entertainment, beautifully made, but are purely diversionary. I think cinema can enrich your life.”
“As I’m leaving, I’m trying to say: Remember, this can really be something beautiful in your life.”
That mission includes spearheading extensive restoration work with the Film Foundation along with a regular output of documentaries in between features. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker are currently producing a documentary on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Cinema, he says, may be the preeminent 20th century artform, but something else will belong to the 21st century. Now, Scorsese says, “the visual image could be done by anything by anybody anytime anywhere.”
“The possibilities are infinite on all levels. And that’s exciting,” Scorsese says. “But at the same time, the more choices, the more difficult it is.”
The pressure of time is weighing more heavily on Scorsese, too. He has, he’s said, maybe two more feature films left in him. Currently in the mix are an adaptation of Grann’s latest book, the 18th century shipwreck tale “The Wager, ” and an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s “Home.”
“He’s uncompromising. He just does what he feels he really wants to look into,” says Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer on “Flower Moon,” as well as his last three feature films.
“You can feel that it’s a personal exploration of his own psyche,” adds Prieto. “In doing that, he allows growth for everybody, in a way, to really look into these characters who might be doing things we might find very objectionable. I can’t think of many other filmmakers who attempt at such a level of empathy and understanding.”
Yet Scorsese says he often feels like he’s in a race to accomplish what he can with the time he has left. Increasingly, he’s prioritizing what’s worth it. Some things are easier for him to give up.
“Would I like to do more? Yeah. Would I like to go to everybody’s parties and dinner parties and things? Yeah, but you know what? I think I know enough people,” Scorsese says with a laugh. “Would I like to go see the ancient Greek ruins? Yes. Go back to Sicily? Yes. Go back to Naples again? Yes. North Africa? Yes. But I don’t have to.”
Time for Scorsese may be waning but curiosity is as abundant as ever. Recent reading for him includes a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed.” Some old favorites he can’t help but keep revisiting. “Out of the Past” — a movie he first saw as 6-year-old — he watched again a few weeks ago. (“Whenever it’s on, I have to stop and watch it.”) Vittorio De Sica’s “Golden Naples” was another recent rewatch.
“If I’m curious about something, I think I’ll find a way – if I hold out, if I hold up – to try to make something about it on film,” he says. “My curiosity is still there.”
So too is his continued astonishment at cinema and its capacity to transfix. Sometimes, Scorsese can hardly believe it. The other day he watched the Val Lewton-produced 1945 horror film “The Isle of the Dead,” with Boris Karloff.
“Really? How many more times am I going to see that?” Scorsese says, laughing at himself. “It’s their looks and their faces and the way (Karloff) moves. When I first saw it as a child, a young teenager, I was terrified by the film and the silences of it. The sense of contamination. I still get stuck on it.”
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Box Office: Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Nabs $10.4M Friday, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Rides to $9.4M
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Taylor Swift and AMC Theatres’ Eras Tour earned $10.4 million on its second Friday, enough to beat the $9.4 million grossed by Martin Scorsese‘s Western true-crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon on its opening day at the domestic box office.
While Taylor Swift: Eras Tour is virtually assured of winning the weekend with a gross of $30 million to $33 million after crossing the $100 million mark domestically, that doesn’t mean Killers of the Flower Moon can’t carry a tune. (AMC is being more conservative in projecting a $26 million to $27 million weekend for Eras in case there is, once again, little walk-up business.)
Flower Moon — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro — is expected to score $23 million for the weekend, the third-best nationwide opening of Scorsese’s career behind 2010’s Shutter Island ($41 million) and 2006’s The Departed ($26.9 million), not adjusted for inflation. It also ties with The Departed and Goodfellas in receiving the best CinemaScores of his career, an A-.
Apple Original Films is giving the $200 million to $250 million film a traditional theatrical run via Paramount. Its performance so far is impressive for an adult drama that runs three hours and 26 minutes.
And while Flower Moon is skewing older, 46 percent of Friday ticket buyers were under the age of 35, including 27 percent between the ages of 25 and 34. Among older adults, 38 percent of the audience was 45 and older. Since this latter demo is notorious for not rushing out on opening weekend, Apple and Paramount are counting on Flower Moon to enjoy a strong run in the ensuing weeks as awards season unfolds, thanks to strong reviews and audience exit polls.
The movie skewed notably male on Friday (61 percent), but the gender breakdown could even out as the weekend unfolds.
Flower Moon is based on David Grann’s book about the murders of Osage Nation tribe members in the 1920s after oil was found on their Oklahoma land.
DiCaprio — one of the world’s biggest movie stars — and the rest of the cast haven’t been able to do any publicity since the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced July 14. Apple was able to bank some interviews previous to the strike and generated headlines around the world when it took Killers of the Flower Moon to the Cannes Film Festival in late May but didn’t reap the benefits of a final publicity blitz by the actors. (Scorsese, who has a strong fan base, instead did the heavy lifting solo.)
This weekend marks a turning point for Apple’s film ambitions. Killers of the Flower Moon, costing $200 million, is arguably the biggest event film to date from a tech giant to be given a conventional theatrical release versus going relatively quickly to streaming. Earlier this year, Apple Original Films revealed it intends to spend $1 billion a year to produce movies intended for theatrical, both to boost its streaming service and strengthen its profile in theaters.
Apple’s next major theatrical test after Killers of the Flowers Moon is director Ridley Scott’s historic epic Napoleon, starring Joaquin Pheonix in the titular role. Apple and Sony open the film Nov. 22 on the eve of Thanksgiving.
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Marvel Fans React To Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’
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In a controversial opinion piece penned for The New York Times, acclaimed film director Martin Scorcese argued that Marvel movies cannot be classified as cinema. The Onion asked fans of the action movie franchise what they thought of Scorcese’s latest film, Killers Of The Flower Moon, and this is what they said.
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Leonardo DiCaprio Cements a Thrilling New Era in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
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The Revenant.From Everett Collection.
When you get to be as famous as DiCaprio, at a certain point, you can do what you want. His collaborations with Scorsese neatly chart that evolution. During DiCaprio’s early-2000s period of creative drought, he and the director met on Gangs of New York, a fraught production overseen by Harvey Weinstein, before thriving on the studio-backed dramas The Aviator (Miramax), The Departed (Warner Bros.), and Shutter Island (Paramount). However corporate the machines were—something Scorsese has expressed regret about on his latest press run, from Weinstein’s Gangs meddling to the artistic limitations of Shutter Island—this was still Scorsese, and so DiCaprio operated in fresh shades of gray, tough morality dramas that challenged his sparkly persona. It’s no coincidence that his first Oscar nod since being recognized for the 1993 breakout What’s Eating Gilbert Grape came over a decade later, for his intense portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator.
In that era, DiCaprio also dabbled in transformative villainy, whether with the heavy prosthetics of Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar or the nasty twang of Tarantino’s Django Unchained. But Scorsese’s first independently financed production starring DiCaprio officially turned the actor’s appeal inside out. His very presence in The Wolf of Wall Street, as the sleazy stockbroker Jordan Belfort, presented a brilliant challenge. For three full hours, viewers were stuck in his manically depraved world, which DiCaprio embodies fearlessly and, at times, grotesquely—trading his limitless audience goodwill for a discomfiting repulsion. It’s why critics at the time often considered the film to be in conflict with itself, on the brink of valorizing its despicable protagonist. Of course, Scorsese’s intention was exactly the opposite. DiCaprio was almost too good. Perhaps some weren’t ready.
Don’t Look Up, Killers of the Flower Moon, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.From Everett Collection.
A decade later, Scorsese and DiCaprio meet again in Killers of the Flower Moon, with the latter in a fresh career phase—one less burdened by the peak of fame, perhaps, and thus less in need of subversion. How quickly things can change: The pathetic, weaselly skin of Ernest Burkhart, a dopey war veteran unwittingly entangled in a horrific conspiracy to extort and murder the Osage community in 1920s Oklahoma, fits him like a glove. The film begins as a kind of sweeping love story between Ernest and an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), then develops into a searing horror movie about his involvement in the deadly poisoning of her and her family. His mob-boss-esque uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), pulls the strings, but it’s Ernest’s utter indifference toward stopping him, and protecting those he’s destroying, that marks the film’s most insidious and tragic form of evil.
Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, The Departed.From Everett Collection.
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David Canfield
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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is the Hat Movie of the Year
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Killers of the Flower Moon is an indisputable Martin Scorsese masterpiece. As the legendary director grapples with his own mortality, he’s put out one of the finest films of his career, one that characteristically muses on similarly heavy themes: greed, corruption, betrayal, colonialism, violence. Based on the 2017 David Grann book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the little-known story of the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma and the formation of the FBI. See, the Osage Nation had the foresight to maintain mineral rights on their land so, when oil was discovered, it made them fabulously wealthy. It also made them the target of a vast murder plot by their white neighbors.
I had eagerly been anticipating this movie since it was announced, an anticipation that only grew stronger when presented with the one single still that was available and then, each subsequent trailer. Something else I instantly clocked in the trailer? A cavalcade of hats, each bigger and more beautiful than the last. This was not false advertising, but merely a small sampling of the reality: I can confirm that all three hours and 26 minutes of Killers of the Flower Moon are absolutely teeming with hats.
This film was costume designer Jacqueline West’s first time working with Scorcese (who, it must be noted, is no stranger to wild hats). “Few directors are as conversant about clothes,” she told me. “He really has incredible taste in clothing, and a wonderful Italian eye. It’s in his blood.”
She floated two Westerns to the director when explaining what her influences would be: 1926’s The Winning of Barbara Worth and 1948’s Blood On The Moon.
Of course, hats were a practical necessity in 1920s Oklahoma, to protect from the sun—these guys didn’t have any Supergoop SPF—and rain when working outdoors. But, more than that, West said, “the hats were meant to be there to tell a story.”
More than 300 hats were created for the movie. The principal actors’ hats—Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart and Robert DeNiro as his uncle, William Hale, for instance—were made by Jack Scholl at Weather Hats in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. (West had a connection to them through her husband, who is a Bullock, as featured in HBO’s Deadwood.)
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Gabriella Paiella
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Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘Endless’ Improv Annoyed Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese Says
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Even Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio needs to be told to tone it down sometimes.
The 48-year-old actor was hilariously outed this week by none other than Martin Scorsese for his purportedly excessive improvisation while filming “Killers of the Flower Moon.” This ultimately left DiCaprio’s costar — Robert De Niro himself — visibly vexed.
Scorsese’s anticipated crime drama regards the real-life Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma after oceans of oil were found on the land. While it’s the first Scorsese film to star both longtime collaborators of the acclaimed director, their acting approaches sometimes didn’t mesh.
Scorsese told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that DiCaprio’s method was rather tedious.
“Oh, endless, endless, endless!” Scorsese told the outlet about DiCaprio’s incessant urge to discuss things and improvise in his scenes with De Niro. “Then Bob didn’t want to talk. Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit.”
He continued: “And we’d tell him, ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’”
Scorsese made some of the most iconic films in history with De Niro, including “Taxi Driver” (1976), “Raging Bull” (1980) and “Goodfellas” (1990). They reunited on “The Irishman” (2019), after DiCaprio had formed his own prolific working relationship with Scorsese.
DiCaprio, Scorsese and De Niro brought “Killers” to the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images
“Killers of the Flower Moon” marks DiCaprio’s sixth feature with Scorsese, who cast him at 27 years old in “Gangs of New York” (2002). The pair later made “The Aviator” (2004), “The Departed” (2006), “Shutter Island” (2010) and “The Wolf Of Wall Street” (2013) together.
“Killers” marks De Niro’s 10th feature film collaboration with Scorsese.
It was ironically De Niro himself who first told the director about DiCaprio, as he was so impressed by the actor’s performance in “This Boy’s Life” (1993) that he called Scorsese to gush about him. DiCaprio also inspired Scorsese to reassess his approach to “Killers.”
“After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’” Scorsese told The Irish Times. “I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’”
Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth had already adapted David Grann’s 2017 book into a script, but ultimately rewrote it to shift the focus from a procedural about white FBI agents to a more truthful drama about the plight of the indigenous Osage.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” hits theaters Oct. 20.
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The Strange but True Story of the Pioneer Woman’s Link to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
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Sometimes guardians made crooked deals with merchants; sometimes, Synder says, they “were the merchants themselves.” Osage headright holders, who were only paid out periodically, could be driven into debt by the high prices of stores like the Hominy Trading Company. Guardians would then offer a bailout: sell us your land, or offer it in trade, and we’ll make sure the debt is erased. Transferring a headright was hard, with a slew of federal documents that had to be filed and approval by various bureaucrats. By comparison, selling your allotment to the person appointed to approve all your business transactions was easy.
“It was corruption,” says Everett Waller of the guardianship program and the schemes around it. Waller lives in Pawhuska, not too far from Ladd and Ree Drummond’s ranch. He’s the chairman of the Osage Nation’s mineral council, which oversees all the oil and gas rights in the county; he also appears in Killers of the Flower Moon as Paul Red Eagle, an Osage chief whose 1926 Tulsa speech to a group of wealthy oil men spoke mockingly of the efforts of white men to woo wealthy Osage women.
According to In Trust, modern-day members of the Drummond family characterize their forebears as honorable men and savvy business people who purchased their land fairly, and who had good relationships with their Osage neighbors. Waller isn’t so sure about that. “It’s easy. Just look at the ownership,” he says of the Drummonds’ many land purchases during the Reign of Terror. “Anything over a quarter million acres is far beyond just a lucrative business.” (Vanity Fair reached out to several members of the Drummond family for this story, as well as to Ree Drummond, who married into the clan in 1996. None of them responded as of publication time.)
Osage oil fields.Courtesy of Oklahoma Historical Society.
An ancestor of one of Waller’s colleagues on the mineral council, Myron Red Eagle, might agree. In 1934, tribe member Myron Bangs Jr. hired an independent auditor to examine his finances, which were being managed by his guardian, the Drummond brothers. “The auditors filled five pages with discrepancies or issues they found,” Adams-Heard says on her podcast. Bangs sent the federal government the report, and the US filed suit against the brothers in 1941, alleging they “conspired and devised a scheme to defraud” Bangs. A federal judge, however, dismissed the case.
Adams-Heard also discovered that the Drummonds—seemingly without Bangs’s permission—borrowed $15,000 from Bangs’s funds. They used the money to purchase William Hale’s ranch, which he’d put on the market as he was headed to prison. “To see that he might not have known that his money was used to purchase this land from a man who was convicted of aiding and abetting a murder of another Osage man—I mean, that was really striking,” Adams-Heard told Slate this month. (Vanity Fair reached out to Adams-Heard for this story, but Bloomberg declined to make her available for an interview.)
The Drummonds made that purchase with another local ranching family, the Mullendores, who ended up buying out a lot of the Drummonds’ interest in the land. Another portion of the Hale ranch was owned by Charles Drummond, Ladd’s father and Ree’s father-in-law; he sold it to broadcast magnate Ted Turner in the early 2000s. In 2016, the Osage Nation bought it, and the rest of Turner’s 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch, back.
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‘We did it, and it became something’: When Leonardo DiCaprio revealed Kate Winslet and he worked on USD 2.2 billion movie as an ‘experiment’
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One of the most famous sequences in Titanic is Leonardo DiCaprio in a tux and tail standing atop a large staircase in front of a clock, turning and extending his hand to Rose, played by Kate Winslet. Meanwhile, Winslet was unquestionably stunning in her performance as Rose. And their chemistry was incredible, leaving viewers in awe of the two of them. Titanic is one of the best films of all time, and no one could have done justice to Jack and Rose’s love tale other than DiCaprio and Winslet. However, DiCaprio acknowledged in 2016 that he and Kate Winslet did the film as an experiment. Who would have anticipated that an experiment would turn out to be so beautiful and record-breaking?
Leonardo DiCaprio revealed that he and Kate Winslet did Titanic as an experiment
Leonardo DiCaprio reflected on his experience filming Titanic alongside Kate Winslet and discussed how the part changed his career. In an interview with Deadline in 2016, the Titanic actor stated why the 1997 James Cameron film was an experiment for him and his co-star.
He said, “Titanic was very much an experiment for Kate Winslet and me. We’d made all of these independent films. I admired her as an actress, and she told me, ‘Let’s do this together; we can do it.’ We did it, and it turned into something we could never have predicted.
DiCaprio, who was only 22 years old when Titanic was released, said that he didn’t realize the scope of the project at the time. “‘Do you realize how big of a movie this is? ‘Yeah, it’s big,’ I said. It’s a big movie. They’re like, ‘No, no, no. ‘ No, it’s the largest movie ever,’ she says, and I’m like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ I knew there was an expectation for me to do something at that point, and I knew I had to get back to what my intentions were from the beginning.
DiCaprio admitted that he could have gotten any part he wanted after Titanic, but he’s always wanted to produce different movies. He said, “By then, I knew exactly what kind of films I wanted to do. I used [my fame] as a blessing, making R-rated movies and different kinds of movies and taking a chance on things I wanted to act in. People would want to fund those films right now. That was something I’d never had before the Titanic.”
Leonardo DiCaprio was recently spotted enjoying ice cream at Lionel Messi’s game
The internationally recognized actor Leonardo DiCaprio kept a low profile as he watched the Herons defeat MLS rivals LAFC 3-1 from the stands. The seven-time Ballon d’Or winner caught the interest of Hollywood’s A-Listers, with celebrities flocking to see him play.
Despite his best efforts to blend in with the crowd at BMO Stadium, the Titanic and Wolf of Wall Street legend’s meal selection revealed him. The Oscar winner was seen eating an ice cream stick during the second half, with Vice City already up 2-0.
![Leonardo DiCaprio (IMDb)]( "Leonardo DiCaprio (IMDb)")
He tried to fit in by wearing his normal baseball cap and sunglasses, but it was futile. At the very least, the 48-year-old megastar looked completely ignorant that he was being recorded by Apple TV cameras. This was not, however, the first time the Los Angeles native had been photographed watching a game in recent memory.
Leonardo DiCaprio, on the other hand, was most recently seen in the 2021 film Don’t Look Back. The actor will soon be seen in Killers of the Flower Moon, which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. The film will be released on October 20, 2023.
ALSO READ: Sam Asghari thinks he’s the ‘same’ as Leonardo DiCaprio amid split from Britney Spears; Here’s why
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Leonardo DiCaprio’s Endless Summer
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I am thrilled to inform you that once again Leonardo DiCaprio and his closest friend and confidant Toby McGuire are on a boat. They are not in St.-Tropez, nor Sardinia, nor even the Amalfi Coast. That was yesterday’s yachting. This week, they’re off the coast of Ibiza.
The crew is different this time as well. Leo and Toby are hanging out Ibiza’s finest: Arabella Chi, 32-year-old Love Island star and Riccardo Tisci, Burberry’s COO. Chi and DiCaprio are not dating the tabloids say; she’s instead been linked to DiCaprio’s other buddy and nightlife man about town Richie Akiva, according to the Daily Mail. The actor’s plus one was actually Mick Jagger, who joined him for lunch on Wednesday.
I know what you’re thinking. Are you going to take note of every time Leonardo DiCaprio steps dockside until the end of time? All I can say is that it’s nice to have a calling. A grounding force, something to carry you through this one wild and precious life.
And one day, won’t we—humanity—want a record of this? We’ll want to know that through all the heat and discord, somebody was pressing on, deciding to live. We’ll want to know that Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio always returned to the sea, whether it was the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, and found something there to float on. And that we always caught him if we could.
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Kenzie Bryant
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12 Things We Lowkey Love About Final Fantasy XVI
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I’ve finished Final Fantasy XVI and am now working on 100 percenting it, including beating the game a second time on the New Game+ “Final Fantasy” mode difficulty. For all the game’s flaws, of which there are plenty, there’s just so much it does that I just can’t get enough of. From the music and environments to the heart-stopping Eikon battles, Square Enix’s latest action-RPG is chock full of things both big and small, in your face and very subtle, that make it, for me at least, one of the most memorable Final Fantasy games in nearly two decades.
Released on June 22 as a timed PlayStation 5 exclusive, Final Fantasy XVI tells the story of the orphaned prince Clive and his (not so merry) band of outcasts as they seek to overthrow the powers that be and install a new, more equitable world order. It trades the turn-based, menu-heavy RPG customization the franchise is known for for chunky action combat and cinematic spectacle that’s constantly cranked to 11. And it works. Mostly. Here are some of our favorite things we can’t stop thinking about from Square Enix’s latest blockbuster adventure.
Clive’s slutty little waist
If we’re talking about little things in Final Fantasy XVI worth spotlighting, I think it would be a crime to not include Clive Rosfield’s slutty little waist. Who gave that man permission to wear a blood-red corset and just show off what he’s working with at all times? Oh, you’re sad about your brother’s death? I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of your loud-as-fuck fit. Criminal. Lock him away. — Kenneth Shepard
The anime flexes
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku Spectacle is at the heart of Final Fantasy XVI, and that includes using its Kaiju Eikon fights to recreate some classic anime moments. An early sequence where Ifrit punches the crap out of Phoenix is an homage to Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Eikons can regrow entire limbs like in Attack on Titan. The development team took almost every opportunity afforded by the game’s central premise and used it to go berserk (speaking of which).
When the music hits
Final Fantasy XVI’s soundtrack was composed by Masayoshi Soken. It’s very subtle in parts compared to some earlier scores in the series, but goes very hard in others. Most satisfying of all is how elegantly it shifts mid-battle to take advantage of choreographed quick-time cinematic moments. “To Sail Forbidden Seas” is the name of the song that plays during all of the Eikon battles, and the mood ebbs and flows in perfect sync with the battle, as you go from hacking away at the stagger gauge to unleashing a flurry of cooldown abilities while the boss is vulnerable. The track builds, brings in the chorus, and then reaches another level when the cinematic clashes begin before settling back down again when it’s back to the main combat. Final Fantasy boss fights have always sought to be dynamic and exciting even when turn-based, but XVI takes it to a whole new level. Especially during the Titan fight.
Clive’s Wall of Memories
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku At a certain point in the game, you start amassing keepsakes from your adventures, little remembrances of people you’ve helped or things you’ve accomplished. I like this because you don’t get anything for them except the keepsakes themselves. They don’t provide you with any combat bonuses or stat boosts. They’re just keepsakes, a little reminder that what matters most of all in the world of Final Fantasy 16 isn’t your strength stat or how good your bracers are, but the connections Clive forms with others.—Carolyn Petit
The Torgal toss
Speaking of epic boss fight moments, holy hell Torgal is out of his mind. I pointed at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio when he grabbed Benedikta in his jaws and swung her across the battle arena after she beat the crap out of Clive. We’ve moved so far beyond “Can you pet the dog?” If your game’s canine friend can’t go Super Saiyan on a demigod, then what’s even the point? Final Fantasy VIII’s Sant’ Angelo di Roma walked so Torgal could run.
The way the Mothercrystals disintegrate
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku A lot of massive crystals get destroyed in Final Fantasy XVI, and every time it’s as satisfying as watching an ice sculpture get sent through a wood chipper. Probably not great for Valesthea’s air quality, but beautifully effervescent nonetheless.
No clipping
Sometimes a game’s graphics are so good you don’t even notice all the ways in which they’re incredible. Final Fantasy XVI’s intricate costumes and long hairstyles are particularly notable for how rarely, if ever, they clip through one another, let alone the environments. Clive in particular has a long dark mane and a long dark cape, and they never get caught on one another or stray objects across all of the environments, even when the rebel sellsword is vaulting over fences or climbing up ledges.
How gracefully Clive gets out of people’s way
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku In keeping with Final Fantasy XVI’s theme of providing the occasional ridiculous level of attention to small details, I can’t get over the automatic animation Clive goes into every time you’re about to steer him into another NPC. Getting snagged on random characters in the world has been a staple in older games in the series, but here you’d have to go out of your way to steer into one. And even still, Square Enix’s developers decided to add a bespoke animation precisely for those rare occasions, just to keep things flowing naturally and avoid the the game-y-ness of the game coming through.
The sound of the XP screen
Whether it’s the rounding up of the numbers like a slot machine or the clink, clink, clink of new gil and items getting added to your inventory, there’s something magical about Final Fantasy XVI’s minimalistic battle results menu. At first I hardly noticed it, but with every battle the tiny dopamine hit of seeing and hearing Clive rack up points wrapped its tendrils around my lizard gamer brain.
The scenery
Final Fantasy games are known for being beautiful, but I can’t get over the muted extravagance of some of Final Fantasy XVI’s environments. The hyper-realistic style almost masks how much is actually going on, whether its giant kingdoms in the background or dense forests thick with different types of foliage. Except for the deserts, which look like how my brain remembers every other Final Fantasy desert.
Summons fighting
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku Shiva, Ifrit, Odin and Bahamut have been blowing up stuff since 1990’s Final Fantasy III, with summon animations that got more and more over-the-top in each new entry. Final Fantasy XVI is the first to render those scenes as if they were just part of the underlying fabric of the game rather than rewards doled out sparingly. My favorite is when, in one scene early on, Bahamut and Odin stare each other down from across a battlefield as their two kingdoms’ armies collide. It’s presented so nonchalantly that it’s easy to forget just how incredible it is to play a Final Fantasy that never flinches from showing you everything.
Uncle Byron
Clive is great and Cid is excellent. I love Gav too. There’s no shortage of great (mostly male) characters in Final Fantasy XVI, but let’s give it up for Uncle Byron, who thinks Clive is an imposter until they recite a scene from a play they used to perform together years ago at family parties. He’s a coward but throws his vast reserves of gil into the rebellion, wants to make amends for past failures, and never misses a chance to talk a big poetic game like he just sprang out of a Sir Walter Scott novel. The developers at Square even made sure to keep him animated behind the bar guzzling down beer at the inn during an early brawl in the Dhalmekian Republic.
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Ethan Gach
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Killers of the Flower Moon Trailer: Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio movie promises love, crime and more
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Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone is one the most highly anticipated films of 2023. Paramount and Apple released the second trailer of the film on July 5. The much-awaited drama premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It received a 9-minute standing ovation at the festival. Now, the new trailer of the film shows the stunning acting of DiCaprio, Niro, Lily, and others. Check out the below to know the details of the new trailer.
Killers of the Flower Moon new trailer
The new trailer opens with a conversation between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). Ernest can be heard saying to Mollie, “You know you got nice color skin. What color would you say that is?” Mollie who is a member of Osage tribe, replies, “My color.” Then the scene takes to William (Robert De Niro) who says, “The Osage. They have the worst land possible.” But admits that they “outsmarted everybody.”
Robert De Niro instigates DiCaprio’s character about the Osage people of Oklahoma. He becomes wealthy through the discovery of oil on their land. Niro then goes on to say to Ernest that the land had oil in it and money flows freely there. He can be heard saying, “The wealth should come to us.”
Ernest and Mollie eventually fall in love and become a couple. They can be seen kissing while the trailer shows William saying, “It’s just gonna be another tragedy.”
Significantly, Mollie says, “I oughta kill these white men who killed my family.” In one of the scenes, Ernest can be seen consoling Mollie as he says, “I’m right here.” Tom White can be seen telling Ernest that he is sent down from Washington D.C. to see about those murderers.
Watch the new trailer:
The trailer shows us fast-cutting scenes of murder, arson, and gunfights. It gives a glimpse into the horrifying reality of the violence inflicted upon the native people of Oklahoma. This leads to Lily Gladstone’s character getting revengeful and declaring, “I must exact vengeance on these white men who took my family from me.”
Synopsis of new trailer
The official synopsis of the second trailer depicts that oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation at the turn of the 20th century. Notably, they became some of the richest people in the world overnight. Needless to say that the wealth of these Native Americans attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder. The synopsis ends with, “Based on a true story… ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is an epic western crime saga, where real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal.”
For the unversed, Killers of the Flower Moon is a true story based on David Grann’s non-fiction novel of the same name. It tells the story of the murders of Osage people in Oklahoma throughout the 1920s. Scorsese’s film and Grann’s book follow the romance of Enerest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Gladstone) and the immense wealth of one Native American nation.
The Apple Original Killers of the Flower Moon has set its wide theatrical release for October 20.
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Are Leonardo DiCaprio and Gigi Hadid over? Actor spotted hosting Neelam Gill on expensive yacht in Italy
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Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio, accompanied by his father and stepmother, indulged in a lavish getaway on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The highlight of their vacation was Leonardo’s hosting of British model Neelam Gill and her model friends on his magnificent $150 million mega yacht, Luc Leman.
Leonardo DiCaprio, as usual kept a low profile
During their time on the yacht, Leonardo DiCaprio kept his usual low-profile style, sporting a plain white T-shirt, beige cargo-style board shorts, a baseball cap, and chain necklaces. Neelam Gill looked stunning in a silk midi dress adorned with an eye-catching print. She accessorized her dress with a green handbag and off-white flip-flops. Joining them were models Madison Headrick Nahmad, who wore a striped crop top and white trousers, and Bianca Balti, arriving in an elegant porcelain print ensemble.
Glimpses of Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent romances
Leonardo’s Italian vacation followed his rendezvous with supermodel Gigi Hadid in London. The two were seen together at the Chiltern Firehouse and enjoyed a dinner with Leo’s parents at China Tang. Although their romance reportedly ended earlier this year, sightings of the duo in May and recent hangouts suggest they may have rekindled their connection.
Quality family time for Leonardo DiCaprio with father and stepmother
Accompanying Leonardo on his holiday were his father, George DiCaprio, and stepmother, Peggy Farrar. George showcased his dapper style in a brown patterned shirt and dark trousers, while Peggy, an Amritdhari Sikh, donned a white turban, a chic white kaftan, and matching trousers. George DiCaprio, known for his involvement in underground comix, has played a significant role in his son’s life. Despite struggling financially during Leonardo’s childhood, George found success in the waterbed business and became a respected figure in the underground comic scene as a writer, editor, and distributor. More recently, he made a small appearance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Licorice Pizza, portraying a wig shop owner and waterbed salesman who influenced the protagonist.
As the actor enjoys quality time with loved ones and continues his successful career, the Italian holiday provides a glimpse into Leonardo DiCaprio’s luxurious lifestyle and his appreciation for the beautiful company.
ALSO READ: Did Gigi Hadid and Leonardo DiCaprio spend ‘nearly the entire night’ together at Pre-Oscars party?
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