Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio & Robert De Niro ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Interview – Deadline

Editor’s note: This interview was originally published on May 16 during the Cannes Film Festival. It is being rerun now to coincide with the film’s domestic release and interviews were carried out prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

EXCLUSIVE: In 2016, the hottest book in Hollywood hadn’t even been published yet. Circulating in galley proofs, it was the latest non-fiction work from author David Grann, whose 2009 book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon had recently been filmed by James Gray and produced by Plan B. His new book was another mouthful — Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI — and it proved just as tasty.

Seven-figure bids materialized, with talent attachments that included Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and J.J. Abrams. The deal ended with a statement buy by Imperative Entertainment’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, who went well beyond the bids and took it off the table for $5 million. With Martin Scorsese directing, they would set it up at Paramount, casting DiCaprio alongside Robert De Niro in the most iconic pairing since Michael Mann’s Heat with De Niro and Al Pacino, but on opposing sides of the law.

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Killers of the Flower Moon had all the makings of a classic Western. DiCaprio would play Tom White, an incorruptible Texas Ranger-turned FBI agent sent to Oklahoma in the early 1920s by J. Edgar Hoover to answer a desperate call from the Osage Indian Nation. The Osage had recently become the wealthiest people per capita in the world due to the vast supply of oil being harvested from their lands. At the same time, many of them were beginning to die in alarming numbers — and under highly suspicious circumstances.

It was the perfect set-up for a murder mystery, but something didn’t feel right. Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro began to realize that the situation was more complex than that. More explicitly, it would be inappropriate to serve up a white-savior Western since white people were also the bad guys: the outsiders who insinuated their way into the Osage and took advantage of their naivety, empowered by apathy from corrupt local law enforcement and townsfolk eager to shake money out of the pockets of their trusting Osage friends. 

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So, Scorsese started over, seizing on the chance to tell a story that would resonate in a modern era, forcing audiences to confront their own darkest instincts: how far would they be willing to go for the love of money? The lightbulb moment came when DiCaprio wondered if the focus should not be the lawman but rather one of his suspects: Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart is apparently a loving husband, married to Osage tribe member Mollie, and they have three children together. Mollie is at death’s door when Tom White — now to be played by Jesse Plemons — arrives. Is Ernest just in it for the money? 

This much darker take and much more expensive take reportedly led Paramount to back out as financier. But to Apple heads of Worldwide Video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, this had the potential to be an important historical epic, a beachhead project for their fledgling film program. They went out and got the package, just the way they did at Sundance with CODA, which went on to become the first Best Picture Oscar winner for a streamer. The deal orchestrated by Scorsese and DiCaprio’s rep Rick Yorn left room for Paramount, which had certain rights. The deal called for a full global theatrical release through Paramount, before it lands on the Apple TV+ streaming site in the heart of awards season.

Despite the radical change of angle, De Niro, marking his 10th collaboration with Scorsese, held on to the role of Bill Hale. He is Ernest’s uncle, who presents himself as a loving patriarch and ally to members of the Osage, but who enlists his nephew in a nefarious plan to help fulfill his darker motives. “I’d read the book a few years earlier and the Tom White character was more prominent,” he says, “That was right for the book, but Marty and Leo’s idea to focus on the relationship between Bill and Ernest made sense to me. They wanted to focus more on that dynamic instead of Tom White coming in and saving the day.”

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That shift makes it a much more personal story, De Niro explains, one that fleshes out the story to ground an exploration of human nature, weakness and greed. “It made the most sense to show what’s going on in that world, the dynamic between the nephew and the uncle,” says De Niro. “I don’t know if you would call it the banality of evil, or just evil, corrupt entitlement, but we’ve seen it in other societies, including the Nazis before WWII. That is, a depressing realization of human nature that leaves people capable of doing terrible things. [Hale] believed he loved them, and felt they loved him. But within that, he felt he had the right to behave the way he did.”

He continues: “Tom White and the FBI set up law and order in the Wild West, where laws were made by the people who were right there and felt they could do anything. They were entrenched in the community, and nobody was accountable. It was racism, really.” 

In retrospect, casting De Niro as DiCaprio’s uncle was a masterstroke, playing into the idea of family and subverting the concept of the father-son relationship that had developed offscreen. After all, says DiCaprio, “My career was launched by doing This Boy’s Life, auditioning with Bob and then getting the role. Working with him, watching his professionalism and the way he created his character was one of the most influential experiences of my life and career. It got me to do all these films with Marty and now, 30 years later, all of us getting to work together and collaborate, it’s such an incredible and special experience for me. Those are my cinematic heroes. It is so very special to me.”

RELATED: Martin Scorsese Talks ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon,’ Why He’s Never Been A “Hollywood Guy” And The Future Of Cinema

To DiCaprio, the original script just didn’t live up to the story’s epic potential. “It just didn’t get to the heart of the Osage,” he says. “It felt too much like an investigation into detective work, rather than understanding from a forensic perspective the culture and the dynamics of this very tumultuous, dangerous time in Oklahoma.”

DiCaprio was keen to tap into the innate spirituality of the piece, and also the place, a feeling that followed him onto location. “We were shooting there during the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre,” he says, “which was a half-hour car ride away from where the Osage reign of terror occurred and happened in the same year, 1921, as the first Osage murder. We were there for the Tulsa massacre and the return of the Flower Moon. It was cosmic insane coincidence that we were telling this story, 100 years later.”

RELATED: ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Crew On Working With “The Greatest Collaborator” Martin Scorsese & The Response To The Film From Native Community – Contenders London

This subtle reworking of the material, with its new emphasis on shifting moral values, also helped the movie to become more of a traditional Scorsese movie. “We did a lot of work to try to help Marty do what he does best, which is to tell a very human story,” says DiCaprio. “To get to the dark side of the human condition but also understand the complexities. Here you had the wealthiest nation, the richest per capita people in the world. You had this melting pot in Oklahoma where freed slaves had created their own economy, and the Osage emerged as this wealthy culture. But you also had during that period the rise of the KKK and white supremacy and this clash of cultures. For some of these white settlers, it was like a gold rush to take advantage of people of color.”

Surprisingly, in amongst all this darkness is a love story, between Ernest and Mollie. “Ernest and Mollie really represented how twisted and complex some of this stuff was, culturally,” DiCaprio says. “A lot of Osage women were marrying white men who really came to prey on them, to take over their headrights and seize their oil money. And yet, at the same time, what struck me was one scene in the initial draft we had, the real testimony of Ernest and Mollie, as he explains his part in this horrific plan. They still loved each other. That was the twisted complexity of what made this a truly dark American story.” 

This is really where the film departs from the path laid down by the book. “The biggest challenge became pulling off the trick of not making this a mystery, but exposing Ernest early on for who he is and then watching this very twisted relationship unravel. Not only with Mollie, but also with De Niro’s character as well. That wasn’t easy and it took years to figure out.”

So many years, in fact, that Scorsese had enough time to go off and make The Irishman. “There was just more and more development,” DiCaprio recalls. “The script is based on an amazing book, but when I spoke with David Grann after we had this idea, he was all for it. He said that getting into a forensic look at the culture at that time, the clash between white America and the Indigenous people, would be the perfect way to tell the story, if it could be done. I really think we accomplished that. At the end of the day, it works.”

Another approach would have felt rote, he says. “When you see our characters, you’re going to know something’s wrong. You see the dynamic within the first 20 minutes, and where do you go from there except explore, in depth, that crazy family dynamic? That decision allowed us to really make what I feel is a throwback to a 1940s or ’50s golden age of cinema epic drama, the kind we don’t often get to see nowadays.”

The king of New York reflects on the life choices that brought him together with long-time collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

DEADLINE: In Killers of the Flower Moon, the depiction of the exploitation and murder of Osage tribe members for oil money — and the indifference shown by the U.S. government and law enforcement — is just gutting. Why did you want to tell this story?

MARTIN SCORSESE: What I responded to when I read David Grann’s book was the natural order of things. The idea that one could rationalize that if the Osage are not going to be of any use, if they’re going to be phased out anyway, why don’t we just, you know, help them go? And, ultimately, do we really feel any guilt for that? I don’t mean you and I, but when you’re doing what was being done to the Osage, and if you tend to dehumanize someone…

DEADLINE: …You can rationalize abhorrent behavior, if it lines your own pockets?

SCORSESE: Do [the Osage] behave differently, culturally? Yes, on all levels. There’s no way they could fit in to the European model, the capitalist model, in terms of money and private property. So, then [the attitude is] we’re coming, and we’re not going away. Either you join us, or you have to go. Now, we love and admire you, by the way, but it’s just that your time is up.

I heard someone recently say, when they fire an executive, well, their time is over. And the person behind that fired person, it’s their time. Is this the natural order of who we are as human beings?

DEADLINE: Your movie supplies a bleak answer to that question.

SCORSESE: Well, the answer is: probably yes, if you’re driven by how much money you can make. All that land’s just sitting there, what are they doing with it? The Europeans are thinking, ‘We come here, and look at this place. Look at the riches! And what are they doing? Killing some buffalo. Fighting amongst themselves over hunting areas. Communal living. And, excuse me, nobody owns the land?’ The very fact they don’t understand, in European terms, the value of money means they can’t exist in this world.

DEADLINE: So rather than take David Grann’s book and turn it into a mystery-thriller with murders solved and the FBI established, you decided that making it an exploration of human nature was your way in? 

SCORSESE: Leo DiCaprio looked at me and said, “Where’s the heart in this movie?” This was when Eric Roth and I were writing the script from the point of view of the FBI coming in and unraveling everything. Look, the minute the FBI comes in, and you see a character that would be played by Robert De Niro, Bill Hale, you know he’s a bad guy. There’s no mystery. So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares! We’ve got fantastic ones on television. 

The least material available to us was about Ernest. There’s much written about Bill Hale, Mollie, and many of the others. Eric and I enjoyed working on that first version; it had all the tropes of the Western genre that I grew up with, and I was so tempted to do it that way. But I said, “The only person that has heart, besides Mollie Burkhart, is her husband Ernest, because they’re in love.”

We went to Oklahoma to the Gray Horse settlement, the Osage gave us a big dinner, and people got up and spoke. One woman got up and said, “You know, they loved each other, Ernest and Mollie. And don’t forget that. They loved each other.” I thought, ‘Whoa. That’s the story. How could he have done what he did?’

DEADLINE: Presumably, the other version would have been more in the spirit of Westerns told from a white male perspective.

SCORSESE: It was something we’ve seen before. We researched Tom White. He was super-straight. In the book, he’s the son of a lawman who instilled incorruptibility and empathy in his son.  We tried to do more research, hoping to go deeper on Tom White. Does he have difficulties? Maybe he’s drinking? I finally said, “What are we making? A film about Tom White, who comes in and saves everybody?”

The woman who mentioned the love story said she’d told her mother about this film, and her mother said, “Tom White? You mean the man who saved us?” So, there’s still recognition of what they did, Tom White and what was then called the Bureau of Investigation. Even though a lot of people got away with what they did. We’ll never really know everything about what happened.

But the love story [changed everything]. I said, “How do we do the love story?” We couldn’t figure it out. And then Leo said, “What if I play Ernest?” I realized, because there is the least amount of research on Ernest, that we could do anything. If we did that, we’d take the script and turn it inside out, make it from the ground level out, rather than coming in from the outside. I said, “Let’s put ourselves in the mindset of the people who did this.”

DEADLINE: How much did this whole experience leave you questioning the Westerns you grew up loving, with the white heroism, and white hat/black hat iconography, especially when it came to the depiction of Native Americans?

SCORSESE: Well, the white hat/black hat tradition has more to do with mythology that is deeper than folklore. The gunslingers evolve into the outlaws of the ’30s that the FBI made their name on — Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson — and then to La Cosa Nostra. There was a Robert Warshow essay called The Gangster as a Tragic Hero that laid it out: as long as we see the gangster fall, it’s alright. The western mythology comes under that heading.

The most beautiful of them came from John Ford and Howard Hawks, and then, of course, there’s Shane, which is the most mythological. But there were movies we grew up watching where the native Americans were for the most part depicted unfairly.

The first Western I remember seeing was Duel in the Sun, in which Lionel Barrymore calls [Jennifer Jones] a squaw. I was 6 years old, and I remember thinking, ‘Why are they so angry at these people?’ Gypsies, Native Americans. It’s like England, where you had Madonna of the Seven Moons. Phyllis Calvert plays an aristocrat, but she also has Gypsy blood in her, and at night she runs out and does crazy things with the Gypsies.

I didn’t quite get it then [laughs]. I guess it had more to do with sex than anthropology and social issues. But I grew up watching films like Red River, where the Native Americans force the wagons into a circle and Joanne Dru gets the arrow in her shoulder. That incredible scene, where Montgomery Clift pulls out the arrow and she doesn’t blink. And he has to suck out the poison. I think one of the problems in the genre is that none of the Native Americans are played by Native Americans. I mean, in Taza, Son of Cochise [Douglas Sirk, 1954], the star is Rock Hudson.

DEADLINE: In your movie, you feature a glimpse of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, where white supremacists destroyed the Black Wall Street. Was that an extension of the attitude among white people — a kind of passive-aggressive civility — that could turn violent with the slightest provocation?

SCORSESE: I don’t know. We only became fully aware of what happened in Tulsa a couple of years ago. We knew about race riots, about lynchings. We didn’t know about the destruction, the wiping out of a whole people out of fear of economic superiority, of people of a different color. You see they’re doing well and next thing you know… I think it has to come down to pure racism. This country’s a big experiment. Everybody’s together.

DEADLINE: Had DiCaprio played Tom White, it would have been like putting him in the role Kyle Chandler played in The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s better to see you put him through the emotional blender. Bend and twist him to see what happens.

SCORSESE: What’s great about Leo, and it’s why we work together so often, is, he goes there. He goes to these weird places that are so difficult and convoluted, and through the convolution, somehow there’s a clarity that we reach. And usually it’s in the expression, in his face, in his eyes. I’ve always told him this. He’s a natural film actor. I could shoot a close-up of him, he could be thinking of nothing, and I could intercut anything with it, and people will say, “Oh, he’s reacting to such and such.” It’s the Kuleshov experiment. You could do that with him. There’s something in his face that the camera locks into, in his eyes. The slightest movement, we know it. Thelma [Schoonmaker], editing his footage with me over the years, she often goes, “Look at this. Look at the eye movement here. I think we should keep it.” It’s very interesting, what goes on behind the eyes. It’s all there.

DEADLINE: His first breakthrough came opposite Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life, and it was De Niro who told you about him. Do you remember what he said?

SCORSESE: Not exactly. He usually didn’t say much at that time. It was ’92, ’93 and we hadn’t worked together for almost 10 years since we did Goodfellas. Bob wanted me to do Cape Fear. After Goodfellas, he did This Boy’s Life. We were talking on the phone, about what I’m not quite sure. He said, “I’m working with this young boy. You must work with him sometime.” That was the first time I heard him recommend somebody to me. “The kid is really good.” he said.

DEADLINE: Did he say why?

SCORSESE: Bob doesn’t talk a lot [laughs]. He’ll say, “He’s good.” Or, he’ll say, “He’s right for this.” Or he’ll say, “I don’t know, there’s something.”

DEADLINE: This is your 10th film with De Niro and your sixth with DiCaprio. But aside from a short film, it’s the first time you’ve had them together. Why did it take so long, and how close were you to having them both in a film like The Departed?

SCORSESE: We talked to Bob about it, but he didn’t want to do it. Look, there are some people I work with a lot because I find that I’m… in the margins, in a way. I look back, and I feel lucky enough to have gotten the films made that I got made. By “in the margins”, I mean it in the sense that there are many actors over the years I would’ve loved to work with, but… I don’t fit in with the industry thinking. I’ve tried. I was lucky with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. It all fit together right. But I didn’t work with Bob for 10 years until we did Goodfellas; we went off in different directions. Then we made another two, three films. And then, for another 19 years, we didn’t. In the meantime, there were two with Daniel Day-Lewis, and for years I wanted to work with Jack Nicholson, if work is the word.

There are others whose names I won’t mention that I tried, and it just never fit. People I admired so much. I feel I missed it. And yet what happened is that I found that, because of the subject matter in many of the films, there seemed to be a comfort level [with Bob and I], not easy by the way at all, but a comfort level in knowing we could get to a place. What that place is, I may not be able to verbalize, but together we could probably find something.

But that took also long periods of not working together, because, you know, people change. He still wanted to do certain things. Casino really solidified it for me. That was the ultimate, in terms of that type of picture for him and me. Leo then became that way too, and a lot of it happened on The Aviator. There were some scenes he did with Cate Blanchett that left me stunned, I thought it was so beautiful. And he learned a lot as a person; he told me he did. Maybe he was a young kid, just growing. I have daughters. I don’t have sons, so maybe it’s like we’re stumbling along and it’s almost like parenting in a way. But, wow.

And then we did The Departed and he just blossomed. That character he plays, Billy, is so wonderful. That kid caught in this Celtic street war where, for fun, they kill the Italians from Providence. This poor kid is in the shooting war in the streets. They’re like, as Roger Ebert said in his review, “This movie is like an examination of conscience, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?” This was his character, and he did it beautifully. He’s not a religious guy, but he understood the human condition, and that boy. I thought that was incredible.

So, with Bob, after Casino we stopped for a while and I did Kundun, and Bringing Out the Dead. And then Gangs of New York. We always checked in, on that and everything else. He wanted me to do Analyze This, and I said, “We already did it. It was Goodfellas.” I talked to him about other projects, and at one point he said, “You know the kind of stuff I like to do with you.” I said, “OK.” That became The Irishman, and it took nine years. We were always looking. “What about The Departed?” “Nah, I don’t wanna do that.” “OK.”

DEADLINE: He turned down Gangs of New York?

SCORSESE: That was just a check-in. Literally, he said, “What are you doing?” “I’m doing this. You interested?” “Nah.” “OK.” We always talked about that kind of thing, because he is the only one around who knows where I came from and who I am, from that period of time when we were 15 or 16 years old. He knows that part of New York. It was all instinct between us and his courage and his humility, in terms of how he’ll say, “If a scene plays on my back, fine, but if it plays better on the other person’s face, play that.”

Now, that was a certain period of time. Does he still think that way, 10 years later? Turns out he did! But is he the old Bob? No. You’ve got to see where they are. Like when Leo said, “Where’s the heart of this thing?” I said, it’s Ernest. He loves her and she loves him. And yet… when does he know he’s poisoning her? Is it really insulin they’re giving her for her diabetes? All of that is unknown. But he’s obviously harming her, and how does someone who’s in love with this person, has a family, kids, do that? Clearly, he’s being manipulated by Bill, his uncle. The weakness of the character. He’s like Kichijiro from Silence.

DEADLINE: That character who keeps betraying the missionaries, screwing up and asking for absolution in confession?

SCORSESE: Yes. He was a disaster.

DEADLINE: The way it unfolds, you don’t really know if Ernest is in denial, or if he is just ignorant. He could have just been doing what he was told by the doctors who said the medicine would help her diabetes and slow her down.

SCORSESE: That’s the key. That’s the scene. And that scene took until the day we shot it, to write it. We just kept working on the scenes day by day, weekend by weekend. And when he nods, when Leo says, “Well, you know, it’s just gonna slow her down.” He’s saying, “I accept in denial what all of you are forcing me to do.”

DEADLINE: Lily Gladstone, as Mollie, is the movie’s conscience. What kind of direction did you give her? She’s stoic and often doesn’t say much, which leads to a critical payoff.

SCORSESE: Lily had her own thoughts. She has an intelligence and a groundedness about her, in her mind and heart. It’s almost instinctual. When Mollie says, “You know, Coyote wants money,” he says, “Right, I love money. Let’s have some fun!” She goes, “You’re right. I’m with you.” She loves him. That’s Mollie’s issue. She didn’t leave him until after the trial.

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I think she just really loved him. She talks about his eyes and that sort of thing. Her sister says, “Oh, I like the other one, the red-haired guy. But, you know, they both want your money.” Mollie says, “It doesn’t matter, his uncle’s rich, and he doesn’t need that much.” I would use the phrase ‘beautiful failure’ here, and hers is that she trusts and loves. Maybe we see it as a failure, but it’s not a failure for her, because she’s loving and trusting. She has heart, and she cannot accept the fact that he would do anything like poison her intentionally.

DEADLINE: But Mollie’s relatives were dying in suspicious circumstances all around her.

SCORSESE: He has nothing to do with it, in her mind.

DEADLINE: You’ve described the shorthand that you have with De Niro. How does it work with DiCaprio?

SCORSESE: With Leonardo, there’s no shorthand. It’s longhand. We hang out and talk and get all kinds of research. I give him stuff to read, and music. He’s very good with music. As I say, he prompted me to think about Ernest rather than Tom White for him, even though there was very little written on Ernest, and he is the weakling, a man who was in love with his wife, but he’s poisoning her. He was like, “Yeah. OK. How are we gonna do that?” He wanted to go into that uncharted territory. That’s the excitement. We did, and it’s hours and hours and days of work. On set. On the weekends. The film was day and night. Same with Bob, to a certain extent.

DEADLINE: When Deadline did a long interview with Coppola recently, he said that after all the studio meddling on The Godfather, he only wanted to write The Godfather Part II with Mario Puzo, but he had the perfect young director to take over: you. Paramount turned him down. What do you remember about that?

SCORSESE: He told me, and, honestly, I don’t think I could have made a film on that level at that time in my life, and who I was at that time. To make a film as elegant and masterful and as historically important as Godfather II, I don’t think… Now, I would’ve made something interesting, but his maturity was already there. I still had this kind of edgy thing, the wild kid running around.

I didn’t find myself that comfortable with depicting higher-level underworld figures. I was more street-level. There were higher-level guys in the street. I could do that. I did it in Goodfellas particularly. That’s where I grew up. What I saw around me wasn’t guys in a boardroom or sitting around a big table talking. That took another artistic level that Francis had at that point. He didn’t come from that world, the world that I came from. The story of Godfather II is more like Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. It’s wonderful art.

DEADLINE: I always wondered why you gave up Schindler’s List to Steven Spielberg. You grew beyond the street level mobster thing with breathtaking films like Kundun, Silence and now Killers of the Flower Moon. When you decided Schindler’s List wasn’t for you, was it like Godfather II, outside a world you were most familiar with?

SCORSESE: Oh, no. Godfather II, Francis just mentioned it to me. For Schindler’s List, I hired Steve Zaillian, and Steve and I worked on the script. I was about to direct it. But I had reservations at a certain point. Don’t forget, this is 1990, I’d say. I did The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. The whole point of that movie was to start a dialogue about something which is still important to me, which is the nature — the true nature — of love, which could be god, could be Jesus. I’m not being culturally ambivalent here, it’s what’s in us. Is god in us? I really am that way; I can’t help it. I like to explore that. I wanted a dialogue on that. But I didn’t know about all that yet. So, I did Last Temptation, I did it a certain way, and Schindler’s List was scuttled by its reception. I did the best I could. I went around the world. Any arguments, I took ’em on. I may have been wrong, but I’m not sure you can be wrong with dogma. But we could argue it.

In the case of Schindler’s List, the trauma I had gone through was such that I felt to tackle that subject matter… I knew there were Jewish people upset that the writer of The Diary of Anne Frank was gentile. I heard that there were people who complained about Schindler, that he used the inmates to make money off them. I said, “Wait a minute.” I could… well, not defend him, but argue who he was. I think he was an amazing man, but I didn’t know if I was equipped for it at that time. I didn’t have the knowledge.

I remember Steve Spielberg, over the years, mentioning it to me all the time. He held up the book when we on a plane going to Cannes, and he said, “This is my dark movie and I’m going to make it.” That was back in 1975. And I said, “Well, I have The Last Temptation of Christ, and I’m gonna make that.”

I used the phrase at the time, “I’m not Jewish.” What I meant was, it’s the old story that the journey had to be taken by a Jewish person through that world, and I think Steven also learned that. He came from… [pauses] where is The Fablelmans set, Phoenix? He told me there were only 200 Jews in Phoenix. I couldn’t believe it. Because I come from the Lower East Side, and grew up with the Jewish community. I wasn’t being altruistic, but it just made sense to me that he was the person who really should go through this. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the situation.

DEADLINE: That journey changed Spielberg’s life. When you finally watched Schindler’s List, how did you feel? 

SCORSESE: Let me put it this way, and you may say that it’s deflecting the question. But I guarantee you, if I did it, it would not have been the hit that it became. It may have been good, that I can tell you. I had some ideas. Most of it’s there. I had a different ending. I admired the film greatly. But I know that my films just don’t go there. They don’t go to the Academy. You’ll say, “But you’ve got so many nominations!” Yeah, that’s true. But when Paul Schrader and I were not nominated for Best Screenplay and for directing Taxi Driver, that set the tone. I realized, just shut up and do the films.

Raging Bull? We thought, for a second, we’d win, but I said, “It’s not going to be.” I was fine. At least it was recognized by the industry. In the ’80s, I wasn’t recognized at all. From King of Comedy, up to Goodfellas. Nothing on Last Temptation. I realized, ‘You just don’t make these films, Marty. You don’t do them. Just shut up make your films. And if you want, maybe you should make films in Europe. Maybe you should make low-budget, independent films.’ But I tend to start that way, and then they usually wind up being part of the mainstream. In the ’80s, I went low budget with After Hours, and did an industry film with The Color of Money. Then, Last Temptation was made for very, very little. And then I did another industry picture, which was Goodfellas. But, you know, even Goodfellas, I was treated in a tough way. No special treatment at that time, in 1989, even by Warner Bros.

DEADLINE: Why?

SCORSESE: Budget, dammit. I’m responsible for it, man. I was 15 days over schedule on Goodfellas. Here’s the thing. [First AD and second unit director] Joe Reidy boarded the picture at 70 days. They said, do it in 55. And we tried. Towards the end, we were stumbling over ourselves, exhausted. I even had a doctor tell me, “Don’t take coffee, because it might make you too nervous.” And we ended on day 70.

DEADLINE: Exactly as you originally planned it…

SCORSESE: Yeah. Now, that doesn’t mean we were right, and they were wrong. “Do it cheaper, do it faster.” I get it. But we weren’t treated very nicely by them when we started going over. It was, “Oh my god, two days over! Oh my god, another day over!” Geez. I mean, it was a nightmare.

They did well with it. They enjoyed it, and they were great in the end. It’s just that, at the time, they weren’t great. Nobody knew. I knew it, but they didn’t. I had a feeling there was something special with that picture. This is different, Killers of the Flower Moon. We did it day by day. We discovered it as we went along. It’s wild. I mean, I had it structured. It was exotic in a way. It didn’t make for a very relaxing time.

DEADLINE: Sounds like the act of discovering left you feeling alive.

SCORSESE: Yeah. In terms of Goodfellas, it was visceral but it was there on the page, with Nick Pileggi and I, and then it was a matter of pushing, pushing, pushing. It was also designed on the page. Some things were spontaneous. Like, Joe Pesci would come in and say, “I wanna do this scene…” With that whole movie, we were like, “Just do it.” We did it in rehearsal, rewrote it from rehearsal.

DEADLINE: What this the ‘how am I funny’ scene?

SCORSESE: He said, ‘something happened to me.’ We were in a restaurant. I said, ‘tell me.’ He goes, ‘I can’t tell you here.’ I said, well, let’s go to my place. So we did. He says, ‘I’m gonna act it out.’ And he did it. I said, ‘I know just where to put it.’ It’s not even in the script. I didn’t write it in. Said, we’re gonna squeeze it in on one day shooting. And Mark Canton had a couple of the other guys from Warner Brothers with him that day, and we hear laughter off camera. It was them.

DEADLINE: Just recently, Super Mario Brothers has minted money, while Air, Ben Affleck’s movie about Michael Jordan’s Nike shoe endorsement, had box office that didn’t match its rave reviews. The media narrative behind Killers of the Flower Moon is obsessed with its runtime and its $200 million budget. Apple’s decision to put the film through a wide global release through Paramount might ultimately be the future that connects streamers and theatricals, because the P&A makes it more culturally relevant than if it just landed on a streamer. Where is all this headed, the future for ambitious theatrical films?

SCORSESE: It’s the question, really. Who said cinema was going to continue the way it has for the past hundred years? In the past 25 years things have changed, in the past five years things have changed, and just in the past year, things have changed. Who says it’s going to continue to exist that way? Where people would go see a film like Out of the Past or The Bad and the Beautiful, in a theater on a giant screen with 1,000 or 2,000 people in the audience on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evening? I would like it to continue that way, because I knew it that way. And I do know that a communal experience with an audience, with any film on a big screen, is better than one where you’re watching alone. I know that. Well, the nature of the technology is such that a whole new world has been created. In that world, there are certain films, for example, that even I would say, “Let’s wait and see it on streaming.”

But you’re talking to an 80-year-old man. People in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, they should be experiencing films in a communal experience in a theater. Films like Mario Brothers are excellent for younger people. But they also grow into mature people. What about that part of their lives? Are they going to think movies were only for game movies or, what do they call them, tent shows?

DEADLINE: Tentpoles.

SCORSESE: Yeah. Are they going to think that’s what cinema is? To a certain extent it is, and when I was a kid, Around the World in 80 Days was like the tentpole thing. The screen was amazing, it was Todd-AO. I’ll never forget the Technicolor intro, with Edward R. Murrow. And then the rocket goes up and the screen opens, the curtains open, and you had this giant screen, and on it this magnificent travelogue that is Around the World in 80 Days. So those things happen, but it’s not for all of cinema.

I do think there has to be a concentrated effort to nurture an appreciation for films that that audience will go see in a theater as they grow. Which means the theaters also have to help us. The theaters say, “Well, we played a smaller indie film.” Everything has become pigeonholed. But what if that screen is in a place that is comfortable? Not a closet with a screen that is smaller than the one you have at home. That means a person will come out and go to that theater with a few friends and respond to that picture. And you never know. That person may come out and write a script or a novel that becomes a script that becomes a tent-pole film that’s going to make more theaters more money in the future. Because maybe, like Spielberg and me, we go see Jules and Jim, and he becomes friends with Truffaut and Fellini. Those films influenced him. I think we can create this experience with Killers of the Flower Moon in a theater for people who want to see this kind of picture.

And when people talk about how much money I’m spending, it’s really how much money Apple is spending. If Apple gave me a certain amount, I think, ‘OK, I have to do it for that amount.’ You might want to say, ‘You got more?’ But sometimes more money is not the best thing. You try to make it for what you’ve agreed to, and believe me, I do. It’s different from The Irishman, where Netflix gave us the extra money for the CGI.

DEADLINE: When the press narrative is your budget, DiCaprio changing roles that left Paramount stepping out as the principal financier, and the runtime, does that ratchet up the pressure for you?

SCORSESE: It certainly does. The risk is there, showing in a theater in the first place. But the risk for this subject matter, and then for running time. It’s a commitment. I know I could sit down and watch a film for three or four hours in a theater, or certainly five or six hours at home. Now, come on. I say to the audience out there, if there is an audience for this kind of thing, “Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched. This is a different kind of picture; I really think it is. Well, I’ve given it to you, so hey, commit to going to a theater to see this.”

 Spending the evening, or the afternoon with this picture, with this story, with these people, with this world that reflects on the world we are in today, more so than we might realize.

DEADLINE: You’re 80. Do you still have that fire to get right back behind the camera and get the next one going?

SCORSESE: Got to. Got to. Yeah. I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time [laughs]. The whole world has opened up to me, but it’s too late. It’s too late.

DEADLINE: What do you mean by that?

SCORSESE: I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was 83. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.