Leonardo DiCaprio says he felt a great deal of responsibility getting “Killers of the Flower Moon” right.
“This was a very dark chapter in American history,” he says of the Osage Nation murders depicted in the film. “We needed to tell the story correctly and that meant we had to listen.”
Before and during filming, DiCaprio, co-star Lily Gladstone and director Martin Scorsese sought the advice of the Osage community and pored over considerable research compiled by author David Grann.
“The Osage are still affected by this moment in history,” he says. “We just knew it was our job and our responsibility to listen and get their perspective. A lot of those meetings (resulted in) the movie that you see today.”
In the film, DiCaprio plays a white soldier who marries a Native woman, played by Gladstone. Because oil had been discovered on Osage land, Indigenous women were wealthy. As a result, there’s a desire to get their money any way possible. The soldier’s uncle (played by Robert DeNiro) tells him he’ll get her oil rights if he survives her.
Contract killings, mysterious deaths and rampant illness suggest something’s afoot.
Movie critic Bruce Miller says "Killers of the Flower Moon” is true cinema. It’s art in its highest form that never fails to entertain.
To understand the sense of dread that permeated the community, Gladstone and DiCaprio, listened to tribal members.
“It was actually kind of a fun acting exercise,” Gladstone says. “It reminded me of being in school again, where you’re just given text without any context.”
The key was to find the love that was in the relationship. “Just as Ernest (DiCaprio’s character) maintained until the day he died,” Gladstone says. “Since there are no living people who knew Mollie (her character), we started looking to the legacy of who they were in stories of how their kids were.”
Stories about Cowboy and Elizabeth, their children, “informed what the parents would’ve been like,” she says.
An early scene, in which Mollie outdrinks Ernest was abandoned because “the community didn’t feel like that was Mollie,” Gladstone says. “They said Mollie would’ve enjoyed a glass of whisky, but she wasn’t known for being somebody who could handle liquor like her sister, so the scene changed.”
DiCaprio and Gladstone improvised moments throughout the film, including a first car ride. Mollie says something to him in the Osage language and Ernest says, “It must be Indian for ‘handsome devil.’”
That was Gladstone’s idea, DiCaprio says. “We knew that this entire movie and the entire structure of the narrative was reliant on this love story working.”
Scorsese told Gladstone he saw “The Heiress” as an inspiration for the film. “What’s nice (about that) is Osage ladies really do fill that grace, that regality the way classic stars of the era did,” Gladstone says. In “The Heiress,” Olivia de Havilland’s character came from an oppressive patriarchal society, whereas Mollie comes from a matrilocal society. De Havilland’s character was told she was worthless. “Mollie comes from a community where families celebrate when a daughter is born.”
De Havilland, she says, showed “how to hold the screen.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” she says, is a reimagining with Native American women from a “very woman-loving, woman-supportive society.”
While prepping the film, “we were in a bit of a free fall,” Gladstone says. “We weren’t certain this dynamic was going to function on screen the way that it clearly did in reality.” Once editor Thelma Schoonmaker cut scenes together, the dynamic started to emerge. “Thelma could see we were solving this big puzzle.”
DiCaprio got to see film footage of the real Ernest talking about Mollie: “The one quote was, ‘Well, she was a good one.’ I felt the entire community had their take on this relationship. We developed this love story very much based on those stories. And, strangely, enough, I felt like I had more than enough to work with to create Ernest as a character.”
