Inside Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese and DiCaprio’s $200m gamble with history

Martin Scorsese doesn’t do half measures. For Silence, his passion project about persecuted Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan, one of the stars, Adam Driver, lost so much weight to get into character he couldn’t think straight. “You have no ideas, you know, because you’re so hungry,” he told W Magazine.

His most recent film, meanwhile, 2019’s The Irishman, was a sprawling, swaggering 210 minute epic of mob hits, union skulduggery and Al Pacino chasing every last morsel of scenery around his plate. It cost $160 million. Only Netflix had the cajones to stump up for it; and only they know whether it has made that budget back.

So what’s next for Marty? A cosy Sunday night costume drama? Manned mission to Mars? Frankly, either wouldn’t surprise. Instead, he has teamed up with Leonardo DiCaprio for a true crime mystery, Killers of the Flower Moon. Adapted from journalist David Grann’s 2017 book-length investigation, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, it will tell the story of one of the darkest episodes in recent American history.

In the 1920s, the midwestern Osage Nation, one of the Native American tribes of the Great Plains, discovered oil under their land. Under US law, the tribespeople had headrights to the oil and were entitled to a share of its profits. These marginalised, poverty-stricken people were made wealthy almost overnight. Newspaper reports disbelievingly detailed their spending on luxury cars and private schools for their children. One even proclaimed they were: “the richest nation, clan or social group of any race on earth, including the whites, man for man.”

The Osage did not enjoy their windfall for long. Convinced they could not manage their wealth responsibly – and perhaps influenced by the lobbying of white campaigners – in 1921 Congress passed a law which decreed that all Osage people, of half blood or more, must have state-appointed “guardians” to look after their finances until they demonstrated “competency”. It was racial disenfranchisement, legalised.

That’s when the murders began. In May 1921, hunters discovered the corpse of Anna Brown in a remote ravine. The authorities couldn’t find her killer, and so they ruled her death as accidental due to alcohol poisoning. Brown, though, was just the first. Between 1921 and 1926, perhaps more than 100 full-blood Osage Native Americans were murdered. Many were poisoned; others shot. In the last embers of the Wild West violence was common. And besides, many seemed to figure, they were Indians. Dying out was what they were good at.

It took the involvement of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, to begin to join the dots. Under the orders of J Edgar Hoover, in 1925 Texas ranger Tom White was sent to lead the investigation. He was to be the visible face of law enforcement. But, in fact, he was coordinating a network of undercover agents in Osage County.

After two years of patient snooping, they flushed out the truth – many of the murders had been committed or arranged by a local sheriff and petty crook, William K Hale, known as “the King of Osage Hills”. Hale and his nephews, Ernest and Bryan Burkhart, had connived to marry Ernest to Mollie Kyle, a full-blood Osage, thus securing her oil headrights. They then arranged the murders of the rest of her family to cash in on the inheritances. The other killings came as the conspiracy expanded and the gang bumped off potential witnesses and informants.

After hung juries and overturned verdicts, they were eventually brought to justice. Many, though, including surviving members of the Osage Nation, allege these killings were just the tip of the iceberg – that this sordid, blood-soaked saga of Frontier injustice and racism has left multitudes of unavenged bodies in the dirt. In his review of Grann’s book, one critic wrote: “[This] sickening conspiracy goes far deeper than those four years of horror. It will sear your soul.”

It sounds, therefore, like the perfect vehicle for a Scorsese and DiCaprio team up, their first since 2013’s raucous The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio would, of course, play the square-jawed lawman White who comes to lift the lid on this seething nest of murderous bigotry. And that must have been how Paramount envisaged it, too, when they signed up to bankroll the film in 2019.

But in the sort of zig-zag twist that Scorsese's films excel at, Paramount have now pulled back, only agreeing to distribute Killers of the Flower Moon in cinemas. Apple will now shoulder the costs of the film and stream it – a big power play for the technology company better known for its original TV programming and snazzy phones and computers.

There are reported to be two reasons for Paramount’s change of heart. The first was costs. You don’t get Scorsese on the cheap. (Silence is supposed to have 100 per cent exceeded its budget.) But the ballooning budget of the film, as much as $200 million, rattled even Paramount’s deep-pocketed executives. They demanded Scorsese shrink it down to a still-eye-watering $150 million. Instead, he walked. Paramount no doubt hoped he would return chastened after fruitlessly shopping his film around. But they did not bank on Apple’s bank balance – or their willingness to get their name on the next potential Scorsese Oscar winner.

Indeed, the second reason Paramount pulled back was because DiCaprio and Scorsese had demanded major script changes. Rather than DiCaprio play the uncomplicated hero, the actor would instead portray Ernest Burkhart, nephew to the villain, Hale, a role earmarked for Robert De Niro. It’s a shift that would substantially alter the audience’s sympathies – and the shape of the eventual film.

We won’t now get a pseudo-Western about a righteous stranger trundling up and straightening out a rotten town. Instead, it promises to be an altogether murkier affair with perspectives ping-ponging between the morally-compromised Burkhart, and the eventual realisation of his complicity in a ghastly conspiracy. Think Shutter Island meets There Will Be Blood. And that could be a very Academy pleasing combination indeed.

In addition, Scorsese has gone to great lengths to tell this horrific story sensitively and carefully. According to a local newspaper, Osage News, the production has employed many Osage Nation people as actors, chefs, translators, language consultants and artisans. Scorsese and his team have also secured permission to film inside the Osage Capitol building, the old superintendent's house on the Osage campus, as well as other historic buildings around Osage County. And filming is to be done in full consultation with Osage elders.

This kind of historically accurate and rigorously authentic production tends to do well in awards season. DiCaprio, for instance, bagged his first Best Actor Oscar, after five previous nominations, for his harrowingly visceral performance in The Revenant. That film, too, was notable for its collaboration with First Nations people.

Scorsese hasn’t been so lucky with the Oscars recently. Though it was nominated for 10 awards, The Irishman won none of them; a sign, some said, of lingering snobbery about its streaming backer, Netflix.

Could Killers of the Flower Moon erase this bad luck? With a new script, the signs look promising. And, a year after it was supposed to start, shooting began in March 2021. Apple will undoubtedly be hoping their $200 million bet comes good, announcing their arrival in the prestige film market.

Paramount, meanwhile, might consider the Osage Nation parable that gives the film its title. It refers to a saying in which taller plants outgrow their neighbours, cutting off their light and water. The slower spring flowers die because they do not move fast enough. Nature, like the film business, can be ruthless.