Martin Scorsese Opens Up on Next Film 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

It is set to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro

BY Allie GregoryPublished Feb 18, 2020

Following a very busy year promoting his latest film The Irishman and causing a seemingly never-ending and riotous discourse about what is and isn't cinema, Martin Scorsese has dropped some details on his follow-up effort.

A film he's been planning for several years now, Killers of the Flower Moon, still has no official release date — but Marty has finally shared some new information about the flick, stating officially that he plans to make it a 20th century Western.

Speaking with Premiere, the director elaborated on the movie's plot:

We think it's a Western. It happened in 1921-1922 in Oklahoma. There are certainly cowboys, but they have cars and also horses. The film is mainly about the Osage, an Indian tribe that was given horrible territory, which they loved because they said to themselves that whites would never be interested in it. Then we discovered oil there and, for about ten years, the Osage became the richest people in the world, per capita. Then, as with the Yukon and the Colorado mining regions, the vultures disembark, the white man, the European arrives, and all was lost. There, the underworld had such control over everything that you were more likely to go to jail for killing a dog than for killing an Indian.

It's so interesting to think about the mentality that leads us to this. The history of civilization goes back to Mesopotamia. The Hittites are invaded by another people, they disappear, and later it is said that they have been assimilated or, rather, absorbed. It is fascinating to see this mentality which is reproduced in other cultures, through two world wars. And which is therefore timeless, I think. This is the film that we are going to try to make.


While not many other details have surfaced, IMDb has listed the following film synopsis:

Members of the Osage tribe in the United States are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s sparking a major F.B.I. investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.

The film is based on a highly acclaimed true-crime novel of the same name by author David Grann. He published the book back in 2017, which is when Scorsese began formulating the film.

Scorsese himself offered the following statement last summer about the upcoming film adaptation:

When I read David Grann's book, I immediately started seeing it — the people, the settings, the action — and I knew that I had to make it into a movie. I'm so excited to be working with Eric Roth and reuniting with Leo DiCaprio to bring this truly unsettling American story to the screen.

Scorsese had previously nabbed Leonard DiCaprio and Robert De Niro for the project. So far no other cast members have been announced.

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