Martin Scorsese is very much still at it. Just a few years after dropping the three-and-half-hour, gangster epic The Irishman on Netflix, Killers of the Flower Moon, his new movie, is coming to Apple TV+ this year. This old dog is full of new tricks.
Well, distributionally speaking, anyways. On paper, Killers of the Flower Moon is a textbook Scorsese crime picture. It will see him reunite with Leonardo DiCaprio for the sixth time, a decade after their last collab, The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a period crime epic, about a murder within the Osage Indigenous American tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, and the unorthodox FBI investigation that followed. Robert De Niro, naturally, is in it too.
While the film was initially expected to slide under the door in 2022 to hit the Oscars season (with Apple apparently scrambling to pull together an awards contender to replace Will Smith-led Emancipation), it's now confirmed to be finally coming our way this year with the streamer set to premiere the film — now confirmed at a svelte three hours and twenty-six minutes — at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
It might have been a longer wait than anticipated, but we're happy to play the long game, especially if it's anywhere close to the power and potency of The Irishman. (2019 — GOAT year for movies!)
Here's everything else we know so far.
What is Killers of the Flower Moon about?
Killers of the Flower Moon is adapted from journalist David Grann's account of a five-year period in the 1920s during which twenty Indigenous Americans, all of the Osage tribe, were murdered in cold blood for their cash-rich oil shares — the so-called “Osage Reign of Terror”. However, having been in development for years, with DiCaprio originally attached to a completely different lead character, some pretty hefty reworking has been done to the working script and Grann's original story.
The original story is a pure crime mystery thriller, with the focal point being Tom White, played by Jessie Plemons, the FBI detective, saving the day. But in an interview with Deadline, Scorsese said that route would fall flat on screen. “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 unravelling everything”, he said, adding “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.”
Instead, the lens is shifted to DiCaprio's character Ernest, De Niro's character Bill's nephew and a character married to an Osage woman who is at death's door when the FBI are called to the area. The mysterious circumstances around her illness beg the question of whether he's just in it to reap the spoils of Osage land.
DiCaprio, also speaking to Deadline, said the new focus on the romance at the heart of the story speaks to the wider cultural issues at play. “Ernest and Mollie really represented how twisted and complex some of this stuff was, culturally,” he said. “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.”
There's also a bigger focus lent to the relationship between De Niro's Bill and DiCaprio's Ernest, who barely appears in the book. “It made the most sense to show what’s going on in that world, the dynamic between the nephew and the uncle,” said 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 realisation of human nature that leaves people capable of doing terrible things."
Who is in Killers of the Flower Moon?
Killers boasts a stacked cast, from Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart to Robert De Niro as his uncle Bill Hale. There's also Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the FBI agent.
Plemons spoke about Killers to GQ back in September last year, describing White — a special agent in the FBI who solved the Osage murders — as “having an otherworldly level of fairness and justice”.
In a breakout performance, however, is Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart, Ernest's wife and the beating heart of the crimes in this story of the Osage genocide. Speaking about her performance, Scorsese has said “Lily had her own thoughts. She has an intelligence and a groundedness about her, in her mind and heart. It’s almost instinctual.”
Despite DeNiro and DiCaprio both being stalwarts of the Scorsese canon, this will be the first time they've actually all worked together as a trio. DiCaprio, however, got his first big break in the De Niro film This Boy's Life in 1993. In fact, Scorsese credits De Niro with landing DiCaprio on his radar. “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”, he told Deadline.
Speaking of the chance to all work together finally, DiCaprio added, “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.”
Is there a trailer for The Killers of the Flower Moon?
Yes, but not for us normies just yet.
As reported by Variety, Martin Scorsese previewed the first official trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon at the annual film exhibition convention CinemaCon in April. It sounds as though DiCaprio and De Niro will make for a dastardly criminal duo, with the trailer, according to Variety's report, depicting them as “two schemers who would like to get their hands on the Osage wealth, even if it means blowing up, shooting or otherwise violently disposing of people.”
Scorsese had some words of thanks for the Indigenous population the film is based on. “I'd like to thank the entire Osage Nation,” he said, praising their support in “working tirelessly” to help make Killers. “This is a big screen movie, and that's what we made,” Scorsese said, declaring it to be of an “epic scale”. That's until it leaves cinemas and ends up on laptop screens via Apple TV+, of course.
But the words “I do love that money sir” came not from Scorsese on the Apple TV+ deal that funded Killers, but from the lips of DiCaprio's character to De Niro, the latter portraying an immoral cable baron, in the trailer. “This wealth should come to us,” De Niro later says. Later on, Jesse Plemons' Tom White, an “upright lawman” from the nation's capital, warns DiCaprio that he's going to get to the bottom of his nefarious deeds. “I was sent down from Washington D.C. to see about these murders,” he says. “See about it,” DiCaprio replies. “See who's doing it.”
When will Killers of the Flower Moon be released?
It has been announced that the film will open in a limited release on 6 October and then wider from 20 October. Inevitably, the film will also end up streaming on Apple TV+ as it's being produced by Apple Original Films as Scorsese's first team-up with the streamer. However, there's no official streaming release date yet.
Naturally, as it's Scorsese, DiCaprio, De Niro and all the splash that comes with them, the film is expected to have a big awards season push after that aforementioned big Cannes premiere.
Read the Killers of the Flower Moon review.
