Martin Scorsese Says He and Robert DeNiro Would Roll Their Eyes at Leonardo DiCaprio When Improvising

It turns out that director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert DeNiro weren’t always impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio’s improvisation choices while shooting Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese shared that he and DeNiro would actually roll their eyes at DiCaprio when he tried out different dialogue.

During an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Scorsese said:

“Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we’d tell [Leo], ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’”

The director explained that the two actors couldn’t be more different, and added that some of DiCaprio’s creative choices were so “endless, endless, endless,” that De Niro “didn’t want to talk.”

It just makes me laugh to know that as much as Scorsese has praised DiCaprio as an actor, there are things that still annoy him.

The film is based on David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and the story is set in 1920s Oklahoma. It depicts the serial murders of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. Here’s a description of the story:

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Osage Indians were driven onto a presumed worthless expanse of land in northeastern Oklahoma. But their territory turned out to be atop one of the largest oil deposits in the United States; to obtain that oil, prospectors were required to pay the tribe for leases and royalties. By the 1920s, the members of Osage Nation had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world. And then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

The movie is now in theaters to watch.