Martin Scorsese Will Start Shooting KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON in February 2021
Director Martin Scorsese has had a long and rough road trying to get his next film project, Killers of the Flower Moon, off the ground. He had a hard time trying to get the $200+ million he wanted to make the film. Paramount Pictures ended up ditching the project, and Apple TV+ came swooping in to pick it up at the budget he wanted.
With the hard part of getting the money out of the way, Scorsese is now prepping to start shooting the film, which stars Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and he will start production on it in February 2021.
During an interview with the Osage News, Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of the Osage Nation headquartered in Pawhuska, Oklahoma in the Osage Hills, which is the location where Scorsese will shoot the film, said:
“My latest information is that they would start filming, subject to Coronavirus, February 2021. And, they will be here for about 16 weeks. They’re going to start moving in here quietly, I’m not helping that very much, but quietly around November and December. So, they’re coming.”
The film is based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, with a script written by Eric Roth. The story is described as follows:
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.
When previously talking about the film, Scorsese explained:
“We think it’s a western. It happened in 1921-1922 in Oklahoma. They 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.”
This next project from Scorsese is one that I’ve been very much looking forward to seeing. The story the film will tell is a fascinating, incredible, and dark story. I’m sure that Scorsese is going to deliver an amazing film.