Martin Scorsese's KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Lands at Apple; Paramount Didn't Like DiCaprio's Character Being a Villain
The last thing we heard about Martin Scorsese’s next film project, Killers of the Flower Moon, he was in talks with Apple and Netflix about funding it. Well, Apple ended up stepping up to the plate to take on the $200 million-plus budget.
The movie was originally set up at Paramount Pictures, and they are still involved as a partner that will distribute the film theatrically. But, they didn’t want to finance the movie. In case you’re wondering why, it’s because Leonardo DiCaprio decided he wanted to play a villainous character instead of the heroic one. That’s something the studio just wasn’t comfortable with, especially with the big-budget that Scorsese says he needs.
According to a report from THR, Paramount was hoping that no other studio would go for what Scorsese wanted so that Scorsese would lower his budget. But that obviously didn’t play out the way they wanted it to. Apple came in ready to give Scorsese the budget he wants, and they are stepping into the role of “creative studio” on the film.
The report goes on to explain that when the project was being initially developed, DiCaprio was going to play the film’s hero, which would have most likely been a Texas Ranger named Tom White who is brought in to investigate a series of murders plaguing the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. That all changed, though:
Sources say things changed when the director and his star decided to revise the script. Originally DiCaprio was playing the good guy working for the then-nascent FBI. In the revised version, DiCaprio would portray villain Robert De Niro’s nephew, torn between love and the evil machinations of his uncle. A source with knowledge of the situation says Paramount felt that turned the film into a moody and less commercial character study — “smaller scale; same budget.”
This implies that Robert De Niro is taking on the role of William Hale, a cattleman who was convicted of ordering the murders and that DiCaprio is going to play Ernest Hale, who married native Osage Mollie Kile.
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.”
In the end, Scorsese wins! He’s going to get the budget he wants to bring this story to life thanks to Apple. I’m a huge fan of Scorsese, and this is a crazy story. I can’t wait to watch the movie!