Martin Scorsese's KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Moving Forward with Seven Month Shoot
Martin Scorsese’s next film project, Killers of the Flower Moon is moving forward and ready to start shooting next month. According to Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, the Apple production will shoot from February 2021 to September 2021, and it will be shot under the working title Gray Horse, which a reference to the real-life community depicted in Grann’s book.
The movie stars Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio and its 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 an update on the project, Scorsese told LA Times , “We’re still working on the film. I did costumes last night. We’re working on casting, all done by Zoom and FaceTime. I miss people.”
When comparing making this film during a pandemic to one of his films, he said, “The isolation for the work has been very good. Lonely. A little maddening at times. I have a room here, it’s soundproof, but I’ve been sort of locked in it for months. It’s like in the film I made, The Aviator, where Howard Hughes lives in the screening room.”
Killers of the Flower Moon will likely be released at some point in 2022.