It struck Scorsese, then in post-production on “Goodfellas,” as a curious thing for such a master filmmaker to say. It wasn’t until Scorsese also turned 80 that he began to comprehend Kurosawa’s words. Even now, Scorsese says he’s just realizing the possibilities of cinema.
His latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is in many ways far outside Scorsese’s own experience. But as a story of trust and betrayal — the film is centered on the loving yet treacherous relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a larger Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (Robert De Niro) — it’s a profoundly personal film that maps some of the themes of Scorsese’s gangster films onto American history.
More than the back-room dealings of “Casino,” the bloody rampages of “Gangs of New York” or the financial swindling of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the story of a crime wave. It’s a disturbingly insidious one, where greed and violence infiltrate the most intimate relationships — a genocide in the home. All of which, to Scorsese, harkens back to the tough guys and the weak-willed go-alongs he witnessed in his childhood growing up on Elizabeth Street in New York.
“I realized: ’You don’t do that. Your Westerns are the Westerns you saw in the late ’40s and early ’50s, that’s it. Peckinpah finished that. ‘Wild Bunch,’ that’s the end. Now they’re different,” he says. “It represented a certain time in who we were as a nation and a certain time in the world – and the end of the studio system. It was a genre. That folklore is gone.
“It’s historical that Indigenous Peoples can tell their story at this level. That’s never happened before as far as I know,” says Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of Osage Nation. “It took somebody who could know that we’ve been betrayed for hundreds of years. He wrote a story about betrayal of trust.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon” for Scorsese grew out of a period of reflection and reevaluation during the pandemic. COVID-19, he says, was “a gamechanger.” For a filmmaker whose time is so intensely scheduled, the break was in some ways a relief, and it allowed him a chance to reconsider what he wants to dedicate himself to. For him, preparing a film is a meditative process.
“I don’t use a computer because I tried a couple times and I got very distracted. I get distracted as it is,” Scorsese says. “I’ve got films, I’ve got books, I’ve got people. I’ve only begun this year to read emails. Emails, they scare me. It says ‘CC’ and there are a thousand names. Who are these people?”
“I’m trying to keep alive the sense that cinema is an artform,” Scorsese says. “The next generation may not see it that way because as children and younger people, they’re exposed to films that are wonderful entertainment, beautifully made, but are purely diversionary. I think cinema can enrich your life.”
“You can feel that it’s a personal exploration of his own psyche,” adds Prieto. “In doing that, he allows growth for everybody, in a way, to really look into these characters who might be doing things we might find very objectionable. I can’t think of many other filmmakers who attempt at such a level of empathy and understanding.”
Yet Scorsese says he often feels like he’s in a race to accomplish what he can with the time he has left. Increasingly, he’s prioritizing what’s worth it. Some things are easier for him to give up.
“Would I like to do more? Yeah. Would I like to go to everybody’s parties and dinner parties and things? Yeah, but you know what? I think I know enough people,” Scorsese says with a laugh. “Would I like to go see the ancient Greek ruins? Yes. Go back to Sicily? Yes. Go back to Naples again? Yes. North Africa? Yes. But I don’t have to.”
Time for Scorsese may be waning but curiosity is as abundant as ever. Recent reading for him includes a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed.” Some old favorites he can’t help but keep revisiting. “Out of the Past” — a movie he first saw as 6-year-old — he watched again a few weeks ago. (“Whenever it’s on, I have to stop and watch it.”) Vittorio De Sica’s “Golden Naples” was another recent rewatch.
“Really? How many more times am I going to see that?” Scorsese says, laughing at himself. “It’s their looks and their faces and the way (Karloff) moves. When I first saw it as a child, a young teenager, I was terrified by the film and the silences of it. The sense of contamination. I still get stuck on it.”
This content was originally published here.