Xixax Film Forum

The Director's Chair => Martin Scorsese => Topic started by: wilder on July 14, 2017, 07:23:16 PM

Title: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilder on July 14, 2017, 07:23:16 PM
Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio & Robert De Niro May Shoot 'Killers Of The Flower Moon' Next Year
via The Playlist

Speaking with Variety, Scorsese's longtime production designer Dante Ferretti says that director will shoot the recently announced "Killers Of The Flower Moon" next spring, and that location scouting is already underway. The film would potentially star the heavyweight duo of Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and would tell the true story of members of the Osage Indian nation, who were systematically murdered in the 1920s, after oil was discovered on their land. The FBI came in to investigate — their first major case — and bungled it badly. Here's the synopsis from by the book by David Grann, from which the movie will be based:

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes like Al Spencer, the "Phantom Terror," roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization's first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection.  Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: jenkins on August 03, 2017, 06:14:28 PM
a.k.a the novelist who wrote The Lost City of Z, btw
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: axxonn on December 19, 2017, 12:14:02 PM
Sounds great.

There's also an "Untitled Sharon Stone/Martin Scorsese" project listed on IMDb, whatever that is.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Something Spanish on December 20, 2017, 06:40:34 AM
Quote from: axxonn on December 19, 2017, 12:14:02 PM

There's also an "Untitled Sharon Stone/Martin Scorsese" project listed on IMDb, whatever that is.

Yes, this is the much talked about "Revenge of Ginger" project the two have been itching to re-team for, where the ghost of Ginger returns to exact revenge on Ace and the bikers who stole her money while reclaiming her daughter in the process.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on July 29, 2019, 02:50:09 PM
Robert De Niro Confirmed to Star Alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's 'Killers Of The Flower Moon'

By Jordan Ruimy

After months of discussions with the Osage Nation about making "Killers of the Flower Moon" into a movie, it has now been confirmed that Martin Scorsese will film his adaptation of the grisly murder-mystery novel in Osage County.

"Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear told the Tulsa World on Friday evening that Scorsese and members of his team visited the Osage Nation campus earlier that day for about two hours. He said the tribe told Scorsese's team about its interest in providing resources to help ensure that the film portrays an accurate representation of the Osage people."

Scorsese, according to Osage Chief Standing Bear, said Robert De Niro has also agreed to play the part of William Hale, one of the main characters in the book.

Last year, Variety had confirmed that Scorsese and Dicaprio's sixth collaboration together would start production this summer. However, with Scorsese still putting the finishing touches on "The Irishman," Tulsa World is also reporting that production will likely start next Spring of 2020.  No matter, the movie is now definitely happening, with Paramount having even picked it up for distribution.

The film, written by Eric Roth, an Oscar winner for "Forrest Gump," is based on a non-fiction book by David Grann. Grann's book told the story of a murder mystery, set in 1920s Oklahoma, where Osage Indians suddenly began to get murdered, as did those trying to investigate. A corrupt FBI would eventually be tasked to investigate.

Scorsese and DiCaprio already have another project in the works, "The Devil in the White City," but 'Flower Moon' seems to be the film that Scorsese will follow-up "The Irishman" with.  As mentioned, it is destined to be their sixth collaboration together, after "Gangs of New York," "The Aviator," "The Departed," "Shutter Island," and "The Wolf of Wall Street."

Meanwhile, "The Irishman" starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci will be released by Netflix later this year, supposedly on November 27th.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Lempwick on October 11, 2019, 12:48:24 PM
Scorsese in a Sight & Sound interview says De Niro will be Hale, Leo will be the husband Ernest, and Tom White is yet to be cast.  They're gonna try to start shooting in March or April. 
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: putneyswipe on April 10, 2020, 02:38:03 PM
https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1248630329264476160
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: jenkins on April 10, 2020, 03:15:23 PM
i lol adore the press photo for that news
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on December 24, 2020, 04:40:10 PM
Marty got the quar blues too

https://twitter.com/ZSharf/status/1342153936669724672
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Drenk on December 25, 2020, 05:33:56 AM
Wise decision.  :yabbse-grin:
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on January 15, 2021, 11:54:34 PM
Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Production Gears Up For Seven-Month Shoot (https://www.slashfilm.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-production-update/)

QuoteDespite the pandemic, Martin Scorsese is hard at work on Killers of the Flower Moon, his upcoming film that reunites him with both Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Based on the book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of how wealthy members of the Osage Nation were murdered in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s. Killers of the Flower Moon has suffered from some delays due to the pandemic and from original studio Paramount balking at the film's budget. On top of that, Scorsese said in a recent interview that he was worried he had lost some of his spark following work on The Irishamn. But in a recent interview, the filmmaker says he's already deeply engrossed in the pre-production work – a statement that comes with news that the film is gearing up for a seven-month shoot.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on February 17, 2021, 10:03:48 PM
Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Cast Adds Jesse Plemons in Lead Role (https://www.slashfilm.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-cast-jesse-plemons/)

QuoteWhile Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon already has heavy-hitters like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, it looks like the lead of the film will be played by none other than Jesse Plemons, who worked with Scorsese previously on The Irishman. Plemons is taking a role that was originally intended for DiCaprio, but DiCaprio preferred to step into a more supporting part instead. Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the book by David Grann, which tells the true story of how members of the Osage Nation were targeted for murder in 1920s Oklahoma. Plemons will play Tom White, the lead FBI agent investigating the murders.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on February 18, 2021, 12:57:53 PM
Very excited for Lily Gladstone being cast in this, she was so good in Certain Women.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on April 07, 2021, 07:21:00 AM
Jack Fisk joins as production designer, and some more casting news:

https://thefilmstage.com/jason-isbell-sturgill-simpson-more-join-martin-scorseses-killers-of-the-flower-moon/
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wrongright on April 08, 2021, 04:45:04 PM
Fisk's first film since...Song to Song?
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on April 09, 2021, 12:41:17 AM
Exclusive: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is "One for the Ages," Says Writer Eric Roth (https://collider.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-movie-update-role-changes-western-eric-roth-interview/)

Quote"I think this is my fifth year or six year on it. And there were some changes that came about that were interesting about what Leonardo was going to play in it. I think in the long run — we all had our moments of trying to figure out how best to portray things because the story is so impactful — and I think we ended up with exactly the right material and that Marty made the right decisions. I just think he's going to make — and obviously I would say this — but I think [of] all my work, this one could be one of the great movies. I really mean that. I think it has all the ingredients, which I don't want to jinx it, but the story is so important."

The project was originally set up at Paramount Pictures before moving to Apple, reportedly over concerns that DiCaprio was shifting his role from the "hero" of the piece – FBI agent Tom White – to a more complicated, ambiguous character who has a familial connection to the mastermind of the Osage murders.

Roth noted that Scorsese's aim with the $200 million film is to make what is in all likelihood one of the last big budget Westerns, given Hollywood's shift towards almost exclusively backing known IP with budgets that large:

"I know Marty's trying to make a movie that's probably the last Western that would be made like this, and yet, with this incredible social document underneath it, and the violence and the environment. I think it'll be like nothing we've ever seen, in a way. And so this one is, to me, one for the ages."

I asked Roth if Flower Moon is a full-blown Western, and he said the answer is both yes and no while ultimately acknowledging that to him, it certainly feels like a Western:

"I mean, people will be in suits and things because it's 1921. It's during the prohibition, but the ethos I think is very Western. And also, I think Western justice, about how they said that you couldn't find 12 white men to convict a white man of killing a native American. You'd have a better chance of having them convicted of kicking a dog. And that's kind of the feeling on that. And then also, you have these incredible people, the Osage family that a character comes and marries into, and who's a villain and who isn't. And then into that comes a kind of heroic guy — Tom White, his name was, who Jesse Plemons is playing — who was in the Texas Rangers, and you couldn't get more Western than that."

Given the rumors that DiCaprio had switched to a supporting role, I asked Roth if Plemons is now the lead of the film, and he clarified that Plemons and DiCaprio's parts are about equal screentime – it's just that one is the "hero" and the other character is more complicated:

"I wouldn't say [Plemons is] the lead. I would say that he was the designated hero. But yeah, I think that's fairer because I think the parts are pretty equal and they were always equal to a certain extent, and Leo's part is very complicated and very interesting. It's a smart part for a smart actor to play. I mean, if Montgomery Clift was alive, I think he might think of playing him."

The excitement was palpable in Roth's voice, but he cautioned that given the lengthy production period (filming extends through July), audiences shouldn't expect to see Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters before 2022, but that's all to plan. He added that Scorsese "knows this like the back of his hand" because he's been prepping the project for so long. And the writer and filmmaker appear to have gotten along tremendously well, despite the various changes the project went through on its road to becoming a reality.

"Marty is a wonderful, special human being," Roth added. "I would work with him come rain or shine."
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: pynchonikon on April 09, 2021, 01:18:25 AM
Sounds like a ideally great swan song.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on April 09, 2021, 04:49:02 AM
Man I could not be more excited for this.

Quote from: wrongright on April 08, 2021, 04:45:04 PM
Fisk's first film since...Song to Song?

And that was filmed in I think 2012? Seems like he took a few years off.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on April 20, 2021, 12:23:17 PM
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/04/martin-scorsese-starts-filming-killers-of-the-flower-moon-1234631416/

Here's to a smooth shoot.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: PinkTeeth on April 20, 2021, 05:39:00 PM
I will drink to that.
Cheers Marty!
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on May 10, 2021, 11:25:17 AM
First still!

[instagram]https://www.instagram.com/p/COstdzoFNbk/?utm_source=ig_embed[/instagram]
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: pynchonikon on May 10, 2021, 11:31:04 AM
Looks great 👌
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on May 10, 2021, 11:52:51 AM
I like it.  Her blanket/wrap looks brand-new/never worn, tho.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on May 10, 2021, 04:25:07 PM
Could be a production still as opposed to an actual frame of film, they tend to look cleaner, more artificial. Wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with it though, so why am I chiming in....?
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wrongright on May 10, 2021, 04:31:32 PM
I'm surprised this is actually happening.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Rooty Poots on May 10, 2021, 06:19:01 PM
Quote from: wilberfan on May 10, 2021, 11:52:51 AM
I like it.  Her blanket/wrap looks brand-new/never worn, tho.

It's a ceremonial blanket, worn only for special occasions, so it'd be far more likely to have never been worn before.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on May 10, 2021, 09:03:53 PM
I'm impressed that you'd know that!  :yabbse-thumbup:
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on May 11, 2021, 04:46:12 PM
Quote from: Alma on May 10, 2021, 11:25:17 AM
First still!

[instagram]https://www.instagram.com/p/COstdzoFNbk/?utm_source=ig_embed[/instagram]

LOL

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1391861573904474113
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on May 11, 2021, 04:54:21 PM
https://twitter.com/HistoryMuppet/status/1391940076913971201
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: jenkins on May 11, 2021, 04:55:10 PM
gold
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on May 11, 2021, 05:16:32 PM
https://twitter.com/disappoptimism/status/1391879632497123331
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Drenk on May 11, 2021, 05:56:15 PM
Leo is the scarf.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: WorldForgot on May 11, 2021, 07:37:55 PM
https://twitter.com/FilmstoFilms_/status/1392175252495650827/
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on May 11, 2021, 07:39:55 PM
Stud.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: jenkins on May 11, 2021, 07:41:17 PM
the elderly are both the most vulnerable and the hard corest mask rule breakers
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Reel on May 11, 2021, 07:57:11 PM
Bear in mind Scorsese has severe asthma
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: jenkins on May 11, 2021, 08:10:34 PM
so he's extra vulnerable. I'm not judging him btw
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on July 19, 2021, 04:18:56 PM
Heard thru the nerdvine that one of my favorite ADs from Soggy Bottom was in Oklahoma helping Adam Somner and Marty direct KFM.    Checking the IMDB page, I notice it also has Daniel Lupi listed as the UPM.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alma on August 03, 2021, 11:11:26 AM
 :bravo:

https://deadline.com/2021/08/brendan-fraser-joins-killers-of-the-flower-moon-brothers-apple-martin-scorsese-legendary-1234808025/
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on August 10, 2021, 09:30:59 PM
https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1425147525644828673
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on August 14, 2021, 08:15:21 AM
https://www.instagram.com/p/CShjhLHJoHU/
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Reel on August 14, 2021, 09:08:37 AM
Haha, the zip off khakis. Function over fashion!
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: HACKANUT on July 28, 2022, 07:11:25 AM
Imagine being the PA that has to hold Mr. Scorsese's zipped-off pant legs haha.

Also, some sorta trailer outta be getting zipped-off soon right?
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on April 27, 2023, 05:37:27 PM
New 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Images Have Arrived (https://collider.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-images/)

QuoteThe film is produced by Scorsese, Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas and Daniel Lupi, and electively produced by DiCaprio, Rick Yorn, Adam Somner, Marianne Bower, Lisa Frechette, John Atwood, Shea Kammer and Niels Juul. Making its debut at Cannes on May 20, Killers will reach cinemas on October 20, before making its wide global release onto Apple TV+ at a later date.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilder on May 16, 2023, 05:45:39 AM
SPOILERS

Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio & Robert De Niro On How They Found The Emotional Handle For Their Cannes Epic 'Killers Of The Flower Moon'
By Mike Fleming Jr. / Deadline

In 2016, the hottest book in Hollywood hadn't even been published yet. Circulating in galley proofs, it was the latest non-fiction work from author David Grann, whose 2009 book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon had recently been filmed by James Gray and produced by Plan B. His new book was another mouthful — Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI — and it proved just as tasty.

Seven-figure bids materialized, with talent attachments that included Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and J.J. Abrams. The deal ended with a statement buy by Imperative Entertainment's Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, who went well beyond the bids and took it off the table for $5 million. With Martin Scorsese directing, they would set it up at Paramount, casting DiCaprio alongside Robert De Niro in the most iconic pairing since Michael Mann's Heat with De Niro and Al Pacino, but on opposing sides of the law.

Killers of the Flower Moon had all the makings of a classic Western. DiCaprio would play Tom White, an incorruptible Texas Ranger-turned FBI agent sent to Oklahoma in the early 1920s by J. Edgar Hoover to answer a desperate call from the Osage Indian Nation. The Osage had recently become the wealthiest people per capita in the world due to the vast supply of oil being harvested from their lands. At the same time, many of them were beginning to die in alarming numbers — and under highly suspicious circumstances.

It was the perfect set-up for a murder mystery, but something didn't feel right. Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro began to realize that the situation was more complex than that. More explicitly, it would be inappropriate to serve up a white-savior Western since white people were also the bad guys: the outsiders who insinuated their way into the Osage and took advantage of their naivety, empowered by apathy from corrupt local law enforcement and townsfolk eager to shake money out of the pockets of their trusting Osage friends.

So, Scorsese started over, seizing on the chance to tell a story that would resonate in a modern era, forcing audiences to confront their own darkest instincts: how far would they be willing to go for the love of money? The lightbulb moment came when DiCaprio wondered if the focus should not be the lawman but rather one of his suspects: Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart is apparently a loving husband, married to Osage tribe member Mollie, and they have three children together. Mollie is at death's door when Tom White — now to be played by Jesse Plemons — arrives. Is Ernest just in it for the money?

This much darker take and much more expensive take reportedly led Paramount to back out as financier. But to Apple TV+ Video Programming co-heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, this had the potential to be an important historical epic, a beachhead project for their fledgling film program. They went out and got the package, just the way they did at Sundance with CODA, which went on to become the first Best Picture Oscar winner for a streamer. The deal orchestrated by Scorsese and DiCaprio's rep Rick Yorn left room for Paramount, which had certain rights. The deal called for a full global theatrical release through Paramount, before it lands on the Apple TV+ streaming site in the heart of awards season.

Despite the radical change of angle, De Niro, marking his 10th collaboration with Scorsese, held on to the role of Bill Hale. He is Ernest's uncle, who presents himself as a loving patriarch and ally to members of the Osage, but who enlists his nephew in a nefarious plan to help fulfill his darker motives. "I'd read the book a few years earlier and the Tom White character was more prominent," he says, "That was right for the book, but Marty and Leo's idea to focus on the relationship between Bill and Ernest made sense to me. They wanted to focus more on that dynamic instead of Tom White coming in and saving the day."

That shift makes it a much more personal story, De Niro explains, one that fleshes out the story to ground an exploration of human nature, weakness and greed. "It made the most sense to show what's going on in that world, the dynamic between the nephew and the uncle," says De Niro. "I don't know if you would call it the banality of evil, or just evil, corrupt entitlement, but we've seen it in other societies, including the Nazis before WWII. That is, a depressing realization of human nature that leaves people capable of doing terrible things. [Hale] believed he loved them, and felt they loved him. But within that, he felt he had the right to behave the way he did."

(https://i.imgur.com/g2vKxA6.jpg)�

He continues: "Tom White and the FBI set up law and order in the Wild West, where laws were made by the people who were right there and felt they could do anything. They were entrenched in the community, and nobody was accountable. It was racism, really."

In retrospect, casting De Niro as DiCaprio's uncle was a masterstroke, playing into the idea of family and subverting the concept of the father-son relationship that had developed offscreen. After all, says DiCaprio, "My career was launched by doing This Boy's Life, auditioning with Bob and then getting the role. Working with him, watching his professionalism and the way he created his character was one of the most influential experiences of my life and career. It got me to do all these films with Marty and now, 30 years later, all of us getting to work together and collaborate, it's such an incredible and special experience for me. Those are my cinematic heroes. It is so very special to me."

To DiCaprio, the original script just didn't live up to the story's epic potential. "It just didn't get to the heart of the Osage," he says. "It felt too much like an investigation into detective work, rather than understanding from a forensic perspective the culture and the dynamics of this very tumultuous, dangerous time in Oklahoma."

DiCaprio was keen to tap into the innate spirituality of the piece, and also the place, a feeling that followed him onto location. "We were shooting there during the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre," he says, "which was a half-hour car ride away from where the Osage reign of terror occurred and happened in the same year, 1921, as the first Osage murder. We were there for the Tulsa massacre and the return of the Flower Moon. It was cosmic insane coincidence that we were telling this story, 100 years later."

This subtle reworking of the material, with its new emphasis on shifting moral values, also helped the movie to become more of a traditional Scorsese movie. "We did a lot of work to try to help Marty do what he does best, which is to tell a very human story," says DiCaprio. "To get to the dark side of the human condition but also understand the complexities. Here you had the wealthiest nation, the richest per capita people in the world. You had this melting pot in Oklahoma where freed slaves had created their own economy, and the Osage emerged as this wealthy culture. But you also had during that period the rise of the KKK and white supremacy and this clash of cultures. For some of these white settlers, it was like a gold rush to take advantage of people of color."

(https://i.imgur.com/PR8BZ4d.jpg)�
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone are Ernest and Mollie Burkhart

Surprisingly, in amongst all this darkness is a love story, between Ernest and Mollie. "Ernest and Mollie really represented how twisted and complex some of this stuff was, culturally," DiCaprio says. "A lot of Osage women were marrying white men who really came to prey on them, to take over their headrights and seize their oil money. And yet, at the same time, what struck me was one scene in the initial draft we had, the real testimony of Ernest and Mollie, as he explains his part in this horrific plan. They still loved each other. That was the twisted complexity of what made this a truly dark American story."

This is really where the film departs from the path laid down by the book. "The biggest challenge became pulling off the trick of not making this a mystery, but exposing Ernest early on for who he is and then watching this very twisted relationship unravel. Not only with Mollie, but also with De Niro's character as well. That wasn't easy and it took years to figure out."

So many years, in fact, that Scorsese had enough time to go off and make The Irishman. "There was just more and more development," DiCaprio recalls. "The script is based on an amazing book, but when I spoke with David Grann after we had this idea, he was all for it. He said that getting into a forensic look at the culture at that time, the clash between white America and the Indigenous people, would be the perfect way to tell the story, if it could be done. I really think we accomplished that. At the end of the day, it works."

Another approach would have felt rote, he says. "When you see our characters, you're going to know something's wrong. You see the dynamic within the first 20 minutes, and where do you go from there except explore, in depth, that crazy family dynamic? That decision allowed us to really make what I feel is a throwback to a 1940s or '50s golden age of cinema epic drama, the kind we don't often get to see nowadays."

DEADLINE: In Killers of the Flower Moon, the depiction of the exploitation and murder of Osage tribe members for oil money — and the indifference shown by the U.S. government and law enforcement — is just gutting. Why did you want to tell this story?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
What I responded to when I read David Grann's book was the natural order of things. The idea that one could rationalize that if the Osage are not going to be of any use, if they're going to be phased out anyway, why don't we just, you know, help them go? And, ultimately, do we really feel any guilt for that? I don't mean you and I, but when you're doing what was being done to the Osage, and if you tend to dehumanize someone...

DEADLINE: ...You can rationalize abhorrent behavior, if it lines your own pockets?

SCORSESE:
Do [the Osage] behave differently, culturally? Yes, on all levels. There's no way they could fit in to the European model, the capitalist model, in terms of money and private property. So, then [the attitude is] we're coming, and we're not going away. Either you join us, or you have to go. Now, we love and admire you, by the way, but it's just that your time is up.

I heard someone recently say, when they fire an executive, well, their time is over. And the person behind that fired person, it's their time. Is this the natural order of who we are as human beings?

DEADLINE: Your movie supplies a bleak answer to that question.

SCORSESE:
Well, the answer is: probably yes, if you're driven by how much money you can make. All that land's just sitting there, what are they doing with it? The Europeans are thinking, 'We come here, and look at this place. Look at the riches! And what are they doing? Killing some buffalo. Fighting amongst themselves over hunting areas. Communal living. And, excuse me, nobody owns the land?' The very fact they don't understand, in European terms, the value of money means they can't exist in this world.

DEADLINE: So rather than take David Grann's book and turn it into a mystery-thriller with murders solved and the FBI established, you decided that making it an exploration of human nature was your way in?

SCORSESE:
Leo DiCaprio looked at me and said, "Where's the heart in this movie?" This was when Eric Roth and I were writing the script from the point of view of the FBI coming in and unraveling everything. Look, the minute the FBI comes in, and you see a character that would be played by Robert De Niro, Bill Hale, you know he's a bad guy. There's no mystery. So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares! We've got fantastic ones on television.

The least material available to us was about Ernest. There's much written about Bill Hale, Mollie, and many of the others. Eric and I enjoyed working on that first version; it had all the tropes of the Western genre that I grew up with, and I was so tempted to do it that way. But I said, "The only person that has heart, besides Mollie Burkhart, is her husband Ernest, because they're in love."

We went to Oklahoma to the Gray Horse settlement, the Osage gave us a big dinner, and people got up and spoke. One woman got up and said, "You know, they loved each other, Ernest and Mollie. And don't forget that. They loved each other." I thought, 'Whoa. That's the story. How could he have done what he did?'

DEADLINE: Presumably, the other version would have been more in the spirit of Westerns told from a white male perspective.

SCORSESE:
It was something we've seen before. We researched Tom White. He was super-straight. In the book, he's the son of a lawman who instilled incorruptibility and empathy in his son.  We tried to do more research, hoping to go deeper on Tom White. Does he have difficulties? Maybe he's drinking? I finally said, "What are we making? A film about Tom White, who comes in and saves everybody?"

The woman who mentioned the love story said she'd told her mother about this film, and her mother said, "Tom White? You mean the man who saved us?" So, there's still recognition of what they did, Tom White and what was then called the Bureau of Investigation. Even though a lot of people got away with what they did. We'll never really know everything about what happened.

But the love story [changed everything]. I said, "How do we do the love story?" We couldn't figure it out. And then Leo said, "What if I play Ernest?" I realized, because there is the least amount of research on Ernest, that we could do anything. If we did that, we'd take the script and turn it inside out, make it from the ground level out, rather than coming in from the outside. I said, "Let's put ourselves in the mindset of the people who did this."

DEADLINE: How much did this whole experience leave you questioning the Westerns you grew up loving, with the white heroism, and white hat/black hat iconography, especially when it came to the depiction of Native Americans?

SCORSESE:
Well, the white hat/black hat tradition has more to do with mythology that is deeper than folklore. The gunslingers evolve into the outlaws of the '30s that the FBI made their name on — Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson — and then to La Cosa Nostra. There was a Robert Warshow essay called The Gangster as a Tragic Hero that laid it out: as long as we see the gangster fall, it's alright. The western mythology comes under that heading.

The most beautiful of them came from John Ford and Howard Hawks, and then, of course, there's Shane, which is the most mythological. But there were movies we grew up watching where the native Americans were for the most part depicted unfairly.

The first Western I remember seeing was Duel in the Sun, in which Lionel Barrymore calls [Jennifer Jones] a squaw. I was 6 years old, and I remember thinking, 'Why are they so angry at these people?' Gypsies, Native Americans. It's like England, where you had Madonna of the Seven Moons. Phyllis Calvert plays an aristocrat, but she also has Gypsy blood in her, and at night she runs out and does crazy things with the Gypsies.

I didn't quite get it then [laughs]. I guess it had more to do with sex than anthropology and social issues. But I grew up watching films like Red River, where the Native Americans force the wagons into a circle and Joanne Dru gets the arrow in her shoulder. That incredible scene, where Montgomery Clift pulls out the arrow and she doesn't blink. And he has to suck out the poison. I think one of the problems in the genre is that none of the Native Americans are played by Native Americans. I mean, in Taza, Son of Cochise [Douglas Sirk, 1954], the star is Rock Hudson.

DEADLINE: In your movie, you feature a glimpse of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, where white supremacists destroyed the Black Wall Street. Was that an extension of the attitude among white people — a kind of passive-aggressive civility — that could turn violent with the slightest provocation?

SCORSESE:
I don't know. We only became fully aware of what happened in Tulsa a couple of years ago. We knew about race riots, about lynchings. We didn't know about the destruction, the wiping out of a whole people out of fear of economic superiority, of people of a different color. You see they're doing well and next thing you know... I think it has to come down to pure racism. This country's a big experiment. Everybody's together.

DEADLINE: Had DiCaprio played Tom White, it would have been like putting him in the role Kyle Chandler played in The Wolf of Wall Street. It's better to see you put him through the emotional blender. Bend and twist him to see what happens.

SCORSESE:
What's great about Leo, and it's why we work together so often, is, he goes there. He goes to these weird places that are so difficult and convoluted, and through the convolution, somehow there's a clarity that we reach. And usually it's in the expression, in his face, in his eyes. I've always told him this. He's a natural film actor. I could shoot a close-up of him, he could be thinking of nothing, and I could intercut anything with it, and people will say, "Oh, he's reacting to such and such." It's the Kuleshov experiment. You could do that with him. There's something in his face that the camera locks into, in his eyes. The slightest movement, we know it. Thelma [Schoonmaker], editing his footage with me over the years, she often goes, "Look at this. Look at the eye movement here. I think we should keep it." It's very interesting, what goes on behind the eyes. It's all there.

DEADLINE: His first breakthrough came opposite Robert De Niro in This Boy's Life, and it was De Niro who told you about him. Do you remember what he said?

SCORSESE:
Not exactly. He usually didn't say much at that time. It was '92, '93 and we hadn't worked together for almost 10 years since we did Goodfellas. Bob wanted me to do Cape Fear. After Goodfellas, he did This Boy's Life. We were talking on the phone, about what I'm not quite sure. He said, "I'm working with this young boy. You must work with him sometime." That was the first time I heard him recommend somebody to me. "The kid is really good." he said.

DEADLINE: Did he say why?

SCORSESE:
Bob doesn't talk a lot [laughs]. He'll say, "He's good." Or, he'll say, "He's right for this." Or he'll say, "I don't know, there's something."

DEADLINE: This is your 10th film with De Niro and your sixth with DiCaprio. But aside from a short film, it's the first time you've had them together. Why did it take so long, and how close were you to having them both in a film like The Departed?

SCORSESE:
We talked to Bob about it, but he didn't want to do it. Look, there are some people I work with a lot because I find that I'm... in the margins, in a way. I look back, and I feel lucky enough to have gotten the films made that I got made. By "in the margins", I mean it in the sense that there are many actors over the years I would've loved to work with, but... I don't fit in with the industry thinking. I've tried. I was lucky with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. It all fit together right. But I didn't work with Bob for 10 years until we did Goodfellas; we went off in different directions. Then we made another two, three films. And then, for another 19 years, we didn't. In the meantime, there were two with Daniel Day-Lewis, and for years I wanted to work with Jack Nicholson, if work is the word.

There are others whose names I won't mention that I tried, and it just never fit. People I admired so much. I feel I missed it. And yet what happened is that I found that, because of the subject matter in many of the films, there seemed to be a comfort level [with Bob and I], not easy by the way at all, but a comfort level in knowing we could get to a place. What that place is, I may not be able to verbalize, but together we could probably find something.

But that took also long periods of not working together, because, you know, people change. He still wanted to do certain things. Casino really solidified it for me. That was the ultimate, in terms of that type of picture for him and me. Leo then became that way too, and a lot of it happened on The Aviator. There were some scenes he did with Cate Blanchett that left me stunned, I thought it was so beautiful. And he learned a lot as a person; he told me he did. Maybe he was a young kid, just growing. I have daughters. I don't have sons, so maybe it's like we're stumbling along and it's almost like parenting in a way. But, wow.

And then we did The Departed and he just blossomed. That character he plays, Billy, is so wonderful. That kid caught in this Celtic street war where, for fun, they kill the Italians from Providence. This poor kid is in the shooting war in the streets. They're like, as Roger Ebert said in his review, "This movie is like an examination of conscience, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?" This was his character, and he did it beautifully. He's not a religious guy, but he understood the human condition, and that boy. I thought that was incredible.

So, with Bob, after Casino we stopped for a while and I did Kundun, and Bringing Out the Dead. And then Gangs of New York. We always checked in, on that and everything else. He wanted me to do Analyze This, and I said, "We already did it. It was Goodfellas." I talked to him about other projects, and at one point he said, "You know the kind of stuff I like to do with you." I said, "OK." That became The Irishman, and it took nine years. We were always looking. "What about The Departed?" "Nah, I don't wanna do that." "OK."

DEADLINE: He turned down Gangs of New York?

SCORSESE:
That was just a check-in. Literally, he said, "What are you doing?" "I'm doing this. You interested?" "Nah." "OK." We always talked about that kind of thing, because he is the only one around who knows where I came from and who I am, from that period of time when we were 15 or 16 years old. He knows that part of New York. It was all instinct between us and his courage and his humility, in terms of how he'll say, "If a scene plays on my back, fine, but if it plays better on the other person's face, play that."

Now, that was a certain period of time. Does he still think that way, 10 years later? Turns out he did! But is he the old Bob? No. You've got to see where they are. Like when Leo said, "Where's the heart of this thing?" I said, it's Ernest. He loves her and she loves him. And yet... when does he know he's poisoning her? Is it really insulin they're giving her for her diabetes? All of that is unknown. But he's obviously harming her, and how does someone who's in love with this person, has a family, kids, do that? Clearly, he's being manipulated by Bill, his uncle. The weakness of the character. He's like Kichijiro from Silence.

DEADLINE: That character who keeps betraying the missionaries, screwing up and asking for absolution in confession?

SCORSESE:
Yes. He was a disaster.

DEADLINE: The way it unfolds, you don't really know if Ernest is in denial, or if he is just ignorant. He could have just been doing what he was told by the doctors who said the medicine would help her diabetes and slow her down.

SCORSESE:
That's the key. That's the scene. And that scene took until the day we shot it, to write it. We just kept working on the scenes day by day, weekend by weekend. And when he nods, when Leo says, "Well, you know, it's just gonna slow her down." He's saying, "I accept in denial what all of you are forcing me to do."

DEADLINE: Lily Gladstone, as Mollie, is the movie's conscience. What kind of direction did you give her? She's stoic and often doesn't say much, which leads to a critical payoff.

SCORSESE:
Lily had her own thoughts. She has an intelligence and a groundedness about her, in her mind and heart. It's almost instinctual. When Mollie says, "You know, Coyote wants money," he says, "Right, I love money. Let's have some fun!" She goes, "You're right. I'm with you." She loves him. That's Mollie's issue. She didn't leave him until after the trial.

I think she just really loved him. She talks about his eyes and that sort of thing. Her sister says, "Oh, I like the other one, the red-haired guy. But, you know, they both want your money." Mollie says, "It doesn't matter, his uncle's rich, and he doesn't need that much." I would use the phrase 'beautiful failure' here, and hers is that she trusts and loves. Maybe we see it as a failure, but it's not a failure for her, because she's loving and trusting. She has heart, and she cannot accept the fact that he would do anything like poison her intentionally.

DEADLINE: But Mollie's relatives were dying in suspicious circumstances all around her.

SCORSESE:
He has nothing to do with it, in her mind.

DEADLINE: You've described the shorthand that you have with De Niro. How does it work with DiCaprio?

SCORSESE:
With Leonardo, there's no shorthand. It's longhand. We hang out and talk and get all kinds of research. I give him stuff to read, and music. He's very good with music. As I say, he prompted me to think about Ernest rather than Tom White for him, even though there was very little written on Ernest, and he is the weakling, a man who was in love with his wife, but he's poisoning her. He was like, "Yeah. OK. How are we gonna do that?" He wanted to go into that uncharted territory. That's the excitement. We did, and it's hours and hours and days of work. On set. On the weekends. The film was day and night. Same with Bob, to a certain extent.

DEADLINE: When Deadline did a long interview with Coppola recently, he said that after all the studio meddling on The Godfather, he only wanted to write The Godfather Part II with Mario Puzo, but he had the perfect young director to take over: you. Paramount turned him down. What do you remember about that?

SCORSESE:
He told me, and, honestly, I don't think I could have made a film on that level at that time in my life, and who I was at that time. To make a film as elegant and masterful and as historically important as Godfather II, I don't think... Now, I would've made something interesting, but his maturity was already there. I still had this kind of edgy thing, the wild kid running around.

I didn't find myself that comfortable with depicting higher-level underworld figures. I was more street-level. There were higher-level guys in the street. I could do that. I did it in Goodfellas particularly. That's where I grew up. What I saw around me wasn't guys in a boardroom or sitting around a big table talking. That took another artistic level that Francis had at that point. He didn't come from that world, the world that I came from. The story of Godfather II is more like Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. It's wonderful art.

DEADLINE: I always wondered why you gave up Schindler's List to Steven Spielberg. You grew beyond the street level mobster thing with breathtaking films like Kundun, Silence and now Killers of the Flower Moon. When you decided Schindler's List wasn't for you, was it like Godfather II, outside a world you were most familiar with?

SCORSESE:
Oh, no. Godfather II, Francis just mentioned it to me. For Schindler's List, I hired Steve Zaillian, and Steve and I worked on the script. I was about to direct it. But I had reservations at a certain point. Don't forget, this is 1990, I'd say. I did The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. The whole point of that movie was to start a dialogue about something which is still important to me, which is the nature — the true nature — of love, which could be god, could be Jesus. I'm not being culturally ambivalent here, it's what's in us. Is god in us? I really am that way; I can't help it. I like to explore that. I wanted a dialogue on that. But I didn't know about all that yet. So, I did Last Temptation, I did it a certain way, and Schindler's List was scuttled by its reception. I did the best I could. I went around the world. Any arguments, I took 'em on. I may have been wrong, but I'm not sure you can be wrong with dogma. But we could argue it.

In the case of Schindler's List, the trauma I had gone through was such that I felt to tackle that subject matter... I knew there were Jewish people upset that the writer of The Diary of Anne Frank was gentile. I heard that there were people who complained about Schindler, that he used the inmates to make money off them. I said, "Wait a minute." I could... well, not defend him, but argue who he was. I think he was an amazing man, but I didn't know if I was equipped for it at that time. I didn't have the knowledge.

I remember Steve Spielberg, over the years, mentioning it to me all the time. He held up the book when we on a plane going to Cannes, and he said, "This is my dark movie and I'm going to make it." That was back in 1975. And I said, "Well, I have The Last Temptation of Christ, and I'm gonna make that."

I used the phrase at the time, "I'm not Jewish." What I meant was, it's the old story that the journey had to be taken by a Jewish person through that world, and I think Steven also learned that. He came from... [pauses] where is The Fablelmans set, Phoenix? He told me there were only 200 Jews in Phoenix. I couldn't believe it. Because I come from the Lower East Side, and grew up with the Jewish community. I wasn't being altruistic, but it just made sense to me that he was the person who really should go through this. I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to do justice to the situation.

DEADLINE: That journey changed Spielberg's life. When you finally watched Schindler's List, how did you feel?

SCORSESE:
Let me put it this way, and you may say that it's deflecting the question. But I guarantee you, if I did it, it would not have been the hit that it became. It may have been good, that I can tell you. I had some ideas. Most of it's there. I had a different ending. I admired the film greatly. But I know that my films just don't go there. They don't go to the Academy. You'll say, "But you've got so many nominations!" Yeah, that's true. But when Paul Schrader and I were not nominated for Best Screenplay and for directing Taxi Driver, that set the tone. I realized, just shut up and do the films.

Raging Bull? We thought, for a second, we'd win, but I said, "It's not going to be." I was fine. At least it was recognized by the industry. In the '80s, I wasn't recognized at all. From King of Comedy, up to Goodfellas. Nothing on Last Temptation. I realized, 'You just don't make these films, Marty. You don't do them. Just shut up make your films. And if you want, maybe you should make films in Europe. Maybe you should make low-budget, independent films.' But I tend to start that way, and then they usually wind up being part of the mainstream. In the '80s, I went low budget with After Hours, and did an industry film with The Color of Money. Then, Last Temptation was made for very, very little. And then I did another industry picture, which was Goodfellas. But, you know, even Goodfellas, I was treated in a tough way. No special treatment at that time, in 1989, even by Warner Bros.

DEADLINE: Why?

SCORSESE:
Budget, dammit. I'm responsible for it, man. I was 15 days over schedule on Goodfellas. Here's the thing. [First AD and second unit director] Joe Reidy boarded the picture at 70 days. They said, do it in 55. And we tried. Towards the end, we were stumbling over ourselves, exhausted. I even had a doctor tell me, "Don't take coffee, because it might make you too nervous." And we ended on day 70.

DEADLINE: Exactly as you originally planned it...

SCORSESE:
Yeah. Now, that doesn't mean we were right, and they were wrong. "Do it cheaper, do it faster." I get it. But we weren't treated very nicely by them when we started going over. It was, "Oh my god, two days over! Oh my god, another day over!" Geez. I mean, it was a nightmare.

They did well with it. They enjoyed it, and they were great in the end. It's just that, at the time, they weren't great. Nobody knew. I knew it, but they didn't. I had a feeling there was something special with that picture. This is different, Killers of the Flower Moon. We did it day by day. We discovered it as we went along. It's wild. I mean, I had it structured. It was exotic in a way. It didn't make for a very relaxing time.

DEADLINE: Sounds like the act of discovering left you feeling alive.

SCORSESE:
Yeah. In terms of Goodfellas, it was visceral but it was there on the page, with Nick Pileggi and I, and then it was a matter of pushing, pushing, pushing. It was also designed on the page. Some things were spontaneous. Like, Joe Pesci would come in and say, "I wanna do this scene..." With that whole movie, we were like, "Just do it." We did it in rehearsal, rewrote it from rehearsal.

DEADLINE: Just recently, Super Mario Brothers has minted money, while Air, Ben Affleck's movie about Michael Jordan's Nike shoe endorsement, had box office that didn't match its rave reviews. The media narrative behind Killers of the Flower Moon is obsessed with its runtime and its $200 million budget. Apple's decision to put the film through a wide global release through Paramount might ultimately be the future that connects streamers and theatricals, because the P&A makes it more culturally relevant than if it just landed on a streamer. Where is all this headed, the future for ambitious theatrical films?

SCORSESE:
It's the question, really. Who said cinema was going to continue the way it has for the past hundred years? In the past 25 years things have changed, in the past five years things have changed, and just in the past year, things have changed. Who says it's going to continue to exist that way? Where people would go see a film like Out of the Past or The Bad and the Beautiful, in a theater on a giant screen with 1,000 or 2,000 people in the audience on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evening? I would like it to continue that way, because I knew it that way. And I do know that a communal experience with an audience, with any film on a big screen, is better than one where you're watching alone. I know that. Well, the nature of the technology is such that a whole new world has been created. In that world, there are certain films, for example, that even I would say, "Let's wait and see it on streaming."

But you're talking to an 80-year-old man. People in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, they should be experiencing films in a communal experience in a theater. Films like Mario Brothers are excellent for younger people. But they also grow into mature people. What about that part of their lives? Are they going to think movies were only for game movies or, what do they call them, tent shows?

DEADLINE: Tentpoles.

SCORSESE:
Yeah. Are they going to think that's what cinema is? To a certain extent it is, and when I was a kid, Around the World in 80 Days was like the tentpole thing. The screen was amazing, it was Todd-AO. I'll never forget the Technicolor intro, with Edward R. Murrow. And then the rocket goes up and the screen opens, the curtains open, and you had this giant screen, and on it this magnificent travelogue that is Around the World in 80 Days. So those things happen, but it's not for all of cinema.

I do think there has to be a concentrated effort to nurture an appreciation for films that that audience will go see in a theater as they grow. Which means the theaters also have to help us. The theaters say, "Well, we played a smaller indie film." Everything has become pigeonholed. But what if that screen is in a place that is comfortable? Not a closet with a screen that is smaller than the one you have at home. That means a person will come out and go to that theater with a few friends and respond to that picture. And you never know. That person may come out and write a script or a novel that becomes a script that becomes a tent-pole film that's going to make more theaters more money in the future. Because maybe, like Spielberg and me, we go see Jules and Jim, and he becomes friends with Truffaut and Fellini. Those films influenced him. I think we can create this experience with Killers of the Flower Moon in a theater for people who want to see this kind of picture.

And when people talk about how much money I'm spending, it's really how much money Apple is spending. If Apple gave me a certain amount, I think, 'OK, I have to do it for that amount.' You might want to say, 'You got more?' But sometimes more money is not the best thing. You try to make it for what you've agreed to, and believe me, I do. It's different from The Irishman, where Netflix gave us the extra money for the CGI.

DEADLINE: When the press narrative is your budget, DiCaprio changing roles that left Paramount stepping out as the principal financier, and the runtime, does that ratchet up the pressure for you?

SCORSESE:
It certainly does. The risk is there, showing in a theater in the first place. But the risk for this subject matter, and then for running time. It's a commitment. I know I could sit down and watch a film for three or four hours in a theater, or certainly five or six hours at home. Now, come on. I say to the audience out there, if there is an audience for this kind of thing, "Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched. This is a different kind of picture; I really think it is. Well, I've given it to you, so hey, commit to going to a theater to see this."

Spending the evening, or the afternoon with this picture, with this story, with these people, with this world that reflects on the world we are in today, more so than we might realize.

DEADLINE: You're 80. Do you still have that fire to get right back behind the camera and get the next one going?

SCORSESE: Got to. Got to. Yeah. I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time [laughs]. The whole world has opened up to me, but it's too late. It's too late.

DEADLINE: What do you mean by that?

SCORSESE: I'm old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there's no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, "I'm only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it's too late." He was 83. At the time, I said, "What does he mean?" Now I know what he means.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilder on May 18, 2023, 08:18:36 AM
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: pynchonikon on May 18, 2023, 08:23:02 AM
Looks like a classic, already.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: WorldForgot on August 29, 2023, 02:03:24 PM
 Limited Release SCRAPPED in favor of WIDE RELEASE theatrical slate in IMAX/ (https://variety.com/2023/film/news/killers-of-the-flower-moon-release-date-wide-ocotber-1235707166/)

Major win -- can't help but think Oppie's success has wrought some good.

(https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/628/860/1e6.jpg)
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: wilberfan on October 05, 2023, 09:51:18 PM
Long piece in the NY Times today about JACK FISK, Production Designer extraordinaire.

The Genius Behind Hollywood's Most Indelible Sets (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/magazine/jack-fisk-movie-sets.html)

(Text of article)

The Genius Behind Hollywood's Most Indelible Sets

How Jack Fisk, the master production designer behind 'Killers of the Flower Moon' and many other films, brings the past to life.

By Noah Gallagher Shannon

Oct. 5, 2023
Kihekah Avenue cuts through the town of Pawhuska, Okla., roughly north to south, forming the only corridor you might call a "business district" in the town of 2,900. Standing in the middle is a small TV-and-appliance store called Hometown, which occupies a two-story brick building and hasn't changed much in decades. Boards cover its second-story windows, and part of the sign above its awning is broken, leaving half the lettering intact, spelling "Home." The space inside, in the language of the plains, is "humble": Its ceilings are low, its walls wood-paneled, its floors carpeted in tight-woven grids. If it weren't for the giant inflatable University of Oklahoma Sooners mascot in its front-window display, the store would be easy to miss completely.

One winter day in February 2021, Jack Fisk stood before Hometown with Martin Scorsese, explaining how beautiful it could be. For much of the last week, he and Scorsese had been walking around Pawhuska, scouting set locations for the director's 28th feature film, "Killers of the Flower Moon." The film, which is based on David Grann's best-selling book, chronicles the so-called 1920s Reign of Terror, when the Osage Nation's discovery of oil made them some of the richest people in the world but also the target of a conspiracy among whites seeking to kill them for their shares of the mineral rights. To render the events as accurately as possible, Scorsese had decided to film the movie in Osage County. It would be a sprawling, technically complicated shoot, with much of the undertaking falling to Fisk. Unlike production designers who use soundstages or computer-generated imagery, he prefers to build from scratch or to remodel period buildings, and even more than most of his peers, he aspires to exacting historical detail. His task would be to create a full-scale replica of a 1920s boom town atop what remains of 2020s Pawhuska.

The concern for the two men that day was where to build a pool hall, a set critical to the film, as several pivotal scenes between the antagonists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, unfold there. A nearby vacant building, formerly a hotel, appeared to capture the exact scale and mood Scorsese imagined: a vaulted space with columns and tile flooring. But Fisk voiced hesitations. He'd already spent several months in Osage County, touring buildings and studying land surveys, and he thought the hotel wouldn't look right. For one thing, the columns suggested a multistory building of a type then rare to small towns. He also wanted the space to evoke a conspiratorial mood. A pool hall full of plotting, power-hungry men should have windows facing the other proposed sets on Kihekah Avenue, which would be transformed into a period thoroughfare; they would want "eyes on the town."

Robert De Niro, left, and Jesse Plemons in "Killers of the Flower Moon," on a set Fisk built in Oklahoma. Credit... Apple TV+
Fisk made the case that Hometown's space and location gave them exactly that: an atmosphere of menace. A former painter and sculptor, Fisk considers his job not merely the designing of authentic period backdrops but the creation of a film's visual language, a series of subliminal whispers to thematic elements: a character's taste in home décor, the personal history that selects a bedside photo, the temperament that informs a paint choice. He thinks of his art as one of believability: a nearly invisible composition of landscapes, buildings, paint and props that, when projected onscreen, absorbs the audience in a world that they know — instantly, intimately — is real, though they've never seen it before.

Transforming Hometown would be ambitious, but Fisk suspected that the building concealed a few helpful surprises. Based on its height, he figured the ceiling was a drop, hiding a more soaring space. Another tell was the plastic sign, which signaled there might be a hidden clerestory that, once exposed, would bathe the room in natural light. After discovering that both hunches were true, Fisk laid out for Scorsese his vision for the space: He would uncover the original hardwood floor and plaster the walls in an aged olive green before filling the room with a dozen 1900s Brunswick pool tables. As much as possible, the room would be dressed with furniture and fixtures sourced from antique stores and museums, rather than more conventional prop warehouses, and constructed with period materials, like the slotted screws more commonly used at the time. Even the dirt in the street outside would be carefully mixed to be appropriate to pre-Dust Bowl Oklahoma.

But the strangest and most imaginative aspect of Fisk's plan involved integrating yet another set inside the pool hall. As Fisk explained to Scorsese, he wanted to make one side of the hall a barbershop, installing half-inch hex tile and a line of chairs and mirrors. The script called for two sets, but Fisk immediately pictured combining them when he read it. It was an idea that came not from research but something more personal: a memory. When Fisk was growing up in rural Illinois, his mother took him to get his hair cut in a pool hall, he said, a curious wrinkle of small-town life that conjured for him the "mysterious and fascinating" province of men. Especially in period films, Fisk likes to find ways to rekindle historical backgrounds, gone cold from familiarity, into the warmed textures of human life. "People pay more attention if they're seeing something new," he says, "seeing a facet of reality they haven't seen before." (Fisk later pulled up the fire maps from Osage County and discovered that of the three pool halls in the area at the time, two had barbershops.)

Scorsese required no convincing. Though the filmmaker, now 80, had never worked with Fisk before, he handpicked the designer, granting him extensive creative latitude, for expressly this sense of vision. Since the 1970s, Fisk has been one of Hollywood's most sought-after collaborators — legendary among auteur writer-directors for his ability to help them realize their most ambitious projects. He has built boundless, intricately conceived worlds for Terrence Malick ("The Thin Red Line"), Paul Thomas Anderson ("There Will Be Blood"), David Lynch ("Mulholland Drive"), Alejandro G. Iñárritu ("The Revenant") and others. He is the artist filmmakers hire to bring the American past to the screen at the impossible human scale it once existed. "Jack belongs to one of these now rare species of filmmakers who understand film from an almost Renaissance-like tradition," Iñárritu says — he knows photography, nature, architecture, drama. When Scorsese began planning "Killers of the Flower Moon" — a lengthy process in which the director radically revised the script from a story centered on the murder investigators to one following the victims — Paul Thomas Anderson told him, "You have to get Jack."

But Fisk, who is 77, can be notoriously difficult to entice to a film. Since 1970, he has designed relatively few; at one point, he took nearly 20 years off. When Scorsese approached him, Fisk was excited by the opportunity to collaborate with the director, but also by the chance to excavate a world rarely depicted onscreen: The film takes place in a sliver of lost time, one wedged between more familiar depictions of Native Americans in the 19th century and the well-worn imagery of the Roaring '20s. Bringing this moment of cultural collision back to life would represent as sweeping a challenge as Fisk had ever faced. The story unfolds in about 40 sets, as varied as Masonic lodges, Osage funerals and federal courtrooms, spread over a million acres and costing about $15 million of the film's $200 million budget. The sets would represent a kind of culmination of Fisk's careerlong obsession with reclaiming the rough contours of American history. More than any one aesthetic vision, he has sought over a half century to scour away the visual clichés that mar films, seeking beneath them the vivid woodgrain and forgotten colors of the past.

If Fisk's name isn't recognizable to most Americans, his imagery has shaped our collective understanding of what a modern historical epic looks and feels like. His signature is the 360-degree construction of the outdoor set, believably inhabited and painstakingly aged, marrying an anthropological eye for period detail with a rough-hewed naturalism that can edge, at times, into the slippery atmosphere of a dreamscape. For "There Will Be Blood," he erected a 100-foot oil derrick, following turn-of-the-century blueprints so that it might take on a more ragged, credible shape, planting it atop a barren hillside that framed it against the sunset with painterly flair. In "The Revenant," Iñárritu's drifting, magic-inflected survival epic about a 19th-century fur trapper, Fisk scouted snow-buried valleys deep in the Canadian Rockies, throwing up post-and-beam forts in settings so sublime that the film exudes the mind-silencing cold of the characters' icy journey.

But Fisk's work is perhaps most unmistakable as the backdrop behind the films of Terrence Malick, whose swirling, voice-over-driven narratives find grounding in Fisk's elemental settings: oceanlike wheat fields, serene jungle villages, a mother's kitchen at twilight. It's a fusion of styles the two filmmakers began exploring in "Badlands" (1973) — the open-road thriller where Fisk met his wife, the actress Sissy Spacek — and have continued over four decades. As interested as Fisk is in historical authenticity, his work with Malick and others is driven by a desire to build "for character and through character," designing sets that manage to convey, in the manner of poetic compression, a film's emotional core. Malick rarely writes a conventional script, and Fisk never shows the director any designs, an improvisational partnership that seeks to capture fleeting aspects of human existence otherwise hard to render through conventional narrative: grace, transcendence, communion with nature. On set, Malick refers to Fisk as "my eyes."

Fisk has a background in the fine arts, but he considers himself more strictly speaking a "worker" — the conduit of someone else's vision. As a production designer, he is in charge of manifesting a film's reality, interpreting the fluid laws set by the director and script, in order to bring its world into physical existence. A designer must not only come up with all the textures, colors and moods of this world but also figure out how to engineer it all on budget, marshaling a machinery of illustrators, prop makers, location scouts and set decorators. A movie's magic often comes down to how well a designer can trim a script's price tag in labor and materials without sacrificing its aesthetic. (Noirs of the 1940s are crosshatched with shadows partly to conceal threadbare sets.) It is a vast undertaking of dramatic invention — one that aspires to be seen, though never noticed. When people say they love a film's cinematography, what they often mean is its design: what they see within the frame, rather than the way it was captured.

Until recently, no tidy educational pipeline existed to produce this skill set; designers tended to emerge from whatever field corresponded to the demands of filmmaking at the time. In early Hollywood, most were painters, hired to illustrate literal backdrops on massive rolls of canvas hung behind the actors. As camera movements became more dynamic, so did the artwork, expanding to include full-scale replicas and miniature models, the provinces of architects and sculptors. During the studio era, backlots and prop shops supplied an interchangeable conveyor belt of artifice, with each studio employing a head designer to curate a kind of house style. Once the French New Wave and others pushed production outdoors, embracing unvarnished cityscapes, designers also became anthropologists, hunting for spaces that evoked the right reality. Even the title "production designer" itself is an expression of one designer's ever-expanding duties on one film: David O. Selznick gave it to William Cameron Menzies after he conceived and constructed several groundbreaking set pieces in "Gone with the Wind."

Much of this history Fisk only learned recently, when Scorsese gave him a copy of Menzies' biography, "The Shape of Films to Come." Unlike many of his contemporaries, who worked their way up through the art department, Fisk doesn't describe himself as a film obsessive, and he's careful not to watch movies while he's designing. "I always thought of a film as an original piece," he says. The same way an actor metabolizes dialogue and stage directions, Fisk aspires to render a director's vision into what he thinks of as a vast environmental sculpture. What draws him to a project, he says, is a frightening sense of scale, the chance to lose himself in the impossible.

Fisk's extreme commitment has endeared him to directors and crew alike. Nearly every filmmaker I spoke with emphasized the sheer range of his physical talents: landscape architecture, finish carpentry and portraiture, often executed in the same set. But equally important are his imaginative depths. "There is something spiritual in the essence of Jack," Iñárritu says. Part of his job is to serve as a medium between what a director can't quite articulate and what a crew needs to build, a gap he often bridges by simply doing it himself. As Lynch told me: "He will do all the research and make sure it's this and this and this and then build the thing. And if they sawed the wood this way, he would go saw the wood that way." Jacqueline West, an Oscar-nominated costume designer who has worked with Fisk on nine films, including "Killers of the Flower Moon," recalls that when she met him, he was hammering square nails into a set by himself on a weekend. "He's very Method," she says.

When Scorsese began developing "Killers of the Flower Moon," he'd long admired Fisk's work from afar. But initially, he hired another designer, Dante Ferretti, with whom he made "Gangs of New York," "The Aviator" and several other films. Then Covid shut down production, and Scorsese began brooding over the direction of the film. In early drafts, it followed Tom White, an F.B.I. agent then slated to be played by DiCaprio, but Scorsese and DiCaprio worried that the framing privileged the wrong vantage. So Scorsese rewrote the script, moving the film into the perspective of the Osage, but also that of their killers, with DiCaprio switching to play a key conspirator. It was a shift that transformed the film from a murder mystery into something less familiar, a narrative that tracks the deepening grief of the victims right alongside the manifest deceptions of their supposed friends and family, forming an agonizing portrait of complicity and greed and white supremacy.

For Scorsese, Fisk now seemed like the natural choice to guide the film to its historical reality. "Jack has a deep sense of the American past, the way things looked and felt," he told me. "In a way, he was the only possible choice for this picture." But when the two men met, Fisk stopped short of proposing any ideas. He prefers that his vision of a film be sparked by a director's, he says, which in this case turned out to be relatively straightforward. "Marty wanted to have it historically correct," Fisk says. "That's how we connected." With both men nearing 80, the film represented as rigorous a project as either had ever taken on. For Fisk, it meant not just excavating a historical period but also the most minute details of real people's lives. "I didn't want to reinvent the Osage," he told me.

Fisk grew up moving between worlds. His father, a pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, died in a crash when he was 3, and after that, his mother married an engineer who ran foundries all over the world. The family moved nearly every year — Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, Pakistan. Often isolated in a new place, he channeled his inquisitive energies into art projects and building elaborate multistory forts. In Alexandria, Va., Fisk fell in with another artsy student at his high school, a boy named David Lynch. Like Fisk, Lynch had moved a lot, and the young men bonded. "Jack and I ended up being really the only two guys in that whole school that were interested in being painters," Lynch told me. They enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts together, but they were happy to paint all day and avoid Vietnam, renting a dilapidated house across from the city morgue. "I had one floor; David had a floor," Fisk said. "We took an old coffee pot and made a water heater out of it so we could wash our hands and face."

A break for both artists arrived when Lynch was invited to study at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1970. Fisk had little interest in filmmaking but hitched a ride anyway, figuring he'd find work painting billboards. "I always sort of thought I would be an artist, you know, with no money and struggling," he said. "I remember thinking, I'm going to try this for a year." He arrived in Hollywood at a fruitful time for outsiders. The waning power of the studios was making way for the so-called New Hollywood, a young generation of filmmakers influenced by foreign cinema and eager to experiment. " 'Easy Rider' had been made, and studios realized they didn't know what the public wanted," Fisk says.

Through Lynch and his classmates, Fisk soon found work on sets, often because he was the only guy around with a truck full of tools. Eventually, Jonathan Demme — who would later direct "The Silence of the Lambs" — hired him as an art director, a job unfamiliar to Fisk. But it didn't matter: The stripped-down vibe of independent filmmaking suited Fisk, who found he knew just enough carpentry to teach himself whatever a director needed. "They would say, 'We need a church,'" Fisk said. "And then you either find it or build it." The simplicity of these directives was energizing for Fisk, not unlike the clarifying terror of standing before a blank canvas. He had few film references to draw on, and didn't know about conventional film infrastructure, like soundstages, prop warehouses and theater flats. So he relied on what he knew: realist painting, modern sculpture, building forts.

Union rules often make film sets workplaces of strict hierarchy, with each person tending to a narrow scope of duties, but as an outsider Fisk was indiscriminately hands-on, doing whatever needed fixing, an industriousness that quickly endeared him to young directors with tight budgets and ambitious visions. During the 1970s, he worked on films for several established filmmakers, like Roger Corman and Stanley Donen, and designed classics from emerging auteurs, like Brian De Palma's "Carrie." When he learned that an A.F.I. student named Terrence Malick was prepping a '50s thriller about lovers on the lam — what would become "Badlands" — Fisk took it upon himself to compile reference images. "Terry heard about this guy who was researching his film who he'd never met," Fisk says, "and we had a meeting, and it went kind of like this: Could you start July 10th?"

Perhaps no set in Fisk's career more vividly expresses the lyricism of his craftsmanship than the house he built for Malick's next film, "Days of Heaven." The plan was simple enough: Find a house surrounded by wheat fields, where Malick could stage a love triangle among a farmer and two workers in 1916 Texas. But as Fisk scouted, he learned that many fields had already been harvested, and that many modern varieties of wheat were too short for the atmosphere Malick envisioned, with the characters buried to their chests. Some of the only farmers still cultivating the tall varieties that late in the season were Hutterites — a small Anabaptist sect — in Alberta. But when Fisk approached them late in the summer of 1976, he learned they'd be harvesting in six weeks. The shoot would last two weeks, so to give Malick what he wanted, Fisk needed to build a house in a month. He thought it feasible, if he could erect only a facade, with the interior shots filmed elsewhere. But Malick insisted he wanted the wheat fields visible through the windows. All told, Fisk would have about $100,000 and maybe a handful of crew to build it.

"I was too dumb to know it was impossible," he told me. "The Hutterite elders were taking bets that we couldn't finish."

Earlier, Malick showed Fisk a photograph of a Victorian, an image that reminded him of Edward Hopper's 1925 painting "House by the Railroad." He knew a little drafting from art school, but "the carpenters couldn't read blueprints anyway." So he relied on models, bending history and architecture to fit the emotional framework of the character. Many houses in 1910s Texas would've been plain and single-story, as Fisk explains, but you look outside and "you're looking at a wheat field, and it's like an ocean." To accentuate that loneliness, he made the house slender, ornate, with high windows, like a ship. He used telephone poles to anchor the structure against high winds, covering the exterior in plywood. Hutterite teenagers pitched in, along with a few friends, and Fisk furnished the interior with antiques driven all the way up from Los Angeles.

Today, "Days of Heaven" remains a very personal film for Fisk, in part because it showed him that a simple, handmade set could also be the most cinematically elegant. He realized that building an entire structure, instead of a facade, gave a director the freedom to explore and shoot from any angle — which helped pre-empt costly, time-consuming modifications — while the open windows also saturated the photography with natural light and a sense of depth. At the same time, the relative simplicity of the house showed Fisk that a set's emotional core had less to do with beautiful design than with connecting to the character. Without a single line of dialogue, Fisk had managed to evoke the very heart of the story: a man adrift, searching. Everything Fisk loved about realism in painting, he realized — not just its observational eye but also the stark modesty of its subjects — could be suffused into a set.

When he's not working, Fisk lives far from Hollywood, on an expansive farm in the mountains of central Virginia. It's a country of sloping hayfields veined with low stone walls and forested creeks. When I visited in early June, the weather was breezeless and humid, the mountain outlines shaded by wildfire smoke from Canada, and after buzzing through a gate and bumping down a rocky trail, I found Fisk standing in the dirt before his and Spacek's two-story Civil War-era farmhouse. He had just finished the summer's first hay baling, and the rolls lay atop the pastures, like beetles stranded on their backs.

Now in his late 70s, Fisk cuts the figure of a carpenter a few decades younger. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a center-part shag of brown hair and a smile that erupts suddenly across his creased, goateed face, revealing a boyish gap in his teeth. His hands are thick, and the pointer finger on his left is severed at the knuckle, a result of a construction accident, when he injected paint into his finger with a spray gun. "It was just like a sponge full of gray paint," he said, laughing.

He and Spacek purchased the farm in 1978 — a "wonderful, crazy" decision, Fisk said. Though both of their careers were taking off, they loved the miles of fence and roads, the privacy, the quiet beauty. The couple have now lived on the property for so long, tending to its growing seasons and shifts in landscape, that it has seemed to attune Fisk to the slower, more methodical rhythms of nature. As we walked through pastures, he ambled with his hands interlocked behind his back, often interrupting himself to recount a story about some feature of the terrain. He told me that much of the farm was once part of a land grant belonging to the colonial explorer Thomas Walker. He pointed to the horizon: "You can't see it right now, but through the mountains there — that was considered the edge of the wilderness."

Fisk tends to seek out films set in natural environments, then push the production as deep as he can into the story's harshest elements. He described how, during the scouting for "The Thin Red Line," producers argued for shooting in Central America, instead of Guadalcanal, the South Pacific island where the film is set; there were limitations to a far-flung jungle, not to mention malaria. But Fisk was adamant: An immersive sense of place about an environment so exotic couldn't be faked. During a visit to Guadalcanal, Fisk noticed unexploded grenades painted yellow rather than the more familiar green; it was a vestige of an earlier design he'd read about, and one he had already planned to include in the film — a historical detail that didn't seem real. When he saw it in person, he loved the unexpected vividness, the human messiness it suggested about the war effort. It was a visual confirmation to him of history's peculiarity.

It is these sensitivities to a film's natural setting, even more than his craftsmanship, that his contemporaries view with a measure of awe. Peers told me stories of Fisk plucking sagebrush for a paint swatch and kneeling beside an elephant to coat its leg in a believable smear of mud. Nearly everyone I spoke with mentioned the austere splendor of Fisk's Marfa, Texas, set for "There Will Be Blood." When the director of photography Robert Elswit arrived on set, he was impressed by the scale, but also by how Fisk integrated the set into the landscape. He'd laid out all the buildings in such a way that made it easier for Elswit to control the natural sunlight, both for interior and exterior shots, while also orienting them so they were visible in physical and figurative relationship to one another — especially the derrick, which loomed over it all. "His work finding locations, finding the places to set work, and his sensitivity to lighting, to time of day and weather — a lot of production designers aren't interested in the same way," Elswit told me. He credited Fisk with "90 percent" of the Oscar he won.

Fisk says that he's attracted to working on historical films because like working outdoors, it provides him the opportunity to unearth discoveries that bring life back to him replenished of its strangeness. "When I grew up, period films often looked like costume dramas," he told me. "Nobody was dirty." This manicured unreality was compounded by his boredom in school and disbelief watching the news. He was a teenager when the United States invaded Vietnam, and his 20s were shaped by watching General Westmoreland say one thing and hearing another from his friends. It gave Fisk the uncanny sense that beneath this smooth veneer lay another, craggier history. He felt drawn to construction materials and paint colors in particular as tactile remnants. He could remember how, the first time he visited nearby Monticello, the dining room was Wedgwood blue, but that they later "found that that same dining room was previously chrome yellow." This was the sort of history that truly interested Fisk — the mess of past lives, the mysteries that lay hidden within walls.

Fisk's interest in restoring the original colors of history often first requires chipping away the layers that conceal it. When Malick approached him about designing "The New World," his 2004 drama about Pocahontas, Fisk was excited about building a Jamestown replica, partly because he'd long nursed a curiosity about its construction. Some accounts — including "Jamestown Narratives" and the site replica Fisk remembered seeing — suggested a fortress made of sawed planks. "You'd have to take a log and cut it," Fisk said. "Nobody has that kind of time." He refused to believe that a fort built by ship-weary settlers was anything but an improvised ruin. And so rather than rebuild previous renderings, he endeavored to recreate the conditions in which the fort was originally built. He picked a site just upriver from the historical one, laid out on a similar estuary, then labored as he imagined a settler might have — quickly, crudely — erecting 15-foot vertical posts in a timesaving triangle shape.

In the end, it was an awful, irregular structure — one no carpenter would lay claim to — but when archaeologists from Preservation Virginia toured it, they were floored. Beyond how authentically "bad" the fort looked, they noticed designs that conformed to ongoing archaeological discoveries, including Fisk's mixture of daub, a kind of primitive mortar. Like a lot of Fisk's sets, the fort embodied a visual paradox: It was historically familiar, but rendered otherworldly by a nuts-and-bolts attention to detail. When we see it onscreen, it greets us like a gaunt, muddy giant, standing in sharp contrast to miles of clear tidewater channels and mossy glens beyond its gates. And as the plot unfolds, it reveals itself as something closer to a jail cell, curdling the settlers' bravado into a muted dread that builds into violence. It's an accumulation of granular detail that speaks to the spiritual undercurrents of Malick's narrative — a fallen Eden — but also to the ghastliness of being thrust, in bodices and plate armor, into the muggy wilds of 17th-century Virginia.

Fisk described the film to me as a turning point in his career. Though he'd aspired to total veracity, the effort itself didn't feel like cold recreation; it felt intuitive, imaginative. Over his next few films, he experimented with ways to more fully envelop the audience in the same sense of discovery he felt while working, a Method-like approach to construction that necessitated a setwide commitment. On "There Will Be Blood," he threw out every level. Another time, while erecting Indigenous lodges for "The Revenant," he instructed his crew to find a stick of the right size instead of using a tape measure. "They start out thinking Jack's kind of weird," he told me. "Then they get into it. They're becoming part of the performance, part of the character."

As we walked, Fisk told me that it was hard to know if audiences picked up on such details, but that he rarely thought about it. "Worrying about the audience is like a painter thinking about who might buy a painting," he said. "What I'm trying to do is create something that looks real to myself." He once told me how, while building the gate for Jamestown — a massive swinging structure 12 feet tall and eight feet wide — he ran into a problem. "I couldn't figure out a way to do the door, because it's too heavy. You couldn't make a hinge big enough." But then he remembered an ancient gate he once saw in Morocco — built into rock, the doors swung on vertical pegs stuck into the ground and above. Fisk had no idea if the settlers solved the problem this way, but using the method felt right, as if he were tapping into lost knowledge.

An audience might not notice every detail, Fisk says, but their presence becomes part of a larger immersive effect, like those subtle tics of an actor that, taken together, bring a performance convincingly alive. "We think we know the way things are," he says. "Then we see something that's different — and we think we're seeing it for real for the first time."

Later that evening, Fisk and Spacek asked me to dinner, and we drove down a tangle of country roads to a restaurant overlooking a meadow. So far during the visit, I'd seen little of Spacek, as she had made herself graciously if warmly scarce. At one point, after returning from a walk, Fisk and I found an artful spread of charcuterie waiting for us; another time, as Fisk and I talked on the back porch, she hung her head out the screen door, asking if we "might want a little sustenance," in her breezy Texas drawl, before returning with sandwiches. Now at dinner, she slid into the booth, next to Fisk, and asked to be caught up on our conversations, exchanging teasing banter with her husband. "He's a deep well, isn't he?" she said.

As we ate, the couple took turns telling me the story of how they fell in love on the set of "Badlands." To prepare for the film, Fisk browsed thrift stores, imagining himself as Holly Sargis, Spacek's character, letting his hand alight on objects that spoke to the wounded woman's past. "I had this little cigar box," he said. "And there was a tin soldier with a broken leg — maybe from childhood — and this clay mold of a horny toad." It was a form of imaginative inquiry he'd undertaken partly thanks to a limited budget, but one he now saw as vital to his process. For him, this psychological profiling is at the core of his work, and no question is too trivial: "What did I do last night? Where's my comfortable chair?" Even if objects never appear onscreen, finding them helps Fisk sketch the first faint outlines of his designs.

When Spacek arrived on set, she was shocked and delighted to find the drawers full of objects. "It was the first time I'd encountered a designer as character-driven as that," she said. Repressing a smile, Fisk admitted that it was an approach cultivated partly out of a desire to get close to Spacek. He'd badly wanted to speak to her, but was shy and didn't think he had a chance. "That was a way of communicating with her," he said.

In the years since, the couple have worked hard to balance their careers, often finding ways to work together. Early on, when Fisk needed help on a job, he'd occasionally hire Spacek to work on set. (When Spacek auditioned for "Carrie," she worried that Brian De Palma only knew her as "a bad set dresser" from "Phantom of the Paradise.") Once the couple had kids, they tried to arrange their schedules so one of them was always at the farm. During the '80s and most of the '90s, perhaps the most productive period of Spacek's Oscar-winning career, Fisk barely worked at all. He directed a few films, casting Spacek in two of them, but found the enlarged responsibilities frustrating. He was content filling his days fixing up the farm and raising horses. "It was like a second childhood," he said.

The farm soon became a refuge — both for the couple and others. Fisk built homes for their two daughters, and Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange moved close by for a while, as did David Lynch, when he was married to Fisk's younger sister, Mary. Maintaining it all had become a daily meditation for Fisk, one he likened to the Japanese surrealist film "Woman in the Dunes" — in which a woman is forced to sweep sand unceasingly. "I'm cutting down a dead tree, and I'm like: Didn't I plant this 50 years ago? I remember carrying it out in my hands," he said. It was as if the farm had become a living thing, one the couple continued to feed through an ever-growing list of projects. "We've created a little world," Fisk said.

When Fisk began designing "Killers of the Flower Moon," one of the biggest questions he had to wrestle with was also one of its simplest: Who was Mollie Burkhart? Burkhart, in a literal sense, was an Osage woman (played by Lily Gladstone) whose life was upended by a series of suspicious deaths in her family. One of the first times we see her, she is being ogled, for her money and tenuous health, by her eventual husband, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), who is in every way her opposite: rambling, suggestible, greedy. But she remained a cipher to Fisk, a woman straddling two worlds and two time periods, tethered to her Osage roots by her mother and yanked into a boom town's luxuries by her husband. If Fisk was going to illustrate her background truthfully, he felt he needed to find her emotional core.

Because Burkhart was a real woman, Fisk was greeted by an unusually dense amount of research material. In addition to the source book itself, he was granted access to many of David Grann's research files, including court records, photographs and interviews. But Fisk also endeavored to unearth his own primary materials, conscious that he and Grann were sometimes motivated by different imperatives. While Grann had turned up a wealth of the most minute details about day-to-day Osage life, Fisk was often arranging those details in different spaces or figuring out how to render a one-sentence description into a three-dimensional building. When Grann later visited the set, he was shocked by Fisk's attention to the most easy-to-miss surfaces. In the pool hall, Grann noticed a wire of wooden beads above the tables — a scoring system for straight pool, which was the popular style before eight-ball. "That's the type of detail I never knew — how they kept score," Grann told me.

One of the most important things Fisk had to discover and build was Burkhart's house. As well documented as her history was, the exact details of its location and architecture seemed lost. Many in the production staff — and among the Osage themselves — assumed she lived in a huge house, since one of the most publicized details about the Osage was their brick-and-�terra-cotta mansions. But Fisk was wary of casting Burkhart's story in generalizations. "If you don't know where they lived," he says, "how do you know what kind of people they were?" Determined to find something more definite, he pulled up court records, zeroing in on testimony that described Burkhart as having never owned a house at all — instead living with her mother, Lizzie. Following the lead to Lizzie's probate records, he tracked down a five-bedroom home on the reservation.

Though he couldn't know for certain, Fisk thought the house's modesty, its open floor plan and many bedrooms, reflected Burkhart's restraint, her embrace of her family. Most important, he thought it captured something essential about the story: "Killers of the Flower Moon" examines a moment of staggering transformation, as the Osage process their newfound wealth and its consequences. The nation had only recently been dispossessed of its land and moved to Oklahoma; now, the Osage had oil revenues topping the equivalent of $400 million annually. A house that "wasn't necessarily wealthy but was comfortable," as Fisk saw it, embodied that transitional confusion — as well as the danger it attracted. "It was like they were playing a card game with somebody," he says, "and didn't know the rules."

As Fisk began sketching, situating the house at a bend in a river, he drew in a low wraparound sleeping porch, where Mollie and Lizzie might host visitors for the annual dances. Outside, beside a brand-new Studebaker, he added a traditional lodge made of saplings and canvas, where many Osage liked to spend the summer months. Inside the house, Fisk selected a mottled green wallpaper, reminiscent of "grass or leaves — it was nature, trying to get back in," as he put it. It was a subtle permeability he suffused elsewhere throughout the house: open windows and cluttered cookware from people passing through.

"You start looking at the character, and you just kind of build from the character," Fisk told me. "What I try to do with the sets is just: Find the essence."

We were seated in his office on the ground floor of his house. Like every other room, Fisk had meticulously remodeled it himself: The walls and carpet were matching Palace Arms red, a shade close to oxblood, illuminated dimly by recessed lighting in the crown molding. On opposite walls, over the couch and fireplace, hung the bust of a longhorn steer and an oil painting depicting sheep huddled in a storm. Fisk sat in a Finnish recliner and began explaining what he meant by essence. "Essence" was a function of simplifying a set down to a visually expressive core. "It'll just confuse your eye too much if there's too many things to look at," he said. "A lot of design is taking things out of the frame."

During the final stage of building Burkhart's house, Fisk often waited until the crew left, then sat alone in the set, removing furniture and fixtures, night by night, until his interpretation of the character spoke clearly. "I've looked at Edward Hopper for a lot," he said, "because in putting together paintings, realist painters kind of simplify the world. They pick out what's important and what they want to make strong."

If some designers worried about a set not looking full enough, Fisk felt such simplicity got to the very heart of production design: granting access to interior lives. As committed as his career had been to American history, he was open to designing other environments, so long as he could connect to its characters. Whatever expertise he'd amassed about paint colors or construction materials he understood as a tool for clearing away the visual noise that otherwise clutters our view of historical figures. This was the real reason to make a set like Burkhart's house so accurate and yet also so simple: to create a surface compelling enough to draw the audience in, immersing them in the moment, but crystalline enough that, as they leaned closer, they caught a glimmer of their own reflection.

As Fisk and I talked, I found myself thinking of his set from "The Tree of Life": a tree-shaded neighborhood of wide lawns and avenues. Earlier, Fisk told me that one of the few modifications he had made to the set was to remove its fences, and now it struck me why. Accurate or not, it reflected the film's vision of childhood's vast emotional landscape, with the just-wrongness of a memory or a dream. A set should be "as real as possible but also universal enough to allow people in," Fisk says. "It allows you to visit — allows you to become a part of your own history."

To Fisk, building a world was about bringing an audience "into a life," regardless of setting. It was the sort of delicate attention to characterization that Fisk loved about cinema, but also felt was rarer nowadays. All you needed to do was look at the proliferation of fully digitized worlds; it sometimes made him feel as if his whole approach to filmmaking was endangered. His collaboration with Scorsese made it inevitable that "Killers of the Flower Moon" would be discussed as a naturalistic counterpoint to the creep of "an assembly line of manufactured 'content,'" as Scorsese put it to me, but Fisk maintained that his objections were more personal. "I would really miss a human element," he said.

He pointed out that he did see "Guardians of the Galaxy," the Marvel movie "with the talking tree and raccoon and all that stuff, which I liked." But then he paused, tilting his head skyward, as if in search.

"What would the raccoon's bedroom look like?" he said. "I don't know."
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: max from fearless on October 06, 2023, 07:23:24 AM
Wilberfan you're doing god's work, posting this! Thank you. Fisk is one of the greats.

Quick tid bit - in this interview regarding Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong talks about working as Fisk's assistance on There Will Be Blood (her first gig!!!) and how he recruited her. PS. I love her work on NOPE (which isn't talked about enough on here lol)...anyways just a lil Fisk tid bit...

https://teamdeakins.libsyn.com/ruth-de-jong-production-designer
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: max from fearless on October 07, 2023, 06:24:59 PM
Just saw the film in London. I haven't been moved, shaken and astonished like this since "The Master"...
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Alethia on October 08, 2023, 09:13:26 AM
That Marty kidz good
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: RudyBlatnoyd on October 21, 2023, 12:02:23 PM
Just seen this. The cinema was practically sold-out, which surprised me. My thoughts:

Scorsese's latest is almost entirely lacking in the kinetic and propulsive qualities that distinguish his more commercial projects. It's very much a slow-burner, methodically tracking how a white supremacist conspiracy of murder played out over multiple years, shaped – or ended – the lives of dozens of people and reflected America's early reckonings with its own history of violence. It shares the meditative streak of his two previous features, but without Silence's possibility of spiritual redemption or Irishman's frequent splashes of gallows humour. In short, it's a grim and often depressing watch – and easily the least audience-friendly of his collaborations with DiCaprio.

None of this should put off the committed cinephile, but it's best to be prepared for what lies ahead. Scorsese treats this sad, ugly story with the care and attention it deserves. It is obvious that he felt that imbuing the events with artificial suspense or excitement would've been a betrayal of the seriousness of the subject matter, and it's an artistic choice that demands respect.

Also worthy of plaudits are the gorgeous, painterly cinematography – it must be among the finest-looking pictures to be part-funded by a streaming company, although I appreciate that probably count as damning with faint praise – and the performances. Both the leads and the deep bench of supporting players are all note perfect, essaying lived-in period accuracy without getting bogged down in cliched hillbilly mannerisms.

It might be one of Scorsese's most important works, from a political standpoint, although that's not necessarily the same as claiming that it's one of his greatest films. I'm not sure that it ranks among the first tier of his work artistically, but it remains a formidable accomplishment and I'm eager to see it again.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: ono on October 21, 2023, 05:40:59 PM
Spoilers maybe.

This was a big meh-burger of a movie.  Someone needs to edit Scorsese.  No one tells him no anymore.  I saw this with a friend despite its almost 3.5 hour runtime.  I didn't see The Irishman because Meh (I bring it up because it too was 3+ hours).  Story could have been told in 2.5.  It dragged and was so dull.  Plus the female lead was bedridden for the last half of the film, and she was the most interesting character.  The trial didn't need Fraser or Lithgow.  Kinda distracting.  If Plemons were a skosh bigger, he'd be out of place too.  The radio play at the end was... fun but out of place.  I liked the device for another movie.  I didn't like the Scorsese cameos.  Leo makes his squinty brute face and calls it acting, and De Niro plays the most unmenacing "villain" ever.  Scorsese seems like such a nice guy.  He said he's just "discovered" what cinema can do.  Now he needs to discover what "no" and a good editor can do.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: RudyBlatnoyd on October 22, 2023, 02:42:50 AM
The Irishman was excellent. The last forty minutes of that movie might be the most extraordinary thing Scorsese has ever done (the rest is also very, very good, but that ending - wow).

I don't know if KOTFM is quite on that level, but it's a lot to unpack and digest after just one sitting. There's a conscientiousness to it that makes it more akin to Kundun or Silence (ie his non-'fun' movies) than his other crime dramas.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: mogwai on October 22, 2023, 04:23:44 AM
Verdict of "Killers on the flower moon". 3,5 out of 5. Way too long! Maybe an hour should've been edited down. The acting, the directing and the beautiful cinematography were excellent though. But the story due to the length, felt hollow. But I hope to see it again on a streaming service for another sight to see if I feel different.
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: WorldForgot on October 30, 2023, 10:23:57 PM
I'm curious to hear what people would choose to cut. I felt that structurally, its runtime was sound. And its pacing was much better than Oppie's. In that one, it felt like there was a constant surge throughout the movie, and that surge kept the subject from feeling didactic maybe but got in the way of true dynamics. This movie's pacing has the quiet Scorsez and it has the swift Scorsez. So which storyline do you sacrifice?

Someone I know complained about the line
Spoiler: ShowHide
"It's just like Tulsa" during the bombing aftermath
, but idk, for me that line 'played.' It is Oklahoma after all. Their feeling was that it felt so contemporary to be speaking about a (for them recent) tragedy like that -- but I think it contributed to the feel of overall fear/persecution. His 'late' pieces are so interesting as a threaded beat of historical fiction.

Loved the interplay of 'mixed forms' in the beginning and end.
Spoiler: ShowHide
"Pass me a light for my lucky strike" -
the Hello Fresh true-crime ad of the 20's
Title: Re: Killers of the Flower Moon
Post by: Rooty Poots on October 31, 2023, 02:31:34 AM
I loved the movie, but I felt like almost any of the scenes could've been cut and the story would've still worked just fine. (I'm happy with what we got though—it's my movie of the year.)