THE version of Killers of the Flower Moon that will be shown in theatres is a marked departure from what director Martin Scorsese initially envisioned bringing to the silver screen.
In the recent Sight & Sound magazine, Scorsese pointed out that the first script, co-written with Eric Roth, would take almost five hours just to read.
That version, which was over 200 pages, was a more faithful adaptation of David Grann’s novel of the same name and it was from the perspective of the Bureau of Investigation (now called the Federal Bureau of Investigation) agents who investigated a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s, Scorsese told The New Yorker.
On top of being “too long”, this version of the script also faltered as it was a standard police procedural about solving a murder.
“These guys come in from Washington, and the moment they get off that train, the moment they enter that town, you look around and you see Bob De Niro, you see so-and-so —‘I know who did it,’” Scorsese told The New Yorker.
“The audience is way ahead of us”.
Additionally, in this first version of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio was going to play the lead FBI agent, Tom White.
“Myself and Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese told The Irish Times.
“After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”
After that period of writer’s block, the script was then overhauled to focus on the story from within the Osage community and not from the white men coming into the community from the outside.
DiCaprio’s role was then shifted to that of Ernest Buckhart, a World War I veteran pulled into his uncle’s plot to rob the film’s Native American tribe of its wealth.
Killers of the Flower Moon is currently in cinemas.