[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.]
One of the fascinating things about a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese is that film lovers have literal decades of his work to explore, and with it the opportunity to observe how he’s evolved as a filmmaker since his earliest triumphs — an evolution Scorsese himself seems quite conscious of. “In effect, you always make the same film, but does it always have to be the same way?” he told an audience at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on Oct. 18th, following a screening of his newest production, Killers of the Flower Moon.
Added Scorsese, “Maybe the way changes.”
Based on the book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon finds the famed director exploring the Western genre for the first time, as he depicts the brutal murder spree orchestrated by white men like William King Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to rob the oil-rich Osage people of the 1920s. During a post-screening Q&A, Scorsese was asked by the moderator if Flower Moon was a film that he could have made years ago, and his answer to that was a long, but frank, “no.”
As he put it, many factors contribute to how a filmmaker might change with the passing of time: “It’s possible that you might mature in a certain way as a person, whether that’s just on the surface or that’s spiritually or whatever — and, somehow, the work has to reflect that. And then the technique and style has to reflect that.”
For Scorsese, the scene from Killers of the Flower Moon that encapsulated this change in approach was the scene set directly after a bomb has killed the last remaining sister of Mollie Burkhart, played by Lily Gladstone.
