Over 40 years, Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese collaborated on 11 projects. Today brings their final joint effort, as Sony Music Masterworks has released Robertson’s posthumous soundtrack for Scorsese’s new film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon explores the murders of native Osage peoples in Oklahoma in the 1920s after oil deposits were discovered on their land, in a saga that came to be called the Reign of Terror.
Robertson himself spent much of his childhood on the Six Nations Reserve as part of his mother’s Mohawk community. As he explained in a posthumous statement, he leaned on this personal history as he crafted the film’s accompanying soundtrack. “I was gathering pictures in my head of music I heard as a child at the Six Nations Indian Reserve. My relatives are all sitting around with their instruments, and one guy would start a rhythm, and then somebody would start singing a melody to that, and it was just haunting. The feeling of the music beside you like that, humming and droning – the groove and the feel of it got under my skin and it lives there forever.”
“Two days after Marty returned from Oklahoma and filming had wrapped, he was ready to get started with the music,” Robertson added, “digging into my imagination and seeing where it leads me helps build what I do with him. Sometimes, it’s a small build, but this was a really big one. A lot of music was involved with this. I wanted to build an orchestra of guitar sounds with different variations of the instrument. I kept building and building the orchestra and then I tore it down and tried to keep its soul.”
As part of his creative process, Robertson also spent time in Oklahoma studying the music of the Osage Nation and researching popular music of the 1920s,
Killers of the Flower Moon is in theaters beginning today, and Robertson’s soundtrack can be streamed in full below.
Robertson died on August 9th at the age of 80. His other collaborations with Scorsese included The Kings of Comedy, Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Irishman. Scorsese also famously directed the concert film The Last Waltz on The Band, which featured Robertson.
