Martin Scorsese Is Flipping the Script

MARTIN SCORSESE has been making the movies he calls pictures for practically his whole adult life. But 27 feature films and 16 documentaries later, he says each time is like starting over.

“If I feel I’m just shooting the script—and it may be the greatest script ever made—I don’t know what I’m doing. Why am I there?” he says, as the light in a 20th-floor room in Manhattan gradually shifts on a recent afternoon. “Can I go deeper? How far can we push? What can I learn? Not how to make a movie—just about life. Know what I mean?”

During the six years the director spent on his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese and his collaborators scrapped a completed script to turn the plot inside out. He let his leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the world’s most marketable movie stars, go from hero to villain.

When this and other radical revisions scared off the Hollywood studio that had backed the film, Scorsese leapt into a familiar but anxiety-inducing ritual: finding someone new to pay for his movie and put it out.

“You’re asking them to trust you to get it there,” he says. “But in reality, in life, nobody knows what could happen.”

Scorsese also courted peril by putting himself in charge of a story that demanded deep understanding of Native American history, culture and pain. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, Killers of the Flower Moon is based on David Grann’s bestselling book about a series of real events known as the Reign of Terror, when dozens of Osage tribe members were killed by outsiders coveting their valuable mineral rights.

In 60 years as a filmmaker, Scorsese has elevated the crime genre with humanity, granular detail and novel camera moves. He’s explored the edges of spiritual faith in The Last Temptation of Christ and moral corruption in The Wolf of Wall Street. He’s parsed the greatness of other artists in documentaries about Bob Dylan, George Harrison and more. But for all his proven mastery, Scorsese, turning 81 in November, is still a student, searching for truths inside a story and how to frame them.

In 2019, when Scorsese traveled to Oklahoma for the first time to meet with Osage leaders and scout potential filming locations, he was stunned by the terrain. He recalls wild horses on the run and long drives with views dominated by prairie and sky.

With that landscape wide open to him, he says, “The problem was where to putthe camera.”

When Scorsese talks about films, his hands travel in movements as precise and contained as the M.S. monogram below the chest pocket of his shirt.

The hands hinge open. Fold closed. Cup the air. Point with palms pressed together, as he flips through the comprehensive film archive stored in his head. He mentions pioneering directors—John Ford and Allan Dwan, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Bellocchio—as if they were mutual acquaintances of yours.

Scorsese’s own visual language was shaped by the more claustrophobic scenery of his upbringing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“My idea of space was long, narrow hallways. Old, broken-tile floors. Staircases. Naked lightbulbs,” he recalls. “Compartmentalized and closed off with angles and hidden nooks and crannies. That’s how I see the world.”

When he was a kid frequenting cinemas around the city, movies helped him make sense of himself and the swirl of identities in his environment. Italian and American. Catholic and criminal.

Oft-described scenes from Scorsese’s childhood shape his origin story as filmmaker and future hero to cineastes: the local TV broadcasts of Italian movies like The Bicycle Thief and Paisan that he absorbed with his Sicilian family. The isolation caused by his asthma and the leeway his parents gave him to see lots of movies. The trips to the cinema led by his mentor, a Catholic priest named Father Francis Principe, and the discussions that followed.

The impossible trick that Scorsese later pulled off was to convert all this cinematic input to fiercely original output.

“I knew I had it together in Mean Streets,” he says.

That third feature film, which Scorsese co-wrote, burst from the 30-year-old director’s lifelong observations of street-level drama in Little Italy. Hustlers, mafia hoods and loan sharks are the everyday people surrounding two friends at odds, played by Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in the 1973 movie.

A crescendo of critical acclaim, peaking with 1976’s Taxi Driver, gave way to one of the lowest periods of Scorsese’s career. He had a vision for a musical romance that his actors would improvise as they shot. His experiment got scrambled in the execution, accentuated by the director’s drug use, ego and instability. New York, New York flopped in 1977, and Scorsese spun into more excess, along with depression and illness.

“I was lucky to survive it all,” he says. “And then I threw everything into Raging Bull.”

De Niro steered Scorsese back to work by pushing the story of boxer Jake LaMotta on him. The director orchestrated a study of male violence in black and white with dreamlike compositions of De Niro set loose in the ring. Released in 1980, Raging Bull yielded an Oscar for De Niro as best actor, and one for Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese feature since. (It earned Scorsese the first of his nine nominations for directing; he didn’t win until 2007, for The Departed.)

IT WAS DE NIRO, the muse of Scorsese’s formative career, who put the next one, DiCaprio, on the director’s radar. In 1993, De Niro had been impressed by the actor’s performance, at age 18, in the lead of This Boy’s Life, featuring De Niro as an abusive stepfather.

Scorsese has now made six features starring DiCaprio (starting with 2002’s Gangs of New York) and 10 with De Niro. Killers of the Flower Moon, out Friday, is the first full-length Scorsese picture the actors have starred in together.

During the production, the director balanced their differing approaches to their roles: De Niro terse, DiCaprio expansive. “Oh, endless, endless, endless!” Scorsese says with a laugh, recalling DiCaprio’s discussions on set and improvisations in his scenes with De Niro. “Then Bob didn’t want to talk. Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we’d tell him, ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’ ”

In the past, Scorsese has immersed himself in the worlds of Tibetan Buddhists (Kundun) and 17th-century Japanese Christians (Silence). But the open wound of Indigenous relations with whites in the U.S.—plus a loud cultural debate about who should tell the stories of historically oppressed peoples—made Killers especially fraught. Many rounds of conversation among DiCaprio, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth led to the overhaul of the Killers script. To understand the movie they ended up making, it helps to consider the one they didn’t.

The original Killers screenplay centered on the criminal investigation of the Osage murders by a fledgling federal agency now known as the FBI. DiCaprio initially signed on to play the bureau’s straight-arrow lead investigator, Tom White.

But despite Scorsese’s love of westerns, using the lawman’s perspective just didn’t work, he says. And by the way, having a hero named White would be an unfortunate irony for filmmakers trying to avoid Hollywood’s white-savior trope.

DiCaprio suggested a heel turn. He would instead play Ernest Burkhart, a weak-willed man who marries an Osage woman and falls into schemes to kill her people. De Niro is Ernest’s uncle, an Oklahoma cattle baron and apparent ally to the Osage who even speaks their language.

White, the federal investigator, does arrive (in the form of actor Jesse Plemons), but not until late in the story. Instead, Scorsese frames the film around the real-life contradictions in the relationship of Ernest and his Osage wife, Mollie Kyle, played by Lily Gladstone. He loves her but enables his uncle’s plan to slowly poison her. Meanwhile, Mollie seems unwilling to see the evil in Ernest.

Along with those Oklahoma landscapes, Scorsese captured the manipulations unfolding inside Osage homes. “It put us on ground level…. The whole place is guilty. The whole place is complicit. We’re complicit as people coming into this country,” he says.

Casting director Ellen Lewis, who has helped Scorsese find the faces for each movie of his since Goodfellas, says excitement defines his approach to new work. “Every single time, it’s as though we’ve never done it before,” she says.

Possible next films for him include adaptations of the Marilynne Robinson novel Home and another book by Grann, the shipwreck tale The Wager.

What leads Scorsese into unfamiliar terrain in his 80s? “Endless curiosity and openness,” Lewis says. “His empathy, the tough view from where he came from and his spirituality, which is a huge part of his life.”

Like any auteur who’s been around the block in Hollywood, Scorsese has had his share of scrapes with major studios.

Paramount Pictures didn’t like his solution to the Killers story, or the project’s growing price tag. “The studio said, ‘We backed the other version, we can’t back this one,’ ” Scorsese recalls. And that was before the completion of the new script that would see DiCaprio playing a queasy character with bad teeth.

For the second time in a row for Scorsese, a tech company stepped in with more cash to burn and designs on one of the most respected directors in the game.

Paramount had also balked at The Irishman, Scorsese’s ambitious return to the gangster genre. Netflix took on the project and the expensive visual-effects process of de-aging De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci for the decades-spanning story.

Apple helped save Killers. At the time it stepped in, the company was still trying to prove it could be a studio. Its streaming TV platform was new, and had yet to release the Emmy-winning Ted Lasso or the Oscar-winning CODA. Apple partnered with Paramount to release Killers in theaters before its streaming debut on Apple TV+.

When Killers was in business limbo, however, Scorsese worried, in part because of thoughts about his family’s future. His wife of 24 years, Helen Morris, has been dealing with Parkinson’s disease for over 30 years. They have a daughter in her 20s, and Scorsese (who was married four times before) has two older daughters and two granddaughters. The precautions of estate planning can weigh on visionary filmmakers, too.

“During these dry spells, it’s pretty scary,” more so than before, Scorsese says. “We’re at the end, in a sense.”

SCORSESE HAS A SPECIAL section in his cinematic memory for mistakes in his own movies, including an entire hue in one of his masterpieces, says his friend Fran Lebowitz.

“He has said this to me numerous times: ‘You know what’s wrong with Taxi Driver, Fran? The color red. The studio wouldn’t give me the money to correct the color. That’s why it’s unwatchable.’ ”

When starting one of the two documentaries he made about Lebowitz, a humorist and fellow New York City icon, Scorsese had a condition. “He said, ‘All right, here’s the deal—we’re not gonna leave Manhattan.’ And we shook hands,” she recalls.

Though set in his ways as a person, Scorsese stays adventurous as an artist, she says. “Most people his age, artists or not, are not doing anything like what they used to do. To me, Marty’s future work is of as much interest as his past work. There are very few artists that’s true of.”

He was in his mid-70s when people started asking him questions about his own mortality. For a director who has committed so many elegantly choreographed killings to film, death isn’t a touchy subject. “I think about it all the time,” he says.

His pace has been as busy as it’s ever been in the past decade, starting with The Wolf of Wall Street, a tour de force of 1980s hedonism. He conveyed the corrosive effects of money in wild scenes of stockbrokers, drugs and sex. Then he explored the spiritual struggles of Jesuit priests and Japanese Christians in Silence. He helmed documentaries about New York Dolls rocker David Johansen and the Rolling Thunder Revue, a star-studded Bob Dylan tour in the mid-’70s. Beyond the films Scorsese directed himself, he helped produce projects such as Bradley Cooper’s upcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro.

Amid all this productivity, mortality barges in. “Every time the phone rings. Every time a text comes up,” Scorsese says, he dreads bad news about a friend.

In August, Robbie Robertson died at age 80. The former leader of the Band and pioneer of the Americana movement had been a confidante and running buddy of Scorsese’s since the mid-1970s. Together they shaped The Last Waltz, a landmark concert film from 1978 that was the Band’s swan song. Both men were searching.

“The Band had broken up. My film New York, New York wasn’t successful. What we went through was trying to find if we had any creativity left. We were helping each other that way, without saying it. He’d play music for me, I’d show him film, and we’d go from party to party around the world,” Scorsese recalls, adding, “It’s all the same party, I discovered that.”

Leaning back on the couch where he’s sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, Scorsese slips into an impression of Robertson during that time: eyes half-lidded, pretending to drag on a cigarette and watch his filmmaker friend rant.

“He was always so cool, and I was always so heated,” Scorsese says with a chuckle. Then a long pause. “Oh, God.”

The director dedicated Killers to Robertson, who composed the film’s score and had shaped music for various Scorsese projects since Raging Bull. Robertson, who was enrolled as a member of the tribal nation where his mother was raised in Canada, created an ominous sound for Killers with ghostly electric guitars and Native drums.

In an initially cautious meeting between Osage leaders and Scorsese and his small team of producers, the director set the tone for the collaboration to come with lots of listening and storytelling, recalls Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of the Osage Nation. (Scorsese later sent them a DVD of Silence to show he was more than the Goodfellas guy.) From production planning to weighing in on edited scenes, Osage people were immersed in the making of the film, the chief says.

“It was our story. We told it. We just had the best people in the world at this time helping us do it.”

Scorsese decided to open Killers with an Osage pipe ceremony and included such other rites as a wedding and baby namings. But moments of casual Native life in the film create a surprisingly powerful impact, Standing Bear says. In one scene, Mollie and her sisters huddle together at a party, laughing, teasing and chatting with each other—all in the Osage language—about the white men around them. Scorsese set up the scene but left the dialogue up to the actresses, encouraging them to improvise.

“They’re talking Osage back and forth. That is something we just don’t hear anymore, and we want it to be like that again,” Standing Bear says. “That scene brought our language truly alive.”

A brief exchange at the Cannes Film Festival, where Killers had its world premiere, indicated how fragile such partnerships can be. During a press conference (held in May, before the actors’ strike), DiCaprio described the film team’s efforts to do research and seek out Osage stories with “almost an anthropological perspective.”

When asked for her opinion, Lily Gladstone, seated next to DiCaprio, chuckled a bit, then politely took issue with her co-star’s word choice. “Native peoples are used to having anthropologists come in curious about everything we do,” said the actress, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage. By contrast, she said, Scorsese and company’s artful take on complicated characters from history “pierces the veil.”

In the Osage and the people who both lived among them and preyed on them, Scorsese saw a duality that he has been examining from different angles in almost all his films. In the Catholic obsessions of a Mean Streets criminal. In the righteous rage of a delusional vigilante in Taxi Driver. In gangsters shrugging off explosions of violence in the name of family and loyalty in Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman.

Making Killers, Scorsese tried to grasp how his characters slid between trust and betrayal, love and murder, honesty and corruption.

“Next thing you know,” the director says, “the undertaker is taking jewels off the bodies.”

Write to John Jurgensen at John.Jurgensen@wsj.com