New York director Martin Scorsese presented his long-awaited film ‘Killers of the flower moon’, starring Lily Gladstone, Leonardo Di Caprio, Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemmons at the Cannes Film Festival. This Sunday, when the premiere had already passed and the director breathed easy watching how critics revered his almost four hours of footage, the filmmaker spoke of how deeply his meetings with the leaders of the Osage Nation impacted his creative process and how it was changing the script to adapt it to the version of this indigenous tribe of the United States.
«I discovered his values about love, respect, love of the land, and I’m not talking about turning the story into a political issue; I’m talking about living in community, relating to one another,” Scorsese said. “They opened my eyes and after two years working on the script, I decided to change it.”
The action of ‘Killers of the flower moon’ rides on the back of a western, the director’s first, which has something of ‘Goodfellas’, ‘The Irishman’ or ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, other of his epic fables.
At the press conference, Leonardo DiCaprio, working with the filmmaker for the sixth time, commented: “Marty’s perseverance and his ferocity in wanting to tell the truth, no matter how ugly, strange or uncomfortable the stories, is his mastery. I continue to be amazed at his ability to continue to tell the truth.”
Much of the ugliness of the story is embodied in the character of Robert De Niro, a baron named William Hale who orders many of the murders after gaining the trust of the Osage. “I don’t understand my character,” De Niro said. “I don’t understand anything about him. But, you know, people trust those who seem charming. He knows how to win people over and then he betrays them. He believes he has the right to own what does not belong to him, “said De Niro, who came to compare Hale with Donald Trump without saying his name. «It is the banality of evil. It is what we have to take care of. We see it today, of course. We all know who I’m talking about.”
The real protagonist, however, is an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart (played by a wonderful Lily Gladstone) and who is the wife of Ernest (Leo DiCaprio). She knows that she puts on a blindfold for a love as toxic as everything around her. Gladstone praised Scorsese and DiCaprio for their “artistic souls” in caring about the problems of the Osage Nation, a gesture that transcends what many anthropologists do. “Bringing out that dark area of our communities is very difficult in the United States,” the actress said.
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