Prior to the premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese discussed the film’s substantial rewrites on the cover of Time magazine. Based on David Grann’s 2017 factual book on the FBI’s investigation into a string of killings among the Osage Nation in the early 1920s, “Flower Moon” is a dramatization of the true story. This story was originally the focus of Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth’s film adaptation, with Leonardo DiCaprio cast as Tom White, the head FBI investigator. Scorsese addressed Time, “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys. Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
In order to alter the viewpoint of the movie, Scorsese and Roth chose to completely rewrite the “Flower Moon” script. In a role-swap, DiCaprio would take on the part of the ethically dubious Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran who becomes involved in his uncle’s plot to steal money from the Osage Nation. The focus of the new “Flower Moon” script would be Ernest and his troubled marriage to Mollie, an Osage lady played by Lily Gladstone, as the murders occur and the FBI shows there to conduct an investigation. Tom White, who was now a supporting character, was filled by Jesse Plemons.
Gladstone recently revealed in Interview magazine that she initially went to the movie audition with sides from the first version of “Flower Moon.” She returned to the audition after considerable rewrites with an entirely new screenplay. Gladstone stated, “Before the rewrites, I had three pages of some pretty mouthy dialogue, But I was struggling so much with the scenes that when COVID shut everything down and the project went quiet for a minute, I assumed that I’d blown the audition. About a year later, I got a request to Zoom with Martin Scorsese. And then I got new sides sent to me that had beats. Suddenly it was a scene that had minimal dialogue…And I was like, ‘Oh man, I can plug a character in here now. This is amazing.’ Because I’d heard that the rewrites completely did a 180. Leo was supposed to be playing Tom White, Jesse Plemons’s character.”
Gladstone referred to the initial “Flower Moon” script, “The focus would’ve been the FBI, with Mollie and Ernest being part of the supporting storyline, instead of the central one.” She previously explained to Vulture, that revision meant that the movie “is not a white-savior story. The phrase “Do something” is an Osage proverb. “Here’s money. Come help us.”
Scorsese spoke candidly on the state of film culture in other sections of his Time interview. “It should be one cinematic culture, you know? But right now everything is being fragmented and broken up in a way,” he continued, pointing to the way streaming services are altering how people watch films. He stated that while he was growing up, “not everybody liked musicals. Not everybody liked westerns. Not everybody liked gangster films or noirs. But at the time, we just went to the movies, and that’s what was playing.”