Leonardo DiCaprio Says ‘Flower Moon’ Script From FBI’s POV Got Axed Because It Didn’t ‘Get to the Heart’ of the Story: ‘We Weren’t Immersed in the Osage’
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director Leonardo DiCaprio finally weighed in on the massive “Killers of the Flower Moon” rewrite that changed the direction of Martin Scorsese’s latest historical epic.
The script originally centered on FBI agent Tom White, who DiCaprio was supposed to play, as he investigates a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s.
That perspective kept the film in line with the majority of David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name, but something about telling “Flower Moon” from the FBI’s point of view did not sit right with DiCaprio or Scorsese. “It just didn’t feel like it got to the heart of it,” DiCaprio recently told British Vogue in a joint interview with co-star Lily Gladstone. “We weren’t immersed in the Osage story.
There was this tiny, small scene between Mollie and Ernest that provoked such emotion in us at the reading, and we just started to penetrate into what that relationship was, because it was so twisted and bizarre and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.” Ernest is Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran who is pulled into his uncle’s greedy plot to rob the Osage Nation of its wealth.
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