Martin Scorsese Recalls Paramount Backing Out of ‘Flower Moon’ After Script Change, Says DiCaprio’s Improv Caused Some Eye Rolls: ‘You Don’t Need That Dialogue’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Martin Scorsese recalled Paramount Pictures execs telling him point blank they would not be backing the overhauled script for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The rejection came before the new script was even finalized. “The studio said, ‘We backed the other version, we can’t back this one,’” Scorsese remembered.

Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth originally planned to faithfully adapt David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name. They collaborated on a script for “Killers of the Flower Moon” that was told from the perspective of the FBI agents who investigated a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s.

Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to play Tom White, the lead FBI agent on the case. This is the movie Paramount was willing to back, but that changed when DiCaprio requested a script overhaul two years into the writing process. “Myself and Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese said in a recent interview with The Irish Times. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.” Scorsese recently admitted to The New Yorker that this first attempt at “Flower Moon” failed because it was a straightforward procedural drama, which is not something he knows how to pull off.