Martin Scorsese looks a little tired on the other side of the screen. It was his turn to promote his new film, Los asesinos de la luna, starring his fetish actors, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. The Hollywood actors’ strike has prevented them from accompanying him at his meeting with the press to discuss this necessary, ambitious and acclaimed Western with which the director of the United States tries to restore dignity in cinema to Native Americans and past resumes the study of violence as a human tool of power, a key theme in his filmography. And the fact is that the film portrays the slaughter of dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation that took place in the 1920s. “A silent and slow genocide”, defines Scorsese in a Zoom chat from New York with a group of media, including La Vanguardia.
Based on real events, the story starts from the book of the same name published by David Grann in 2017, in which he reveals the indiscriminate extermination of this community by the greed of the white man. Scorsese focuses on a real-life character, William Hale (De Niro), a rancher who gains the trust of the townspeople and uses his short-legged nephew Ernest (DiCaprio) to marry the native heiress Mollie (extraordinary Lily Gladstone) while on the other hand he plots how to eliminate the woman’s family in order to keep her money and her oil-filled lands. “It took me about seven years to build this project. I was just drawn to the material, I was fascinated by the mentality of the Osage and the beauty of the way they see life. And we took advantage of it by taking everything they had. Also because the white men in the book were people I had met in New York. People who believed they could do anything. But I was really interested when we got to research and meet in person the whole Osage community in Oklahoma, who talked about their ancestors and how they were killed and the fact that they never said anything about it because they kept it in secret”, says the director of works such as Un dels nostres or Casino. “I learned a lot from them, they’ve been very generous, and when I discovered that a large part of this web of violence depended on the love story between Molly and Ernest, that’s when I focused on the serious project”. “At first I was going the other way, in the opposite direction, that is, from outside to inside, based on Grann’s research, but I discovered that it reminded me too much of the films I made in the past. What really caught me was this, what if this trust is betrayed through love?”, he says.
Although the story uncovers one of those hidden stories of his country’s black chronicle, Scorsese does not believe that the United States is “the only country that has eliminated other cultures. It is something that has happened and continues to happen in other parts of the world, be it for religious, political or economic issues. It is part of our nature.” He reveals that working with De Niro and DiCaprio has been wonderful and fun. “Both share frankness, confidence and a crazy audacity. Really, there is love between the three of us.”
Although they are both fantastic, the one who steals the show is native-born actress Lily Gladstone, who is already aiming for an Oscar. “The story of Mollie and Ernest works as a kind of metaphor for the whole film. Lily has a perfect movie face. He might not be saying anything, but you feel everything going on behind his eyes. Without having to provoke it, many things happen inside it and it reflects it in a very calm way”.
