On the night the Golden Globes were awarded, it became clear that the battle for the Oscar for best actress would be defined between whoever won the award in the best drama category, Lily Gladstone, for the new masterpiece of Martin Scorsese, The Moon Killers and the one who won it in the comedy or musical, Emma Stone, for her impressive work in Poor Creatures by Yorgos Lanthimos. With just days left until it is known who will win the golden statuette, Gladstone has a slight advantage, simply for having won the Screen Actors Guild award, in which many of those who also vote for the Oscar vote. However, she was completely ignored by the Bafta, where Stone, who also took the Critics Choice, won. Historical recognition also weighs in her favor, since the Montana native is the daughter of a Native American from the Piegan Blackfeet Nation, on whose reservation she grew up, and a woman of European origin. She was the first actress of indigenous roots to win the Golden Globe for best actress and if she wins on Sunday, she would set the same record with the Academy Award.
How important was collaborating with the Osage Nation for your work to authentically reflect that culture?
It was essential. I regret that that was not the rule in the films that preceded us all these years. As an actress who has played Native American roles consistently, I usually play women from tribal nations to which I don’t belong, and each time I have to go through a period of acculturation. Most of the time people don’t understand that in the United States there are 574 nationally recognized Native nations. We are not a monolith nor do we have a homogeneous view. I speak a little of the blackfeet language that I learned in my childhood. I grew up on my father’s reservation. But the Osage language is totally foreign to me. Although you may get the impression that Native American actors speak all languages, this is not the case. I had to learn everything, trying to be tremendously respectful, in the same way I would expect an actress to behave when she came to blackfeet territory to tell a story about our ancestors.
How did that collaboration happen?
The wonderful thing about our film is that long before filming began, those involved in this project built a great relationship with the Osage community. The Gray Horse community invited Martin Scorsese to a meeting when he found out that he was going to make this film in which they expressed to him what were the things that worried them. Marty is a legend because in addition to being a great film director he is an incredible human being. If the director had been someone else, he would have ignored that invitation. For me it was crucial that he listened to them, because then he could make the film the way he made it. I hope that in the future all filmmakers who work with native communities follow their example.
And as far as his role is concerned?
When we finally got to the set, there were many people waiting for me and Leonardo to talk to us about our characters. They worked with me to become an Osage woman, and to behave as someone from the tribe would have done at that time. She is not mentioned in the script, but Mollie had been in boarding school as a child, which had undoubtedly been a traumatic experience. She undoubtedly would have been very successful there, knowing how to be part of the community, but also because she understood how to deal with white men. I had to learn a lot, because it was a different culture, in a different time, but the most important thing for me is that I was never alone on the set. If she was unsure about a decision she wanted to make, there were not just one but several Osage Nation advisors at each level of production.
Was it hard to speak Osage?
Clear. Every time I spoke in that language, Janice and Chris were listening in case they had to correct me. Janice’s father wrote a dictionary of the Osage language that is used in Osage revitalization programs, and she knows everything about pronunciation and grammar. All of them were of great help and it was also essential, because portraying that culture in such an authentic way helped us bring the story to life. It was essential that we felt this world as something real in order to create these human beings with whom the audience had to identify. We had to show the family dynamics and the love between the sisters, since that is the way the viewer understands their losses.
The relationship between his character and Leonardo DiCaprio’s can be interpreted in many ways…
One of the first times we went to the community we sat down to talk with Margie Burkhart, Mollie and Ernest’s granddaughter. Her father was Cowboy, the boy who appears in the film. Margie never knew her grandmother, because she passed away long before she was born. Leo was also able to talk to some of Ernest Burkhart’s relatives who were not Osage. There are many in the tribe with the last name Burkhart and there are other people with the same last name who are white. Margie told us that Ernest changed a lot after the incidents narrated in our film. He returned to the tribe after he got out of prison, and every time someone mentioned Mollie after she passed away, she told how much he had loved her. Maybe he felt guilty and was trying to convince himself, or maybe he really was that way. I think the greatest evidence that there was love was the large number of white men who married Osage women in those days and who were tremendously abusive. They were very controlling and tried to turn them into obedient wives just as Hale, Robert De Niro’s character, recommended to Ernest. However, Ernest learned to speak Osage perfectly so he could talk to Mollie. Not all white men who married Osage women bothered to learn the language, but Ernest did. He adored his children. After the trial, when Cowboy was a young man he left his Osage family to go pick up his father, whom he had given the pseudonym “murderer.” As strange as it may seem, this was a son who still respected his father, and between the two they had a good filial relationship.
What do you think?
This is a love story that is very difficult to understand. From what they told us about those later years, they led a harmonious family life. The truth is that in our work with Leo we were shaping it, and while we were trying to find the dynamics in this relationship we worked on several scenes that could be interpreted in different ways. There was one that was key, in which we made 5 or 6 versions, with different levels of complicity on the part of Ernest, others in which we explored authentic love and also those in which Mollie suspected her intentions. And yet we end up being left with a variant in which what we see is love. That was the dynamic that occurred in those first explorations, and in which it was clear that they care about each other. By the time we were halfway through filming, we had the relationship very well established, but there were always the questions of how Ernest can live knowing that he is complicit in what is happening and why Mollie can’t see it. In any case, we were simply guided by what was in the script, aware of the affection that these characters have for each other, something that was not difficult to develop because it is very easy to share time with Leo.
