Martin Scorsese seems a little tired on the other side of the screen, although he tries to hide it with his characteristic energy when answering questions. He has only had to promote his new film, The Moon Killers, starring his favorite actors Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, who work together under his orders for the first time in a feature film – both of them coincided in 1993 in The Life of This Boy and in 1996 in Marvin’s Room.
The strike of Hollywood actors has prevented them from accompanying him in his meeting with the press to talk about this necessary, ambitious and acclaimed Western with which the American director tries to restore dignity in cinema to Native Americans and in the process goes back to studying violence as a human tool of power, a key theme in his filmography. And the film portrays the massacre of dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation that took place in the 1920s. “A silent and slow genocide,” Scorsese defines it in a Zoom chat from New York with a group of media, including La Vanguardia.
The production premiered in theaters last Friday and has gone straight to number one at the Spanish box office, with nearly 1.3 million euros in revenue, demonstrating that its long duration of almost three and a half hours has not prevented the public from surrender to the new creation of the New York filmmaker, who will turn 81 on November 17. The film is based on real events and is part of the book of the same name published by David Grann in 2017, in which he reveals the indiscriminate extermination of the Osage community by the excessive greed of the white man. The natives were wealthy from the oil found on their lands in Oklahoma and had the highest per capita income in the world at the time. Until they were victims of discrimination, racism and systematic genocide.
Scorsese focuses on a real character, William Hale, played by De Niro, a businessman who gains the trust of the Osage and uses his dim-witted nephew Ernest (DiCaprio) to marry native heiress Mollie (Lily Gladstone) while on the other hand he plots how to destroy the woman’s family to keep her money and land. “It has taken me about seven years to put together this project. I was simply attracted 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 them by taking everything away from them. Also because The white guys in the book were people I had met in New York. People who thought they could do anything without scruples. But I was really interested when we started researching and meeting in person the entire Osage community in Oklahoma, that they talked about their ancestors and how they were murdered and the fact that they never said anything about it because they kept it a secret,” the director of works like One of Ours or Casino shoots with his rushed words.
And he adds immediately: “I learned a lot from them, they have been very generous, and when I discovered that most of that network of violence depended on this love story between Molly and Ernest, that was when I really focused on the project. Al At first I was going on a different path, in the opposite direction, that is, from the outside in, based on Grann’s research, but I discovered that it was too reminiscent of the films I made in the past. What really got me was that, and what? If this trust is betrayed through love?”, he maintains.
“And that has to do with marriage. It has to do with these two people who really love each other and the husband is very weak. I thought it was interesting to delve into that aspect.” The director believes that in some ways The Moon Killers is more related to The Age of Innocence “than it is to some of my other films.”
Although the story uncovers in great detail and overwhelming staging one of those hidden stories in the black chronicle of his country, Scorsese does not believe that the United States is “the only country that has destroyed other cultures. It is something that “It has happened and continues to happen in other places in the world, whether for religious, political or economic reasons. It is part of our nature.”
He confesses that working with De Niro and DiCaprio has been wonderful. “I’ve known Robert since I was 16. He knows where I come from and knows my old friends and I know his. When we started working together on Mean Streets and particularly Taxi Driver, we discovered that we shared the same sensibilities and interests. or similar and, also, that he was a fearless type of actor. He was the one who introduced me to Leo. We did Gangs of New York together, but in The Aviator I found a lot of similarities between them. I’m not saying the same style, but he had the directness , trust and a crazy audacity in the same way as De Niro. Even though we are 30 years apart from Leo, there is that trust and an enjoyment working together. There really is love between the three of us.”
Despite the fantastic performances of both actors, the one who steals the show is the actress of native origin Lily Gladstone, who is already aiming for the Oscar for playing that elegant woman who trusts until the end in a cowardly husband who turns his back on that kingdom of terror that their own have imposed on the Osage community. “My casting director Ellen Lewis saw her in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and recommended that I see her. And I loved her in the movie. But then the pandemic hit and we had to meet on Zoom and the following year it was another meeting with Leo also by zoom. During that first year we worked on her character. The story of Molly and Ernest works as a kind of metaphor for the entire film. The whole world that we are representing. A horrendous situation. And I think Lily has a sad face. perfect cinema. He may not be saying anything, but you feel everything that happens behind his eyes. And in the positioning of his face, the way he moves. Without having to provoke it, a lot happens inside him and “It reflects it in a very calm way. In addition, it is very strong in the opinions and activism of Native Americans and it helped us a lot in the way we approached the film,” he concludes.
