20 facts you might not know about 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

David Grann is no novice when it comes to his books being adapted. He wrote the book that The Lost City of Z was based on, as well as the article that led to The Old Man & the Gun. In 2017, Grann published the book this film is based on, which has the subtitle “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.”

In 2016, production company Imperative Entertainment won a bidding war for the film rights to Killers of the Flower Moon, spending $5 million for the rights. Now, you may note that the year of the bidding war was 2016, and the book did not come out until 2017. Indeed, the film rights were purchased for millions of dollars before the book was even out.

When the rights were picked up, there weren’t any names attached, but they came quickly, and they were heavy hitters at that. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro were all bandied about from the beginning, and in 2017, it was announced that Scorsese would direct and DiCaprio would star.

You want to adapt a property into a screenplay? You hire Eric Roth. He has six nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay to his name, including a win back in the day for Forrest Gump. Roth shares writing credit on the script with Scorsese, but that was by no means a given. Aside from his extremely low-budget debut film, Scorsese only has writing credit on six of his movies.

Instead of jumping right into Killers of the Flower Moon, which was originally scheduled to start filming in early 2018, Scorsese bumped the project down the road so that he could make The Irishman. Then, filming was announced as being primed to start in the summer of 2020. Well, by this point, you probably know what happened to most 2020 productions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Killers was postponed indefinitely and did not begin shooting until April 2021.

In time, it was announced De Niro would indeed be in the film. Killers of the Flower Moon marked the 10th time that Scorsese collaborated with De Niro. It also marked the sixth time he worked with DiCaprio. Prior to this movie, the three had only ever worked together on the 2015 short film The Audition.

In 1978, Scorsese directed the iconic music documentary The Last Waltz, which focused on the band, um, The Band. One of the members of The Band was Robbie Robertson. Robertson, who grew up partly on the Six Nations reserve outside Toronto, composed the score for Killers of the Flower Moon. It marked the 11th collaboration between the director and the musician. Sadly, it would also mark the last. Robertson died in August 2023, after the film had screened at Cannes but before it was released in theaters. The film is dedicated to his memory.

Scorsese met with members of the Osage tribe while putting the film together, which evidently changed his vision for the film quite a bit. This is speculation, but Grann’s book is more focused on the formation of the Bureau of Investigation and its role in solving the Osage murders than the movie is. On that front, originally, DiCaprio was going to play Thomas White, the primary BOI agent in the movie. Before filming began, DiCaprio asked to play Ernest Burkhart instead. Jesse Plemons ended up getting the part of White.

With COVID wreaking havoc on productions and her career at a standstill, Gladstone was all set to begin a data analytics course and possibly change careers. Then, she received an email about a Zoom meeting with Scorsese for the film. She was cast as Mollie, and the rest is history. Might still be worth it to learn about data analytics, though. You never know when it’ll come in handy.

You can find several musical artists in Killers of the Flower Moon . Sure, maybe it isn’t surprising that Jack White and Pete Yorn have small cameo roles. Sturgill Simpson has a slightly larger role as Henry Grammer. The true surprise was seeing Jason Isbell, with effectively no acting on his resume, playing a supporting role as Bill Smith. Also, he’s really good!

Paramount was originally the studio attached to help produce and distribute Killers of the Flower Moon, but COVID delays and Scorsese’s way of working saw the budget balloon to $200 million. Paramount was ready to back out, so the director went to Netflix and Apple TV+ to try and secure some financing and distribution. In the end, Apple TV+ stepped in to help produce and distribute the movie, with Paramount staying on board as a co-distributor.

Scorsese and company went down to Osage County to film Killers of the Flower Moon while filming in nearby Washington County. Additionally, many locals were hired to serve on the crew and in the cast.

While Scorsese shot the bulk of the film in Oklahoma, you can’t keep the man away from New York for too long. The radio play scene, in which Scorsese appears as an actor, was shot at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, the director’s alma mater.

Mollie was a decade older than Ernest in real life, while Gladstone is 12 years younger than DiCaprio. Of course, Scorsese’s creative license when it comes to casting his compatriot De Niro was a bit more extreme. Hale was 45 when the murders began, as opposed to the octogenarian De Niro.

DiCaprio wasn’t interested in sticking to his original character, or apparently to the script. He was ad-libbing and improvising quite often, much to the consternation of Scorsese and, particularly, De Niro. “Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit,” Scorsese told The Telegraph.

During filming but away from set, De Niro injured his quadriceps muscle. It was bad enough that he had to return to New York City to seek medical attention. Fortunately for a production that had already suffered delays, Scorsese was able to shoot around De Niro’s injury. No production delay occurred.

Extensive standing ovations are kind of de rigeur at Cannes, but even by those standards, Killers of the Flower Moon was a success. After its debut screening, the film received a nine-minute standing ovation. The United States premiere was slightly subdued, as it happened during the SAG-AFTRA strike, so none of the cast was there. However, the early buzz did lead to a change. Originally, the movie was going to have a limited release before hitting Apple TV+, but instead, it was given a full-scale, global theatrical run.

Killers of the Flower Moon runs for a robust 206 minutes, nearly two-and-a-half hours. While Scorsese did not include an intermission, several theaters worldwide decided to insert one. This aggravated the director, with good reason, and the studios. Paramount and Apple took steps to stop theaters from doing this, as it was in violation of the contract between the studios and the theaters.

A contemplative, R-rated drama running over three hours was never going to be a blockbuster. With a budget of $200 million, Killers of the Flower Moon had no chance of breaking even, especially when marketing costs were added into the mix. However, the film was a success. It made $156.2 million worldwide, and the point of producing a film like this for Apple TV+ is to get it on its streaming service and also for the prestige of having a Scorsese film to your name.

Critic groups around the United States have already been dishing out awards to Killers of the Flower Moon. It has won some Best Picture awards. It has also received seven nominations from the Golden Globes and a whopping 12 from the Critics’ Choice Awards. Alas, when the Oscars rolled around, Killers of the Flower Moon joined a prestigious club that nobody wants to be a part of. It got 10 nominations but won zero. Not even Gladstone, who lost Best Actress to Emma Stone.