The master director has proven more than once in his filmography that Martin Scorsese likes to go far in his films and develop stories well into the third hour. On the contrary, there is hardly a film among Scorsese’s works that has a conventional running time of 90 to 120 minutes. But that shouldn’t bother us as long as he gives us great epics and unique cinematic experiences that are rare these days.
His latest film “Killers of the flower moon‘ is no exception, which will hit theaters on October 19, 2023 and is absolutely worth seeing despite – or because of – its incredible 207-minute running time. We could see that this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film celebrated its premiere. FILMSTARTS editor-in-chief Christoph Petersen gave it almost the highest score with 4.5 out of 5 possible stars.
The question is whether an even longer running time would have benefited the film. That’s what Martin Scorsese thought when he worked with Eric Roth on the screenplay for the true crime thriller. Like the maestro in an interview with explained, An earlier version of the script was said to have exceeded 200 pages.
And while an old filmmaker’s rule is that one page of the script should be incorporated into approximately one minute of film running time, this is not always the case, especially with more complex works. It is said that it took four and a half hours to read the original script:
The new “Killers Of The Flower Moon” script was created thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio
So Scorsese finally decided to rewrite the entire script. Because this first version told a completely different perspective than what we now see in ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’. The film should be much more closely based on David Grann’s book and thus take the FBI’s point of view. Leonardo DiCaprio was actually intended for the role of FBI agent Tom White, who tries to solve murder cases in Osage country. However, according to Scorsese, the answer to that would have been quite clear – and so the whole script ultimately stopped working.
In fact, it was Leonardo DiCaprio who made Scorsese change the perspective of the story, as the director recently shared revealed: “After two years of writing the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ And I had meetings and dinners with the Osage and thought, ‘Well, here’s the story.’ We felt like the real story wasn’t coming from the outside, at the FBI, but from within, from Oaklahoma.”
Now ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ tells the Osage murders through the eyes of war veteran Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), who becomes entangled in his uncle’s (Robert De Niro) plan to steal the wealth of their Osage oil country. He falls in love with the Osage Molly (Lily Gladstone). FBI agent Tom White is now played by Jesse Plemons and only has a supporting role.