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FEATURE
director, who also co-wrote the film, deemed the story one of “pure greed and exploitation that played out on an epic canvas.” “I started to see the whole picture as I was reading the book,” Scorsese told journalists during a recent virtual Q&A. “I was drawn to the people, to the world they inhabited, to the thin line between friendship and love on one hand, and extortion and
murder on the other.”
While filming his previous picture, The Irishman, Scorsese
began working on the script with screenwriter Eric Roth. The story centres around a romance between First World War veter- an Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman. When members of Kyle’s family start mysteriously dying, suspicion falls on Ernest’s sly,
ambitious uncle, Bill Hale (Robert De Niro) — and lawman Tom White (Jesse Plemons) is brought in to uncover how complicit Burkhart is in the killings.
“What I wanted to capture,” Scorsese says, “ultimately, was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of a kind of easygoing genocide, and that’s why we went with the story of Mollie and Ernest, because that’s the basis of the love. Love is the basis of trust. So, when there’s betrayal that way, that deep, that was the way into our story.”
Scorsese says that he’s always been drawn to these themes, keen to explore the humanity of characters alongside their cor- ruption and violence. We’ve seen it before, from the switching allegiances of Henry Hill in Goodfellas to Jordan Belfort’s myriad
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