Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese’s sixth collaboration will begin filming in Summer 2019.
Killers of the Flower Moon will be an adaptation of the non-fiction novel of the same name by David Grann, which looks into the murders of Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the earlier 1920s, after oil was found beneath their land.
It will be the sixth time that the duo have worked together, after the epic period drama Gangs of New York (2002), pilot biopic The Aviator (2004), mob drama The Departed (2006), psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010) and black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). It’s clearly a pairing that works well, with DiCaprio scooping Oscar nominations for The Aviator and The Wolf of Wall Street and Scorsese earning his first Best Director accolade for The Departed.
Filming is expected to begin next year, after Scorsese wraps up on forthcoming drama The Irishman and DiCaprio finishes work on Tarantino’s Once Upon On A Time in Hollywood. Eric Roth, who previously worked on Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and A Star Is Born, will pen the script.
Scorsese’s last film and “long-term passion project,” Silence, was a 2.5 hour-long religious epic that favoured directorial self-indulgence over anything flashily Hollywood-esque, and so it will be interesting to see which route Killers of the Flower Moon will take. Either way, the online reaction to the news has been nothing but seismic.