Martin Scorsese's frequent collaborator has one big regret over the director's latest film, wishing the 'Titanic' actor didn't take on the 'Idiot' role in the movie.
- Jan 1, 2024
AceShowbiz - Leonardo DiCaprio should have portrayed the detective instead of the "idiot" in "Killers of the Flower Moon", screenwriter Paul Schrader has said.
Paul, 77, penned Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull", and declared if he had worked with the director on his epic about the slaughter of Osage Native Americans in the 1920s, he would have cast DiCaprio differently.
"Marty compares me to a Flemish miniaturist. He would be more the type who paints Renaissance frescoes. Give him $200 million, a good film will inevitably come out of it," he told France's Le Monde.
"That said, I would have preferred Leonardo DiCaprio to play the role of the cop in 'Killers of the Flower Moon' rather than the role of the idiot. Spending three-and-a-half hours in the company of an idiot is a long time."
Scorsese, 81, originally intended for DiCaprio, 49, to play investigator Tom White in "Killers" instead of Ernest Burkhart, who conspires with Robert De Niro's villainous town leader to slaughter Osage members for rights to their oil. The part of the FBI detective went to 35-year-old Jesse Plemons.
Scorsese has told The Irish Times it was DiCaprio who personally called him requesting a script change and a change in his part. He said, "Myself and (my co-screenwriter) Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate."
"After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, 'Where is the heart of this story?' I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, 'Well, there's the story.' The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma."
DiCaprio's real-life character Ernest Burkhart was a World War I veteran who got pulled into his uncle's greedy plot to rob the Osage Nation of its wealth, with his loyalty was tested once he married a wealthy Osage woman named Mollie (played by Lily Gladstone), who he helps to slowly poison.
Scorsese told Time magazine while writing the original "Killers" script he realised he was "was making a movie about all the white guys… meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me."
