There’s no doubt that the Leonardo DiCaprio-Martin Scorsese partnership is one of the most fruitful in recent Hollywood history. While they haven’t reached the pinnacle at the Oscars yet – the Academy seems to have an odd aversion to Scorsese for some reason – their impressive box office numbers and critical acclaim set them apart from most duos in the industry today.
Their collaboration has reached a point where, for their upcoming film, the highly anticipated “Killers of the Flower Moon,” DiCaprio himself had parts of the script changed to enhance both the story and his character’s journey. Surprisingly, the director welcomed the changes, and in the end, it turned out to be something fruitful for the movie.
A new opportunity to reach the top at the Oscars
This is how Scorsese himself explained it in an interview for The Irish Times: “After two years 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.’ We believed that the true story didn’t necessarily come from outside, from the office, but from within, from Oklahoma.”
Apparently, initially, the script focused on the FBI agents’ perspective as they went there to investigate. However, Leo was clear that the perspective had to change to make a different movie, and undoubtedly, this motivated the final changes. However, Scorsese has also stated that they didn’t always accept all the actor’s changes: apparently, he made many improvisations during filming, and in some of them, they had to rein him in. “You don’t need that dialogue,” Scorsese would tell the good old DiCaprio on some occasions, always backed up by his good friend Robert De Niro.
