In Cannes, Scorsese and DiCaprio turn spotlight toward Osage Nation

JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer

CANNES, France — It was well into the process of making “Killers of the Flower Moon” that Martin Scorsese realized it wasn’t a detective story.

Scorsese, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and screenwriter Eric Roth had many potential avenues in adapting David Grann’s expansive nonfiction history, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” The film that Scorsese and company premiered Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, however, wasn’t like the one they initially set out to make.

The film, which will open in theaters in October, chronicles the series of killings that took place throughout the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. The Osage were then enormously rich from oil on their land, and many white barons and gangsters alike sought to control and steal their money. Dozens of Osage Native Americans were killed before the FBI, in its infancy, began to investigate.

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DiCaprio had originally been cast to star as FBI agent Tom White. But after mulling the project over, Scorsese decided to pivot.

“I said, ‘I think the audience is ahead of us,” Scorsese told reporters in Cannes

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