Robert DeNiro has joined Leonardo DiCaprio in the cast for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have enjoyed quite the impressive run as a movie actor-director pairing, with four of their five collaborations so far having been nominated (and, in the case of The Departed, having also won) for Best Picture at the Oscars. Their films have all been commercial hits too, with 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street bringing in $392 million at the global box office alone.
Needless to say, film buffs are curious about their next feature together, Killers of the Flower Moon. Adapted from the non-fiction book by David Grann (The Lost City of Z), the project is a crime drama about the FBI's investigation of a string of murders on the Osage Indian tribe's territory in Oklahoma during the 1920s (a case that's now known as the FBI's first-ever homicide investigation). As it turns out, DiCaprio isn't the only "Scorsese muse" who's starring in the movie, either.
The Osage Nation's Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has informed Tulsa World that Scorsese's other longtime leading man, Robert DeNiro, will costar in Killers of the Flower Moon as cattleman William Hale (an important character in the story). Standing Bear further confirmed that the movie will be shot on-location in Osage County, and that Scorsese and his production team are working closely with the Osage Nation to ensure that the film's portrayal of the tribe's 1920s culture is as accurate as possible. At the moment, production is expected to begin in early spring 2020 (with Paramount backing).
DeNiro and Scorsese have, of course, already worked together multiple times (even more than DiCaprio and Scorsese so far) over their fifty years-plus careers, going back to their collaborations on the '70s classics Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. More recently, they reunited for Netflix's true story-inspired hitman drama The Irishman. That film is expected to be an awards contender when it premieres this fall and will actually mark the actor-director pair's first collaboration since 1995's Casino. It's not the only potential Oscar contender that DeNiro's got in the pipeline for 2019 either, thanks to his supporting role in Todd Phillips' much buzzed-about Joker movie (which will open in theaters this October).
Killers of the Flower Moon itself sounds like an interesting addition to both DeNiro and DiCaprio's larger bodies of work. The actors and Scorsese have long explored the dark and violent truth behind U.S. history on the big screen, be it through their films together or separately (see also: DiCaprio's previous collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu on The Revenant), and Flower Moon offers them a similar opportunity to examine the ugly reality behind U.S. expansionism into the Midwest. Hopefully, by working closely with the Osage Nation, the trio will be able to deliver a period piece that also does right by its Native American characters, and avoids exploiting their suffering in service of Killers of the Flower Moon's narrative.
Source: Tulsa World