Oscar winner Martin (“The Departed”) Scorsese, the Killers of the Flower Moon crew and several members of the Osage Nation were in New York City to celebrate the premiere of the Apple film.

“It’s a terrific story, and it’s the kind of thing I think that was a time to try to deal with the subject matter,” Scorsese said. “When we started to make the film, the climate wasn’t the same as it is now. I think we were just lucky in the sense that it’s being released at this time.”

The Oscar-winning director continued, “The thing is that there are certain things about our history, about ourselves as human beings, that if we hide them away, they’re not gonna go away. We might as well talk about it and try to show it.”

Greed and Dehumanization

For the author, the story is about reckoning with part of the past that has been erased for far too long. “It is fundamentally about what happens when greed is fused together with dehumanization of another people, and what that can lead to, and what it led to in this case was genocidal crimes,” he said.

The author visited the Osage Nation Museum in 2012 and noticed a photo on the wall of members of the Osage Nation alongside white settlers, but a portion was missing. When he asked then-museum director Kathryn Red Corn what happened to the other part of the photo, she told him that it contained a figure so frightening that she decided to remove it.

Bringing Part of Forgotten History to Light

“She said the devil was standing right there,” Grann said. “I was always haunted by that because the Osage had removed that photograph not to forget what had happened but because they can’t forget. And yet so many people, including myself, we’d never learned about this history. … This film will help bring part of that history to light and start to fill in some of that blankness.”

Fierce Dedication to the Story

Addie Roanhorse was one of many Osage consultants on set. She explained that every day during production there was something new to consult on; whether it was clothing, food or performing certain ceremonies, Scorsese and his team made sure to discuss everything.

She remembered when the book first came out, people visited the museum to see some of the tribe’s black-and-white photos. She was working with Chief Standing Bear at the time and asked why people were taking black and white photos when the tribe’s colorful blankets are a huge part of their culture.

Scorsese Following Protocol to the Tee

“When Marty came in, he followed protocol to the tee, and it was like we almost instantly just like, ‘Yeah, he’s one of us,’” she noted.

Osage clothing consultant Julie O’Keefe echoed Roanhorse’s sentiment, sharing that the film’s production felt like “community project,” with everyone on set doing all they could to ensure its authenticity.

“It was an opportunity to be able to show within our clothing, how we authentically present ourselves, which doesn’t happen a lot for natives out there,” she said. “And our story is one that has a lot of tragedy and tryouts, and for every event that goes on in our life, we have different blankets and different ways that we dress for those events.”

“He looks so much like him, and for our stories, I mean, he would have been the devil in the nightmare,” she said. “And so he walked out, and everyone was just blown away.”