Producer Daniel Lupi had worked with Paul Thomas Anderson and Spielberg, but until Killers of the Flower Moon, he had never collaborated with Scorsese.

So when he got the call to come on board, it was a no-brainer. “How could you say no to Scorsese?” he says. “He’s Martin Scorsese. Paul Thomas Anderson would probably say the same thing. Some of the shots in Boogie Nights were inspired by Goodfellas.”

The script for the adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book had already been rewritten to focus on the relationship between Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, an Osage woman, and DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart amid the genocide that Ernest participated in which targeted Mollie’s family.

With the updated script, Lupi helped get the production to Oklahoma, where he oversaw a crew that wanted to get the story right.

I can’t imagine the film, the other version actually, just because we were so embedded with Mollie and Ernest, and their life. And so when I became involved, a lot of work had happened on the project. There were good relationships with Chief Standing Bear, who was the chief at that time. The marching orders were: Get to Oklahoma and figure a plan out. We also made a change in production designer. Originally it was Dante Ferretti, and then that changed to Jack Fisk for different reasons. Jack had done There Will Be Blood with me and had done a bunch of PTA movies, costume, there were some changes there, and we ended up with Jacqueline West. And then the AD, Adam Somner, who had done Wolf of Wall Street, but also done all the PTA movies and Spielberg movies with me. Basically [we] just seemed to get the right team in place to try to pull it off.

Making it happen in Oklahoma? 

We scouted Oklahoma. We went with Jack Fisk, and Jack is so forensic. Jack goes and looks at the death records of all the people involved, and looks at the land registries. Jack was pulling it way back more into what really happened. We shot the film in Pawhuska, which is the main city of the Osage nation. But the film takes place in Fairfax, which is near Gray Horse, which is further into the Osage lands. But we ended up in Shouns’ office, where the doctors were — we shot in the real [location]. The scene where we go into the [Masonic Lodge], that office is next door to the Shouns’ office. On the walls, it has all these photographs, which go back to the ’20s. And Pitts Beaty, who’s the guy [in the scene] where you meet Mollie, his picture was on the wall. The Masons had not changed since 1920. Where we blew the house up, I think it was like a street away from where the original one happened, and we found someone who kindly let us blow … We didn’t blow their house up, they let us make it seem like [we did]. And then we gave them an empty lot because they were looking to build a new house. Mollie’s house, again, was close to where she lived, so we found a great period house.

It was a bit like on Lincoln, with Daniel Day-Lewis, we shot it in Richmond. Everyone wanted us to shoot it in Canada or in a tax rebate. But we grounded it where the film took place, and you can’t beat that. From a crew point of view, it was quite emotional. Because also on set, we had linguists, people from costume,  lots of Osage with us every day. Obviously to them, this was hard story to tell. The first day of shooting I remember a chief and elders came out to  pray. You always felt like you were making their story.

Impact of having Osage consultants on set? 

Marty was incredibly detail-oriented. Julia O’Keefe was our Osage costume consultant. There’re various ways you can wear blanket and depending on how you wear it there are different occasions. When you see De Niro speaking Osage, I didn’t realize he’d learned it so well–he really got into it. We borrowed artifacts from various people who had ceremonial outfits or costumes.

Script was “living organism”?

We were shooting in order, within reason, so all the sets actually were standing the whole movie. For instance, that’s why you see all the seasonal changes in Mollie’s house. There was financial impact. We had miles of cable, which lit Mollie’s house, all buried under the ground. And so leaving it down for 20 weeks, normally you tend to shoot a location you move on.

To put this film in perspective, the oil derrick where one of the Osage gets killed and you see the guys drilling? That oil well, we shot for 2 days. On There Will Be Blood, that was the centerpiece of the whole movie. So literally, we built the same thing for two-day shoot, which on There Will Be Blood, we shot for a 10-week shoot. Oklahoma was amazing. Everyone lent us things, and borrowed, and rented. Bringing the steam train in was a big deal. We laid the tracks, we brought the train. To rent that and lay the track is like $1 million.

The black and white footage at the beginning, Marty wanted to do this kind of newsreel footage. Cinematographer and director Ellen Kuras, who’s worked with Marty in the past, came in and borrowed Marty’s hand-crank camera. We shot all that footage in black and white with a hand-crank camera.

His recall of cinema history is second. You’ll be talking about how we’ve got a problem and we have to solve that, and maybe we have to talk to the studio, and then he’ll be going on about the studio, and you’ll realize he’s actually talking about Raging Bull.

Knowing the importance of the story?

It certainly made the cast and crew push on. It helped focus people on what was important. We were just trying to show the most authentic film.