Robert De Niro has high praise for his latest collaboration with Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower of the Moon, calling it an “absolute masterpiece” during a sit-down with The Messenger.
“God bless him,” De Niro, 79, said of the Oscar-winning director while promoting the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, which kicks off next week.
Killers of the Flower Moon made a major impact when it premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival, receiving a lengthy nine-minute standing ovation from the audience.
The film is an adaptation of David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Published in 2017, the book tells the true story of a series of murders targeting members of the Osage Nation, who became wealthy in the early 20th century when large oil deposits were found on their land in Oklahoma.
Scorsese co-wrote the screenplay adaption with Eric Roth, with the duo reportedly shifting the focus of the story more on the people of the Osage Nation and less on how the crimes against them led to the formation of the FBI, which is explored in Grann’s book.
Jim Gray, a direct descendent of one of the Osage characters depicted in the film, wrote on Twitter that he has seen the movie, and despite “legitimate concerns that the movie industry might miss the point of the story,” Scorsese told the tale with “dignity and care for the Osage perspective [that] was genuine and honest throughout the process,” adding that “the Osage responded with the kind of passion and enthusiasm that met this historic moment.”
The three-hour-plus epic, which stars De Niro alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and Lily Gladstone, opens in select cities on Oct. 6 before expanding on Oct. 20.
