For Martin Scorsese, focusing on Tom White was structurally trite. Why encroach upon the procedural genre when there are so many good ones on television, the director posited to Deadline. It’s also well worn territory, given the Western genre’s fiction on the white male hero.
It was DiCaprio who suggested focusing on the morally complex Ernest and his marriage to Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman. “The love story [changed everything],” Scorsese admitted. “I said, ‘How do we do the love story?’ We couldn’t figure it out. And then Leo said, ‘What if I play Ernest?'”
Moreover, Ernest — with his relative anonymity compared to Hale or White — offered more space for Scorsese and Roth to imagine new narrative possibilities. “I realized, because there is the least amount of research on Ernest, that we could do anything,” Scorsese continued. “If we did that, we’d take the script and turn it inside out, make it from the ground level out, rather than coming in from the outside. I said, “Let’s put ourselves in the mindset of the people who did this.”
Of course, Tom White is still a major presence in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” just in a different capacity, and with a different actor to boot; Jesse Plemons joined the cast to replace DiCaprio in the role.