Killers of the Flower Moon: Paul Schrader says DiCaprio should have played the cop and not the idiot

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

Paul Schrader, the writer behind Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Bringing Out the Dead, has something he’d like to get off his chest about Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Speaking with France’s Le Monde, Schrader says he would have approached the lengthy epic differently, especially regarding casting. While Schrader thinks Killers of the Flower Moon is a “good movie,” he thinks Leonardo DiCaprio should have played the FBI agent investigating the Osage murders. This part eventually went to Jesse Plemons.

“Marty compares me to a Flemish miniaturist. He would be more the type who paints Renaissance frescoes,” Schrader said. “Give him $200 million, a good film will inevitably come out of it. That said, I would have preferred Leonardo DiCaprio to play the role of the cop in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ rather than the role of the idiot. Spending three-and-a-half hours in the company of an idiot is a long time.”

When Scorsese began work for Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio would have played FBI agent Tom White. Scorsese spent two years working on a script that presents the story from White’s perspective. However, after DiCaprio read the script, he asked Scorsese to switch gears and cast him as Ernest Burkhart instead.

“Myself and [my co-screenwriter] Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese Scorsese told The Irish Times. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”

It’s not unheard of for a lead actor to change roles partway into a film’s development, though shifting DiCaprio’s role for Flower Moon impacted Scorsese’s story profoundly. Speaking with British Vogue, DiCaprio told the outlet about how a small scene shared between Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest helped change the story’s perspective.

“It just didn’t feel like it got to the heart of it,” DiCaprio told British Vogue about his impression of the first script. “We weren’t immersed in the Osage story. There was this tiny, small scene between Mollie and Ernest that provoked such emotion in us at the reading, and we just started to penetrate into what that relationship was, because it was so twisted and bizarre and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”

Scorsese’s changing of the story speaks volumes about how much he respects DiCaprio’s opinion and how the actor has a trained eye for what audiences find engaging.

What do you think about Scorsese changing DiCaprio’s role in Killers of the Flower Moon? Would you like to read the original script to see how different the story could have been? Let us know in the comments below.