Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have one of the most artistically and commercially successful partnerships in Hollywood. Killers of the Flower Moon marks their sixth collaboration. But they have different memories of how their relationship began.
“Martin Scorsese and I first met in the early ’90s, of course, in the East Village of New York,” DiCaprio says in the foreword to the new book. Martin Scorsese: The Journey. “I was only 18 years old and (1993) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape just came out. Marty was rushing out of an event when I walked in.”
DiCaprio says he found out Taxi driver And Good guys director immediately, “but I had no reason to believe that he even knew who I was.”
But Scorsese recognized him, writes DiCaprio. He says Scorsese told him, “Hey kid, you did an amazing job in this picture, I hope we work together one day.”
DiCaprio adds in the foreword: “I was stunned.”
DiCaprio has long admired Scorsese because when he wanted to make films, his father, he writes, assigned him to watch films by Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Killers of the Flower Moon this is the first time DiCaprio has worked with both, and the 10th collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro, who first worked together on the 1973 film. Mean Streets.
DiCaprio first worked with Scorsese in 2002. Gangs of New Yorkand with De Niro in 1993 This boy’s life. In this film, De Niro played DiCaprio’s stepfather. IN Killers of the Flower MoonTheir first collaboration since then, De Niro plays a different kind of father.
Martin Scorsese on the first time he met Leonardo DiCaprio
IN Martin Scorsese: The JourneyA few pages after DiCaprio recalls his first meeting with Scorsese, Scorsese offers another version.
“A few years ago De Niro called me when they This boy’s life in 1993. He said: “This young guy is very good. You’ll have to work with him someday.” But I only met Leo in 1999 when he came to the set. Bringing out the dead. Now we’ve been working together for twenty years,” Scorsese is quoted as saying.
Which version is correct? Here we have to agree with Leonardo DiCaprio: no young actor is likely to forget a compliment from Martin Scorsese.
Martin Scorsese: The Journey, out later this month, is written by Mary Pat Kelly, who has known Scorsese since she began exchanging letters with him when she was a nun living at St. Mary of the Woods College in Indiana. She was writing her thesis and asked to borrow his short film It’s Not All About You, Murray, to compare with James Joyce’s short story Grace.
They soon learned that they shared a passion for Catholicism and spirituality—Scorsese spent a year in seminary before becoming a director. And, as Kelly notes in Martin Scorsese: The Journeythe director continued to explore faith and salvation in many of his films, starting with Mean Streets To The Last Temptation of Christ To Silence To Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese talks in detail about the new film in the new film, and although Killers of the Flower Moon While some will see it as a departure from his previous work – especially if they mostly associate him with mob dramas – it will seem part of the way to proponents like Kelly, who have focused on the deeper themes of his films from the start.
The film, based on David Grann’s 2017 bestselling non-fiction book, tells the true story of an insidious plot to steal the wealth of the Osage Nation after the Native American tribe became rich from oil. DiCaprio, the film’s executive producer, acquired the rights before pitching the project to Scorsese.
Killers of the Flower Moon hits theaters Friday from Apple.
Martin Scorsese: The Journeyfrom Hachette Book Group, out October 25. The details above are available in a free preview available on Kindle.
Main image: Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival at the Arlington Theater on February 6, 2014 in Santa Barbara, California, courtesy of Shutterstock.