Legendary film director Martin Scorsese visits GQ to break down his most iconic films, including 'Taxi Driver,' 'Gangs of New York,' 'Goodfellas,' 'The Departed,' 'Raging Bull,' 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' 'Mean Streets,' 'The Irishman,' 'Silence,' and his newest offering 'Killers of the Flower Moon.'Apple Original Films will release Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters globally on October 20, in partnership with Paramount Pictures.
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00:00 [upbeat music]
00:02 Taxi Driver.
00:06 - Wait, who the hell else are you talking to?
00:08 You talking to me?
00:09 - It really goes back to Brian De Palma.
00:10 His independent cinema in Hollywood started saying,
00:13 hey, maybe these indie films could,
00:15 these kids could work in the industry.
00:16 And so we were all out in LA
00:17 and he introduced me to Paul Schrader.
00:19 Schrader wrote Taxi Driver.
00:21 Travis comes from his vision, but more psyche.
00:24 I connected with it through Dostoevsky's
00:27 Notes from Underground.
00:28 It was like enlightening, you know?
00:30 And so for me, when I read the script,
00:33 Brian gave it to me.
00:34 He said, you know, I can't, I don't want to do it.
00:36 I can't do it, but maybe you should do it.
00:38 But I didn't have enough cache, as they say,
00:40 at that time to make the picture.
00:43 But then they saw the rough cut of Mean Streets
00:45 and they changed their mind,
00:47 especially when they saw De Niro in it.
00:49 And so they said, for the two of you,
00:51 we could probably get this film made.
00:53 - Why won't you talk to me?
00:54 Why don't you answer my calls when I call you?
00:56 You think I don't know you're here?
00:57 - We kept thinking in terms of the character
01:00 and his loneliness and his acting out.
01:03 Not condoning the acting out, but he does act out.
01:06 And yet, an empathy with him, which is really tricky.
01:09 We wanted to make it so badly, nobody would make it,
01:11 that we were thinking of going to different cities
01:12 to make it, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
01:14 The taxi driving wasn't the same.
01:17 And we said, no, it has to be Manhattan.
01:19 Ultimately, what stayed with us was the psychological
01:22 and emotional state of that character.
01:24 As we know now, tragically, it's a norm.
01:28 Every other person is like Travis Bickle now.
01:30 For me, the visualization of the movie
01:32 was to always try to keep you off balance,
01:35 keep the audience off balance.
01:37 I felt that when he made that phone call,
01:39 it was so painful, we shouldn't witness it.
01:41 So the camera should track away, but not pan away.
01:45 It should move completely to a hallway.
01:48 And in the hallway, you think somebody's coming,
01:49 but nobody's gonna come.
01:51 Nothing's gonna happen.
01:53 We're all alone.
01:54 But we don't want to experience the depth of his pain
01:58 at that point.
01:59 And at the same time, there's a sense of anxiety
02:04 on the viewer.
02:05 What's gonna happen in the hallway?
02:07 Well, apparently nothing.
02:09 That was the first shot I came up with.
02:10 So that's the style.
02:11 There's another thing, too, where the taxi pulls up
02:14 at the beginning of the film into the taxi garage.
02:16 Taxi is coming in, we're panning with it as it comes in.
02:20 And normally, it goes this way,
02:21 and the camera would pan with it,
02:22 and it stops.
02:24 Well, as it came in, I went the other way.
02:27 And as we rested, the car came in and stopped.
02:29 Wait, I'm supposed to be looking at the car.
02:31 No, we're gonna go another way.
02:32 And so every shot, as much as possible,
02:35 was designed to be slightly disconcerting,
02:40 but ultimately, ultimately satisfying.
02:44 That was the philosophy of the shooting.
02:46 (upbeat music)
02:49 Gangs of New York.
02:50 Us natives born right-wise to this fine land,
02:55 or the foreign hordes defiling it.
02:59 (glass shattering)
03:00 Well, Gangs of New York comes out
03:01 of those cobblestone streets around the church
03:04 on Mott Street and Mulberry Street,
03:05 and also coming off the other element
03:07 that I grew up with, really, was the Bowery.
03:09 At that time, the Bowery was what you call now homeless.
03:12 At that time, really, basically, alcoholics,
03:13 guys dying in the streets, basically.
03:15 Very, very difficult place to grow up around and in.
03:18 And so, but there was something about that Bowery,
03:21 and something about the neighborhood,
03:23 and the way the buildings were created,
03:26 and the cellars, the cellars, there's so many cellars.
03:30 And my father would talk about growing up there,
03:32 and going into one building, going down the cellar,
03:34 and coming out two blocks away,
03:36 running away from the cops, some of the guys.
03:38 It had its own life, it was like an organism,
03:41 and it had a history.
03:42 - Well, then we got business.
03:44 - What do we do?
03:47 - What Leo DiCaprio was interesting,
03:49 because De Niro, we were acquainted with each other
03:51 when we were 16 years old.
03:52 So, because of my relationship with him,
03:54 going back to when we were 16,
03:56 he experienced what I experienced growing up.
04:00 So, he's the only one I know around,
04:02 who's around that, and who's working in that capacity,
04:05 that knows who I am, where I came from,
04:07 and the world we were in.
04:08 He then called me and said, at one point,
04:10 he just made a film called "This Boy's Life,"
04:12 and he was working with this kid that he cast,
04:15 named Leo DiCaprio.
04:16 So, he's very good, you gotta work with him someday.
04:18 And Bob never really used to tell me that,
04:19 work with somebody, you know,
04:21 just we'd go from picture to picture if we worked together.
04:24 DiCaprio liked our pictures, came together,
04:27 and they said, "Why don't we,
04:28 "you've always wanted to do 'Gangs of New York,'
04:30 "but we started it many times, it got canceled.
04:33 "Here's a chance, this kid Leo DiCaprio
04:35 "really likes your films, at least meet with him."
04:38 And he was willing to go whatever I could do
04:41 to make that film.
04:42 So, that's how it all started,
04:44 with him coming off of "Titanic" and a couple of other films.
04:47 Then we convinced Daniel Day to get into it
04:50 as Bill the Butcher.
04:52 And Daniel Day's a very intense and very specific actor.
04:56 And what I love about working with him
04:58 is that Daniel has a thing where,
05:00 if he starts, he stays in that character.
05:02 People think it's kind of a mystique,
05:04 but it really makes sense.
05:06 And also, 'cause if I'm talking to Bill the Butcher,
05:08 and in between takes, it's Daniel,
05:11 I'm still talking to Bill.
05:13 He stays in that character,
05:15 and he'll be one of the other actors, Irish,
05:17 and he's not supposed to like the Irish.
05:18 And he treats that person that way.
05:21 - I don't give a dumpany fuck about your moral conundrum,
05:24 you meat-headed shit sack.
05:26 - They said, "Why is he?"
05:26 I said, "That's what that is, just, we're not playing.
05:30 "I mean, we're playing, but we're living it."
05:33 (laughs)
05:34 And so, he's very good that way.
05:36 DiCaprio's another way entirely.
05:38 And he comes at a character from every possible angle,
05:42 and we find that with Leo,
05:44 most of the work is done before we shoot.
05:47 (upbeat music)
05:50 Goodfellas.
05:51 - As far back as I can remember,
05:56 I always wanted to be a gangster.
05:58 - Goodfellas was made 18 years after Mean Streets.
06:01 I didn't really wanna go to do another genre,
06:04 gangster genre, right?
06:05 I mean, there is no main character.
06:07 I mean, Ray Liotta is a wonderful actor,
06:10 but he's like Virgil taking Dante through the underworld.
06:13 The real character in the movie is the underworld.
06:16 After doing the film, Last Temptation of Christ,
06:18 when I got back, I owed Warner Brothers Goodfellas,
06:21 or became Goodfellas, it was called Wise Guys at the time.
06:23 I didn't really, almost didn't wanna make it.
06:25 It was Michael Powell, the director of the Red Shoes,
06:28 co-director, I should say, and other masterpieces
06:30 who read the script and insisted I make it.
06:33 Every shot may feel like a documentary,
06:36 but the camera moves, everything you see,
06:38 it's all, clearly, it's all there in the script.
06:41 We had to stage bits of action,
06:43 Joe Reidy did and Michael Ballhouse, my cameraman,
06:46 they worked out all the background action
06:48 for the long Copacabana shot.
06:50 All I said was, we start out in the front,
06:52 he gives the guy the money,
06:53 next thing you know, we go through the thing,
06:54 we go through here, we go through here,
06:55 we go through here, we go,
06:56 you know, and we wind up on the famous comic,
06:58 Henny Youngman.
06:59 Everything has to flow with no obstruction.
07:03 He's got an impressor, they send him bottles of champagne.
07:06 Everybody knows him.
07:07 That's his height, so that shot had to be.
07:10 I wanted Joe Pesci to be in the film,
07:12 and I think he resisted it.
07:14 I know he resisted it.
07:15 He said, "I don't know, gangster stuff,"
07:17 and I said, "Yeah, but Joe," I said,
07:18 "this character's really interesting,
07:20 "based on a real guy."
07:21 - You're really funny, you're really funny.
07:23 (laughing)
07:25 What do you mean I'm funny?
07:26 (laughing)
07:27 - And he said, "Well, if you do it,
07:28 "I gotta tell you something."
07:30 And I said, "Well, what is it?"
07:31 He goes, "Not here."
07:31 And he acted out this scene that happened to him.
07:34 I knew exactly where to put it.
07:35 Went through the scene over and over again,
07:37 recorded it all, each take,
07:39 and then I created it from the actor's improvisations
07:43 and tried to make sure that it accelerated the right way,
07:46 because the slightest change, you know,
07:49 of like, why am I funny?
07:50 What do you mean I'm funny?
07:51 I'm not funny.
07:52 Otherwise, it would be just repetitious.
07:53 - Funny like I'm a clown?
07:54 I amuse you?
07:55 I make you laugh?
07:57 I'm here to fucking amuse you?
07:59 What do you mean funny?
08:00 Funny how?
08:00 How am I funny?
08:01 - And I decided we'd just do it with two cameras.
08:03 We'd squeeze it in on a day that wasn't scheduled.
08:06 The two cameras would be medium wide shots,
08:09 because it was important to see,
08:11 not just, there are no close-ups.
08:12 It was important to see Joe's character
08:14 and Ray's character in relation to the people around them.
08:18 And while the intensity builds,
08:21 you see the body language of everybody around them change.
08:24 And it just happens.
08:25 And I said, "Well, that's even better."
08:27 You know, so close-ups, no.
08:28 Let's get out of here.
08:29 You know, and we shot it like in an hour and a half.
08:31 Improvised, too, with the bottle breaking
08:32 on Tony Diro's head and that sort of thing.
08:35 He had the nerve to ask to pay the bill.
08:37 (laughing)
08:39 (upbeat music)
08:42 The Departed.
08:43 - Those guys you tuned up,
08:46 they're connected down Providence.
08:49 What they're gonna do is come back with some guys
08:54 and kill you.
08:55 - I always wanted to work with Jack Nicholson
08:58 and be in a film, and I offered him the part,
09:00 and then he said, you know, "Give me something to play."
09:02 And he was right, because the way the script was,
09:04 the Bill Monahan script, which is a very good script,
09:07 but the character of Costello was still presented
09:09 as your generic big-shot gangster.
09:12 He hears this young kid in town
09:14 who just beat up somebody in a bar.
09:15 He calls him in, checks him out,
09:18 and then he says, "Come and talk to me."
09:20 'Cause he looks at him and says,
09:21 "Maybe I can use this kid."
09:22 We've seen that scene many times in westerns,
09:25 in gangster films, because it's very truthful.
09:27 That's what happens.
09:28 You could do it in business, too.
09:30 Suddenly you make a big hit with something,
09:32 and everybody calls you,
09:33 and they want to see what you can do for them.
09:35 In this case, it's the underworld.
09:37 And there was a scene where he's eating a lobster lunch,
09:39 it said, in his apartment, and he has this kid come in.
09:42 The basic line was, "What can you do for me?
09:45 "You want to work with me?
09:46 "You're a tough guy.
09:47 "What can you do for me?"
09:48 I'd seen that scene many times.
09:49 And Nicholson said, "What if," call me,
09:52 he said, "What if, while we're at lunch,
09:54 "on the table, in a little plastic bag,
09:57 "is a severed human hand?"
09:58 I said, "Now that's a job interview,
10:00 "and you never mention it.
10:01 "Don't even discuss it."
10:02 We went off on a whirlwind of the fact
10:05 that Costello would be losing control,
10:09 and in a sense, losing his mind, really.
10:12 That's something that was very controversial at the time.
10:14 Some people went with it, some didn't.
10:16 But the thing was that I was around a situation like that
10:19 when I was growing up, where somebody very powerful,
10:21 who was eventually killed in 1968,
10:24 was, in effect, losing his mind and killing people.
10:27 An atmosphere of fear that I saw around that area
10:31 that was what I wanted to capture,
10:33 and departed worse than that.
10:35 These guys were all informers on each other.
10:37 And it's true.
10:38 In a world where everyone is informing on each other now.
10:40 Complain about the guy, "Oh, he's out of his mind,
10:43 "he's overdoing."
10:44 No, imagine, that's, in effect, what it would be like.
10:49 You're completely under his control,
10:52 and he's out of his mind.
10:54 And that's what I feel the world is like right now.
10:57 (upbeat music)
11:00 Raging Bull.
11:01 - You're gonna treat me with everything you got.
11:02 I want you to fucking lay me out.
11:04 Go ahead.
11:05 - You sure? - Yeah.
11:06 - All right.
11:06 - Harder.
11:09 - The '70s studio system changed a great deal.
11:12 And the week that film was released
11:15 was the same week from the same studio
11:17 that Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate opened.
11:20 That, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now,
11:21 all from the same studio, United Artists.
11:23 That ended what the '70s, they call this,
11:26 you know, golden age, et cetera.
11:27 But really, it ended the power of the director, in a way,
11:32 in American filmmaking.
11:35 And that had to come back through independent cinema,
11:38 another way, through the '80s.
11:39 The '70s was very much that way
11:41 because things were wide open.
11:42 And we went in and we took it,
11:43 like the barbarians at the gate.
11:45 And we transformed whatever we could, but they caught us.
11:48 Raging Bull was a, we threw everything we knew into it,
11:52 not knowing how it was gonna be received.
11:55 We understood that people didn't like him.
11:58 And even the crew turned out, I didn't know 'til later,
12:01 why are we making a film about this guy?
12:02 He's a horror.
12:03 And, but we stayed with it.
12:04 This man may be this way, but still, he's a human being.
12:07 He's got a heart, he's got a soul.
12:09 By the end of it, he finds some kind of peace with himself
12:11 and maybe the others around him.
12:13 I think I was going there to try to find peace in myself.
12:15 That year, there were, I think,
12:17 four more films coming out about boxing.
12:19 The main event with Barbra Streisand,
12:22 Prizefighter with Tim Conway,
12:24 Matilda, the boxing kangaroo, and Rocky II, also.
12:27 And they were all in color.
12:29 That's when I realized that we should go black and white.
12:31 And also, the black and white would work
12:32 at distinctively different from the other boxing films
12:35 that were being made, Comedies and Rocky II.
12:38 And also, Irwin Winkle pointed out to the studio
12:40 that the films that were made in black and white
12:43 up to that point in the '70s were Paper Moon and Lenny,
12:47 and they were hits.
12:48 I also thought, too, that the boxing scenes
12:50 had to be very powerful.
12:52 The rest of the film, anything else,
12:54 was concentrated in an almost meditative state
12:57 in terms of framing, holding those people in that frame.
13:01 But the boxing scenes would be like you're on another planet.
13:04 Primarily, it was based on,
13:06 I came up with the idea when I was doing Last Waltz,
13:09 being on the stage with the band
13:11 and watching how the band worked.
13:13 The ballet sequences from Red Shoes,
13:16 where you don't really necessarily go head to toe
13:19 where you see the dancer.
13:20 Instead, you see what's inside the mind of the dancer.
13:23 What's in the mind and what's the perception
13:24 of the fighter in the ring?
13:26 They don't even know where they are sometimes.
13:28 [upbeat music]
13:30 The Wolf of Wall Street.
13:32 - They're gonna need to send in
13:33 the National Guard or fucking SWAT team,
13:36 'cause I ain't going nowhere!
13:38 [audience cheering]
13:41 - Again, like Raging Bull, I didn't wanna make it,
13:43 but I had to find my own way in it.
13:44 And a lot of it had to do with style.
13:45 The style, I felt, originally was more like Goodfellas.
13:48 I had done it.
13:49 And I did it again in Casino.
13:51 What more could I bring to it?
13:52 And we found a way, and that was ultimately
13:55 through his character and the whole idea
13:58 of untethered capitalism.
14:01 This is the spirit of it.
14:01 Anything goes because you're making money.
14:04 Doesn't matter.
14:04 And it's a little bit that way too in Casino,
14:06 but Casino has organized crime.
14:07 It's a different thing.
14:08 This is organized another way.
14:09 And so with that understanding,
14:11 then I was able to play with the structure of it
14:14 and make it right away.
14:16 First three or four minutes of the film,
14:17 you could see right away,
14:18 this is gonna be something unexpected.
14:21 Like every other shot,
14:22 something shocking going on in a way,
14:24 or supposedly shocking.
14:25 In order to do that,
14:26 you have to have somebody who's playing that part
14:29 be prepared to do anything.
14:31 And he did.
14:31 I would provoke him.
14:32 He'd provoke me.
14:33 We'd go further.
14:34 If you read the book, we could have gone even further.
14:36 (upbeat music)
14:39 Mean Streets.
14:40 - Hey, what's the matter with this kid, huh?
14:43 - Hey, there ain't nothing wrong with me, my friend.
14:45 I'm feeling fine.
14:46 Keep your mouth shut.
14:47 - You told me that in front of this asshole.
14:49 - I was living in the late '50s into the early '60s
14:53 down in my old neighborhood
14:54 of what they used to call Little Italy.
14:56 At that time, it really was Little Italy.
14:58 Families were loving,
15:00 but it was the tenements
15:02 and it was not a really good place.
15:05 And they were good people,
15:06 but at the same time,
15:07 it was steeped in a kind of organized crime.
15:09 Mean Streets comes out of that violence,
15:11 which I missed by chance, really.
15:14 - Now's the time.
15:16 - I was with these people in this car.
15:17 I told my friend who was with me in the backseat,
15:19 I said, "It's two o'clock in the morning.
15:21 "This is nonsense.
15:22 "Let's go home."
15:23 He says, "Yeah, yeah, okay, let's go home."
15:24 Car drove off and they got shot.
15:26 It had to do with a lot of street power, so to speak.
15:30 A sense of certain rules that the underworld works with.
15:33 And a lot of it had to do with,
15:34 am I my brother's keeper?
15:36 It also reflects my father and his youngest brother.
15:38 My father was one of eight children.
15:40 His youngest brother was always in jail,
15:42 always in trouble.
15:43 My father was always trying to broker situations
15:46 where he wouldn't get killed.
15:48 - Here's about $30.
15:50 It's always a God honor, Michael.
15:51 - Where's the rest?
15:55 - Yeah, where's the rest?
15:56 - The extent to which one is your real brother
15:59 or one is such a close friend
16:02 that you put yourself on the line
16:04 is something that's really important to me
16:06 in terms of how you live a life
16:08 and try to live a good moral life,
16:11 but you're in a world that is completely corrupt.
16:14 - You don't make up for your sins in church.
16:16 You do it in the streets.
16:19 You do it at home.
16:20 - And that's the essence of Mean Streets.
16:22 That's what I talk about in the beginning.
16:23 You know, you can go to church all you want,
16:25 but the real acting out of your morality
16:28 is outside the church.
16:30 It's outside the building of the church.
16:32 It's in the home.
16:33 It's with your friends and that.
16:34 All the rest is an illusion.
16:36 I was five years old in New York.
16:38 It was late 40s.
16:39 We had a television, 16 inch.
16:41 On Friday nights, there was an Italian film shown
16:44 for the Italian-American community,
16:46 and my grandparents would come over
16:48 and they didn't speak English, only Sicilian,
16:51 and my mother and father, my uncles,
16:53 and we'd get around this little TV set
16:55 and we see the bicycle thief.
16:56 They had these words in the bottom.
16:58 The people that were speaking in the film,
17:00 they were speaking the same way as my family.
17:02 Those Italian films were more than cinema.
17:06 They were a form of truth that I related to
17:11 because it somehow had something to do with who I am.
17:16 And so no matter what I shoot,
17:18 it isn't directly saying,
17:21 oh, we're gonna do a shot now from the bicycle thief.
17:24 No, it's the emotional and psychological impact
17:28 of experiencing that film when I was five or six
17:31 in the room with these people who lived it.
17:35 [upbeat music]
17:37 The Irishman.
17:38 I don't know, it sounds funny.
17:41 It stops, it starts, it loses power.
17:43 See if I can give you a hand.
17:46 Over the years, seeing the difference in the technology,
17:49 one of the key things to give us the energy
17:51 to make our first films, features,
17:53 was John Cassavetes doing shadows in 16 millimeter,
17:57 which came from France with the Éclair camera.
17:59 So all of that happening at that time
18:01 made it that we could make a film ourselves.
18:03 We didn't have to have the studio behind us
18:04 with giant lights and giant Mitchell BNCs.
18:07 I've kind of stayed pretty much traditional.
18:10 We edit now with the computer,
18:11 but I don't really know how to do that.
18:13 Thelma does it.
18:14 If I can utilize the new technology
18:17 for the kind of story I wanna make, why not go there?
18:20 And so in the case of the Irishman,
18:22 De Niro and I had this idea for a long time,
18:25 and again, I didn't wanna do another gangster genre.
18:29 Part of the problem was flashbacks.
18:32 And by the time we got to do it,
18:33 he was too old to play his younger self.
18:35 And they said, "Well, a different actor."
18:37 And I said, "Well, then it's not like us
18:38 making a film together.
18:39 What's the point?"
18:40 And so we were talking about this idea of euthification.
18:44 And Pablo Herman of ILM was with us doing CGI
18:47 or background material for us in Taiwan,
18:51 where we were doing silence.
18:52 And he came up and he said, "I think I can do it."
18:54 What I have seen is that people have to wear golf balls
18:57 on their faces.
18:58 You can't have a scene with Joe Pesci
19:00 and Bob De Niro and Al Pacino or whatever,
19:02 and they all have golf balls on their faces.
19:04 And they're the kinds of actors that,
19:06 that kind of thing for this kind of movie, it doesn't work.
19:08 And eventually, by the end of the shoot of "Silence,"
19:10 he had it.
19:12 And we did a test with Bob and De Niro, and we tried it.
19:16 And we all felt strongly about it.
19:17 The drawback was the financially,
19:20 because it was extremely expensive,
19:21 and also length of time.
19:23 It was an extra five to six months in the post-production.
19:25 That's when Netflix came in and really helped us.
19:28 It's not just CGI.
19:30 We accept it if a person puts on a fat suit,
19:34 or you paint their hair white,
19:35 or they're supposed to be old.
19:37 But what if you do it digitally?
19:39 It's like makeup.
19:40 It's just taking that leap of saying,
19:43 "Oh, no, it's gotta be, what, the old way to,
19:45 this is now a transformation into a new way."
19:48 (upbeat music)
19:51 "Silence."
19:52 (man yelling)
19:58 (man crying)
20:00 Things that happened when I was making "Last Temptation"
20:05 that took me only up to a certain point.
20:07 I found myself wanting more, and I found it in "Silence."
20:10 And when I read the book, I was in Japan, actually.
20:12 It was 1989, and I tried to write a version of the script
20:15 with my friend Jay Cox by 1990, '92,
20:19 but I didn't get it.
20:21 And it took me years, another 10, 12 years,
20:23 to live a life and experience with different exploration,
20:27 going making "Kundun," for example,
20:29 on the Dalai Lama, all of these things.
20:31 And finally, by around 2006, 2007,
20:35 I was able to put the script together.
20:36 I felt that we could do it.
20:38 Too many technical business problems,
20:40 and it almost made it impossible to get made,
20:43 but eventually it did.
20:44 Ang Lee's group helped us to shoot in Taiwan, you know.
20:48 A special experience for the entire crew making the film.
20:52 The locations, the people, the scenes themselves,
20:54 what the Japanese actors, I mean,
20:56 it was really a kind of spiritual journey.
20:59 (upbeat music)
21:02 Killers of the Flower Moon.
21:04 - Their time is over.
21:05 (man shouts)
21:07 - This has taken six years.
21:08 We didn't intend to take it six years,
21:11 but I was making "The Irishman,"
21:12 and then there was COVID.
21:13 I was given the book and read the book,
21:16 and I was very excited by that.
21:18 I didn't quite know how to go about it.
21:19 Eric Roth and I went through a process of a few years
21:23 of pulling the script together and the story,
21:25 and there was some wonderful things in it.
21:26 We got it to a point where we said,
21:27 let's sit down and read this thing.
21:29 I got some friends and we sat down,
21:30 and Leo was there, Eric was good,
21:32 but there was something about it that I felt,
21:35 we'd been there before,
21:37 and that was the idea of a police procedural.
21:40 And the character that he was supposed to play, Tom White,
21:43 was a character that is straight-laced,
21:45 you know, very strong, very proper guy.
21:47 And so we thought about it for another week and a half,
21:49 then Leo came to me, he said, "Where's the real,"
21:51 he came to me, he said, "Where's the real heart
21:53 "of this picture?"
21:53 I said, "The heart is with this guy, Ernest,
21:55 "and his wife, Molly.
21:57 "The only problem is we don't know anything about Ernest.
21:59 "Everybody else, we've got tons of material on,
22:00 "we don't know anything about him."
22:01 So we came up with the idea of what if,
22:03 instead of coming from the outside in,
22:04 what if we go from the inside out?
22:06 Then I said, "Oh yeah, the story really is
22:09 "the relationship of Ernest and Molly and the betrayal."
22:11 I said, "The only problem there is that,
22:12 "it's a creative problem, which is you take the script,
22:14 "you turn it inside out.
22:15 "And how much of procedural do you need?
22:17 "Not very much."
22:18 It started to come together,
22:19 it gave me the direction that I felt comfortable in.
22:23 The other way I've seen that kind of move
22:24 is I enjoy doing, and imagine doing,
22:26 horses and running and Western tropes,
22:28 in a way, they call it.
22:29 I would love that, but I've seen it,
22:30 and they did it so much better.
22:32 Everybody else does it better.
22:33 So here, though, you're in the house,
22:35 and there's a husband and wife,
22:36 and this guy is dodgy.
22:39 He's being manipulated by this sort of angel of death,
22:42 his uncle.
22:43 - You know, you got a nice color scheme.
22:49 What color would you say that is?
22:53 - My color.
22:55 - We had been working on the casting for quite a while,
22:57 including indigenous people.
23:00 She says, "I have somebody I want you to see."
23:02 But then I saw this scene from "Certain Women,"
23:04 Kelly Reichardt's film.
23:05 I thought she was wonderful.
23:06 And after COVID, we got to meet.
23:09 I was struck by the whole visage,
23:12 the face, and her intelligence.
23:15 One could see that there's a lot going on in her face,
23:19 but her not doing very much,
23:20 which is perfect for film acting.
23:22 Also, the intelligence and level of understanding
23:26 and coming from indigenous people and being an activist.
23:30 We could learn from her, which is what we did.
23:32 And we all worked together, myself, her, and Leo,
23:36 very, very closely.
23:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]