Sydney Sweeney in ‘Euphoria.’ Photograph by Eddy Chen/HBO.
Preview:
Sydney Sweeney has boarded new thriller ‘I Pretended to Be a Missing Girl.’
She’ll also produce the movie.
‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Dune’ writer Eric Roth will adapt the tale for Warner Bros.
Sydney Sweeney is one busy actor. Not content with coasting on the success she’s had so far, she’s setting up projects all over the place, striking while the iron –– and her appeal –– is red hot.
And, in keeping with other actors her age, she’s also looking to take more control of what she appears in, striking deals where she produces (via her company Fifty-Fifty Films) as well as leading the cast. It doesn’t hurt that she scores producer fees on top of her acting salary.
The latest potential movie she is developing has a compelling hook and one other impressive talent aboard.
What’s the story of ‘I Pretended to Be a Missing Girl’?
Sydney Sweeney in ‘Euphoria.’ Photograph by Eddy Chen/HBO.
The new movie’s origin lies in the subreddit r/shortstories and is a compelling thriller written by Massachusetts-based high school English teacher Joe Cote four years ago.
Cote’s eponymous tale hinges on a young woman who shows up at a family’s doorsteps ten years after their 18-year-old daughter went missing.
Her plan is to convince the family she is their missing child, and stay just for one night — long enough to steal some valuables and get away. Yet she soon comes to realize she’s made a terrible mistake.
You can read the story here on Reddit, though be warned –– unless the movie changes the story considerably, you’ll be spoiling yourself.
From the sounds of it, it’s a juicy potential role for Sweeney, who could conceivably play both the missing daughter and the interloper.
Alongside Sweeney, Underground Entertainment’s Trevor Engelson and Aaron Folbe (the latter discovered Cotes’ story and signed to represent him), Room 101’s Steven Schneider and Vertigo’s Roy Lee and Mira Yoon will produce the movie, while Cote snags an executive producer credit.
What else is Sydney Sweeney working on?
(L to R) Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in ‘Anyone But You. Photo: Sony Pictures Releasing.
Sweeney’s current schedule is as packed as anyone’s in Hollywood.
2024 included the continued success of hit rom-com ‘Anyone But You’ opposite fellow rising star Glen Powell and the aforementioned Neon horror thriller ‘Immaculate.’
She followed those up with one that she might wish to vanish from her resume, misfiring Spider-Man spin-off ‘Madame Web.’
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The actor also filmed the Ron Howard-directed thriller ‘Eden’ about a society of people who opt to start a new life in the Galapagos islands, only for things to wrong. That one should be in theaters this year.
She has shot the Lionsgate adaptation of the novel ‘The Housemaid,’ which has Paul Feige in the director’s chair, and has worked on two other movies, ‘Echo Valley’ about a woman (played by Julianne Moore) whose life is turned upside down when her daughter (Sweeney) shows up covered in someone else’s blood, and a biopic of real-life boxer Christy Martin, with Sweeney in the lead role (not to mention it’s another movie she produced).
And that list doesn’t even include the potential movies to which she is attached: that list includes a remake of sci-fi comedy ‘Barbarella,’ thriller ‘The Caretaker’ and a drama called ‘The Registration.’
Finally, we have HBO series ‘Euphoria,’ whose much-delayed third season which is finally filming now for a 2026 release.
Here’s what she told Cosmopolitan about the show’s return:
“We did have a long time between season one and season two, but especially now with the time jump, it’s a new process for me. I’m kind of just learning as I go and being open for whatever’s to come. But I’m also really excited. I love Cassie. She is always such a thrilling character to play, so I’m really looking forward to what’s gonna happen in her life.”
When will ‘I Pretended to Be a Missing Girl’ be in theaters?
With Warner Bros. aboard to produce and distribute the new movie, we’ll have to wait and see when it actually goes into production. Unless science has somehow cloned Sydney Sweeney, her busy schedule means it could be a while…
(L to R) Robin Wright and Tom Hanks star in ‘Here’. Photo: Sony Pictures.
Robert Zemeckis has made some genuinely great films, including the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy, ‘Contact,’ and ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ and the mark of much of his career has been his endless fascination with pushing the boundaries of filmmaking and visual effects forward with new technologies and techniques. But for much of the past two decades, he has focused on the latter seemingly at the expense of the former, turning out a variety of films that may offer up new and sometimes dazzling effects while skimping on good stories and well-developed characters.
Such is the case with ‘Here,’ Zemeckis’ formally experimental new film in which he positions his camera, so to speak, slightly above and to the right of a single piece of land in Pennsylvania. The film then documents events that have happened on that spot, from millions of years ago when it was a dinosaur-inhabited swamp wiped out by an asteroid, to the romance between two First Nations lovers, to the series of families who inhabit a modest house over the course of the last century. Most of the focus, however, centers on one family and their rather banal history, with Zemeckis’ distant camera and constant changing of the scene failing to allow even the most perfunctory connection to these characters. The result is a shallow, trite film that also doesn’t do its lead actors any favors with the distracting digital de-aging foisted upon them.
‘Here’ is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, which he expanded from a six-page comic strip he first wrote and drew in 1989. In both the strip and the graphic novel, McGuire drew panels within panels, showing the space in different periods of time and connecting events from one panel to another whether they took place in the past, the present, or the future. Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Eric Roth, Zemeckis attempts the same thing on film: as one scene plays out, a panel opens in a section of the screen and either expands or dissolves into the next scene, with the eras in time overlapping.
The problem is that Zemeckis and Roth do very little to make connections between the different eras, and with the exception of the period during which the house (which is built in 1907) is owned by the Young family, not enough time is spent in any of the eras to give us meaningful insight into how these different periods correspond or how life plays out in similar ways even in varied circumstances. After a while the continually opening frames just become annoying because they signify little.
That the most time is spent with the Young family is the second major problem with ‘Here.’ After a brief prologue in which the aged Richard (Hanks) and Margaret (Wright) enter the now-empty house, we flash back to when Richard’s dad Al (Bettany) and his new wife Rose (Reilly) first purchased it after World War II for the princely sum of $3,400. Beset by PTSD, Al drinks too much but nevertheless dutifully goes off to work for an insurance company, while Rose stays home and tends to their kids. They squabble, the frugal (almost penny-pinching) Al loses his job, they need to take out a second mortgage at one point, and their three kids grow up, including Richard, who is actually quite talented as an artist and harbors dreams of becoming one professionally. “Get a job where you wear a suit,” Al barks at him, giving us a preview of what’s ahead.
Sure enough, Richard gets his sweetheart Margaret pregnant at 18, and he’s forced to abandon his dreams and go into the insurance business as well. We find out later on that Margaret also gave up on a whole slew of ambitions, including owning their own house: Richard is even more thrifty than his dad, always coming up with reasons to keep their family under his parents’ roof instead of making a home of their own. And that’s how it goes for the Youngs, whose repressed dreams, secret yearnings, family get-togethers and fights, and ultimate destinies offer nothing we haven’t seen before in numerous family dramas, and doesn’t even absorb us in any way because our view hangs in one place above the living room like a security camera we might as well be checking on our phone.
The rest of the stories – minus the earliest dinosaur days and subsequent ice age – get even shorter shrift. The best is that of Leo (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond), a free-spirited, bohemian couple in the 1920s who hit the big time when Leo invents the La-Z-Boy recliner (spoiler alert: it’s not true). The story of the First Nations couple goes nowhere (and seems tokenistic), nor does the tale of a woman (Dockery) who is worried sick that her early adopter aviator husband will die in a crash. A peek into the era of the Revolutionary War, when Benjamin Franklin lived a few hundred feet from where the Young house is eventually built, is simply pointless (the big connection? Richard and his brother wear Ben Franklin costumes at a family Halloween party).
The sole story that takes place after the Young family sells the house, about the well-off Black couple who purchase it, settles on the father (Nicholas Pinnock) and mother (Nikki Amuka-Bird) instructing their teenage son (Cache Vanderpuye) on how to behave if he’s ever pulled over by a cop as its big moment. Instead of adding depth to their lives or how the neighborhood around them is changing, Zemeckis and Roth settle for simple button-pushing before paneling back to the whitebread, flavorless Youngs.
In the end, none of it really sticks. The Youngs are too stereotypical to come across as real, and nobody else gets enough time to breathe. The single-shot framing becomes a box from which the story and the people in it cannot escape.
The Cast
(L to R) Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in ‘Here’. Photo: Sony Pictures.
Much has been made of the fact that the teaming of Zemeckis, Roth, Wright, and Hanks constitutes a reunion of the principal creatives of 1994’s ‘Forrest Gump,’ perhaps accentuating the director’s sentimentality over the passage of time. But trying to turn back time for his stars by de-aging them is not the best way to address this. While de-aging has come a long way – even in just the past few years – it’s still a weird, jarring sensation to see Tom Hanks and Robin Wright with smoother versions of their faces plastered on their heads, especially when their voices and physical movements are of the moment.
Wright probably fares best here, even given her stereotypical character and some of the grating dialogue that comes out of her mouth, while Tom Hanks continues his recent stretch of stilted performances and never relaxes into the role of the unmotivated Richard. Paul Bettany’s Al is supposed to be hard of hearing as a result of his WWII injuries, but the usually reliable Bettany ends up shouting most of his lines theatrically – as if projecting to the back row – whenever he speaks. The bottom line, however, is that it’s a shame to see capable actors like Bettany and Kelly Reilly do their best to animate these stock, post-war suburban disappointments.
Zemeckis doesn’t do them any favors either with his fixed gaze, which forces the actors to move closer to the camera when it’s time to deliver important bits of story or foreshadowing (speaking of which, the latter is incredibly heavy-handed: one character makes sure to let us know three times that they’ve forgotten something before – surprise! – they end up with Alzheimer’s). This all just heightens the artificiality of the whole setup – bringing the actors closer to the lens ironically adds more distance to what we’re watching.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in ‘Here’. Photo: Sony Pictures.
We’ll always respect Robert Zemeckis for giving us some of our favorite films of all time – we stand by our assertion that ‘Contact’ is one of the finest sci-fi films of its time, while ‘Back to the Future’ is just about a perfect film (and the trilogy as a whole comes damn close to that hat-trick as well). And even when we don’t admire the films much – ‘Beowulf,’ ‘Death Becomes Her,’ or a truly dreadful outing like ‘Welcome to Marwen’ – we appreciate his curiosity about how far the medium can go and how it can continue to deliver sights that audiences have never seen.
But he’s paid a price for that quest along the way – sacrificing stories and characters with depth and nuanced emotional honesty for stunts that try fruitlessly to replace both — and ‘Here’ is the latest casualty of that journey.
‘Here’ receives 4 out of 10 stars.
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What is the plot of ‘Here’?
A single area of land and the dwellings built on it is the scene for literally millennia of events, from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the COVID pandemic, with much of the focus on one mid-20th century family who live there for decades.
Who is in the cast of ‘Here’?
Tom Hanks as Richard Young
Robin Wright as Margaret Young
Paul Bettany as Al Young
Kelly Reilly as Rose Young
Michelle Dockery as Mrs. Harter
Gwilym Lee as John Harter
Ophelia Lovibond as Stella Beekman
David Fynn as Leo Beekman
‘Here’ director Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks attend the AFI Fest Director’s Spotlight. Photo by Stewart Cook/Sony Pictures via Getty Images.
(L to R) Billy Crystal and Jacobi Jupe star in ‘Before’.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Billy Crystal and Jacobi Jupe about their work on ‘Before’, how Crystal developed the idea for the series and playing a different type of role than he has in the past, Jupe’s approach to his character and performing in the “scary scenes”, and what it was like for the two actors to work together.
You can read the full interview below or click on the video player above to watch our interviews with Crystal, Jupe, Judith Light, and Rosie Perez.
(L to R) Jacobi Jupe and Billy Crystal in ‘Before,’ premiering October 25, 2024 on Apple TV+.
Moviefone: To begin with, Billy, can you talk about developing the idea of the series and having the opportunity to play a role different than anything you’ve done before?
Billy Crystal: The first idea was mine. It kicked off the chain reaction that ends up being this series. We had this notion of this pediatric psychiatrist working with a troubled kid who’s presenting in a very specific way, and that was the mystery of what’s he experiencing? It asked questions about, have we been here before? It got mysterious. So, then my co-EP, Eric Roth, who’s a great writer, brought in Sarah Thorp and he said that she can write this. “Listen to the first two beats of this idea,” he said to her, which was a psychiatrist, troubled kid, and where’s he from? She, in 10 days, came in with this notion that laid out Eli, and his journey with Noah. In the middle of it, I said to her, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” I wasn’t looking to play the guy, but I so was taken with Sarah’s vision that I said I’m in. It wasn’t like I want to play something different it was just, boy, this is great. I’ve been acting a long time and I’ve done different things always, and this was just another one of them. But in a world that I had never ventured into before.
MF: Jacobi, can you talk about your approach to playing Noah and what it was like for you personally shooting the show’s scarier scenes?
Jacobi Jupe: Noah on screen is scary and all the things that he sees and does is scary. But I wouldn’t say I did get scared by it because that’s movie magic, to make it look scary when it wasn’t that scary. But I found it cool. It was always exciting and fun, and I would always get to do crazy stuff. I don’t know, just speak in weird, crazy voices and scream. But I’m always kind of calm inside and then I become angry on the outside sometimes. The character is very extreme. He’s very extreme.
(L to R) Jacobi Jupe and Billy Crystal in ‘Before,’ premiering October 25, 2024 on Apple TV+.
MF: Billy, what was it like working with Jacobi and what did you learn from the experience?
BC: The thing about Jacobi that I’m so taken with, being such a young actor, he would always ask the director, why am I saying this? If the truth didn’t line up with what he had to play, like any veteran actor, he would have trouble. So, it always had to be the truth for him, which for all of us is “Why am I saying this?” Then if I got it, then you can play it freely and honestly. His range is fantastic in the show, but it was based in, it had to be the truth. That’s just a basic lesson for any actor. Is it the truth? Then I can do it.
MF: Finally, Jacobi, is Billy fun to work with? What is he like as a scene partner?
JJ: He’s the best. He is hilarious. He’s good at thrillers. He’s good at other stuff too. He’s such a fun guy and so incredibly talented.
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What is the plot of ‘Before’?
A recently widowed child psychologist (Billy Crystal) meets with his next client (Jacobi Jupe), who seems to be connected in some fashion to his past.
The first look at Robert Zemeckis’ new movie, ‘Here’ is online.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in the time-spanning drama.
It’s another experimental project for the ‘Forrest Gump’ team.
The filmmaking team behind ‘Forrest Gump’ certainly know a thing or three about a story that spans a large amount of time, and one that required considerable effect advances to support its main character’s encounters with historical figures.
So, as you might presume, their reunion –– and in this case, we mean specifically ‘Gump’ director Robert Zemeckis, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and screenwriter Eric Roth –– also offers an expansive chronological storyline and some experimental techniques.
The first look at the result, ‘Here’, is now online via Vanity Fair.
First published as a six-page comic strip in 1989, before being turned into a full graphic novel decades later, ‘Here’ is a high-concept story that focuses on one single room, telling the interconnected, overlapping stories of the many people who’ve inhabited that room over thousands of years.
The film will feature a locked-down camera that never moves, with the action all occurring in one space, and, like the source material, overlapping panels representing changes in design for scene/time zone transitions.
Hanks stars as baby boomer Richard, who grows up in the same house he ends up raising his own family in during the 1970s and 1980s, with Wright as his wife, Margaret.
Zemeckis and his effects team are using a mixture of traditional make-up and cutting-edge digital techniques to portray the characters at different ages, and the story expands out further either way through time, showing Richard’s parents (played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly), occupants of the house long before them and even people –– and creatures –– living in the space before the place was built. There will also be a segment set in 2020, following the couple who inhabit the house after Richard and Margaret.
And though it features the very top end of de-aging effects, Zemeckis soon realized one way to make them work beyond what other filmmakers have tried:
“It only works because the performances are so good. Both Tom and Robin understood instantly that, ‘Okay, we have to go back and channel what we were like 50 years ago or 40 years ago, and we have to bring that energy, that kind of posture, and even raise our voices higher. That kind of thing.”
The aim, according to the director, is to show characters with whom the audience can connect.
The whole point was to make the story identifiable. We didn’t want people [in the house] to be criminals or spies in highly dramatic situations. There are some people who probably won’t like the fact that the conflicts in the movie are not over the top—that they’re pretty rooted in reality.”
Sony aims to have ‘Here’ in theaters on November 15th. So if you’re itching to see what Team ‘Gump’ have been up to, you only have a few months to wait now.
In the early 1920s, members of the Osage Nation are being murdered or dying mysteriously on their land in Oklahoma, which has made them incredibly wealthy due to the vast deposits of oil underneath their feet. World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes to live in the town of Gray Horse with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), and soon marries a rich Osage Nation woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). But Burkhart finds himself drawn into a far-ranging conspiracy that may claim his wife and her entire family.
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Who is in the cast of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’?
At first glance, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ seems tailor-made for master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Both a crime thriller and a penetrating look at a seemingly forgotten chapter of early 20th century American history, the film is on the surface a true epic. Clocking in at 206 minutes and immersing the viewer in the world of the Osage Nation and the corrupt, nearly lawless environs of the American South that threatened their existence, the film is bolstered by the sterling work of its cast and crew. But Scorsese makes two errors that prevent ‘Killers’ from joining the upper echelons of his filmography, and at points nearly stop the movie in its tracks.
Story and Direction
(L to R) Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
In the late 1800s, the U.S. government pushed the Osage Nation out of its native land in Ohio and Mississippi and onto a rough area of Oklahoma known as “Indian territory”. But the joke was on the government, because the land was sitting atop a vast reservoir of oil; by the turn of the 20th century, the Osage were among the wealthiest people in the United States.
All this is laid out succinctly in the opening moments of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” along with the fact that, as the 1920s roll around, members of the Osage are either being outright murdered or passing away from mysterious ailments such as a “wasting disease.” And with the local authorities in the pockets of equally rich white land barons and businessmen who have established themselves in the nearby town of Gray Horse, none of these supremely suspicious deaths are investigated.
Into this toxic situation comes returning WW1 vet Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), ostensibly looking for work but soon – at the suggestion of his uncle, cattle baron William King Hale (De Niro) — courting and marrying Mollie (Gladstone), whose family is among the richest in the Osage Nation. But as Mollie falls ill and other members of both her family and the Nation continue to perish, it becomes clear that this is all a grand conspiracy to seize the Osage Nation’s oil rights and the immense fortunes that come with them – even as its mastermind, Hale, acts as benefactor, friend, and supporter of the Nation.
With nearly all the local law enforcement either in Hale’s pocket or killed themselves, Mollie and several members of the Nation plead for help from President Calvin Coolidge. He dispatches agents of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (later known as the FBI), led by Tom White (Jesse Plemons), to get to the bottom of the killings.
(L to R) Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
It’s easy to see why this material appealed to Scorsese: it’s both a generational crime saga – albeit not set in the usual Mafia confines he’s known for – and a searing indictment of the underside of American capitalism and institutional racism, as white interlopers use any means necessary to steal from the Osage what rightfully belongs to them, with – at first – hardly any consequences.
From a technical and artistic standpoint, ‘Killers’ is a marvel in every sense. The sets, the costumes, the period details, and the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto all capture the texture of life in a very rough part of the United States some 100 years ago. The portrayal of the Osage Nation seems accurate and respectful, and late musicianRobbie Robertson’s powerful yet subtle score combines a throbbing, relentless modern bass line with Indigenous musical cues.
Yet ‘Killers’ falls short in two major areas: the pacing of the film is languid and curiously lacking in tension, as the plot and villains are telegraphed early on and much of the film is filled with odd editing choices – such as the presentation of a murder onscreen after it’s been described at least twice (including in a courtroom scene just prior), making the actual staging of it seem almost gratuitous. Another truly bizarre addition is Scorsese’s final scene, which wraps up the story in a strange expository sequence that nearly takes us out of the film.
But the movie’s biggest flaw is using Ernest Burkhart – an important but secondary player in the book – as the main character. The central character is clearly Mollie Burkhart, although she is relegated to the background for much of the film’s second half. The other major character in the book is BOI agent Tom White (a subdued Plemons, in the role DiCaprio was originally supposed to play), who arrives two-thirds of the way through the film and is also given short shrift as a character. Yet he and Mollie are essentially the moral compasses of the story, while Burkhart appears to have no inner core whatsoever and just allows himself to be manipulated by the people and events around him. This adds to the lack of energy and urgency that this hefty film so desperately needs.
(L to R) Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
It’s kind of astonishing to realize that Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro have not worked together onscreen since 1993’s ‘This Boy’s Life,’ and that the two of them – who have starred in five and nine previous Martin Scorsese pictures, respectively – have never shared the screen under Scorsese’s direction before. So it’s kind of momentous to see them together here.
In the end, however, it’s De Niro who comes across the strongest. His Hale is a masterful portrayal of an unapologetic monster, a man who apparently sees no moral disparity in the way he both seemingly cares for the Osage Nation and ruthlessly plots their slaughter in pursuit of money and power. He remains calm and self-composed, fatherly and yet stern, and professes his love for specific people even as he knows he’s condemning them to death. It’s no secret that Robert De Niro, in the latter stages of his career, has worked in a lot of less than stellar films; but it’s clear that working with his old friend and collaborator brings out the very best in this still vital actor.
As we detail above, DiCaprio is trapped with a character who is positioned as the film’s nominal protagonist (we wouldn’t call him a hero) while also part of the treachery and depravity that drives the film’s narrative. As such, the character seems strangely passive throughout, if not outright stupid at times, his face seems screwed up in a permanent grimace. De Niro’s Hale is clearly defined throughout the movie; DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart is not, and that muddies the good work that Leo is doing. He still delivers in several scenes, especially one between Ernest and Mollie that is one of the few truly heartbreaking moments in a film that should have a lot more of them.
Speaking of which, the third component of the film’s main triumvirate is also its standout. With a modest list of film and TV credits behind her, Lily Gladstone is simply riveting to watch here as Mollie. It’s a shame that the character is waylaid in bed for much of the film’s second half, because Gladstone brings dignity yet humanity to the character – she’s not put on a pedestal as some shining example of an Indigenous person, but is a human being with her own flaws and blind spots. And her grief, rage, and horror as she realizes what is happening to her and her people is palpable and intense.
How Accurate Is The Story?
(L to R) JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
David Grann’s book is meticulously researched, all the more impressive considering how much of the history of these events remains murky or was outright destroyed as the perpetrators covered their tracks. Scorsese and co-screenwriter Eric Roth may have brought certain aspects of the story forward in a manner that departs from the book, but the major elements of the story remain the same. And it’s the little details that cement the film’s devotion to presenting an accurate portrayal of the Osage Nation and the events of the time.
In fact, some of those details may not be clear to viewers the first time around, especially if one hasn’t read the book. For instance, wealthy Osage members, particularly women, are labeled “incompetents,” deemed incapable of handling their own money. It’s mentioned in the movie often and a perfect example of the level of accuracy and detail that Grann’s book strives for, and which Scorsese, Roth and their team replicate.
Final Thoughts
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is worth seeing for its tremendous performances by Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and others, as well as its incredible production design, detailed immersion in the world of Gray Horse, Oklahoma and the Osage Nation, and haunting score from Robbie Robertson. But viewers will feel every minute of the film’s three-and-a-half-hour length, and the decision to see most of the story through the eyes of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart is a nearly fatal flaw that robs the film of a point of view or moral center.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ receives 6 out of 10 stars.
(L to R) Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ tracks the suspicious murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight after oil was discovered underneath their land.
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Who is in the cast of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’?
(L to R) Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of attending a virtual press conference, along with other members of the press, for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ featuring Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese. The legendary filmmaker discussed his new movie, what attracted him to the story, shooting in Oklahoma, historical accuracy vs. emotional truthfulness, casting Lily Gladstone, reuniting with DiCaprio and De Niro, and the music of the late great Robbie Robertson.
You can read about the press conference below or click on the video player above to watch excerpts from the interview.
Scorsese on Accurately Representing the Osage Community
(L to R) JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
The iconic director began by discussing how he and his production team went about accurately representing the Osage community in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’
Martin Scorsese: Well at first, it was very important for me, as soon as I saw the book, and I said, “Well, if you want me to be involved with anything that has to do with indigenous people and Native Americans, I had an experience in the 70s where I began to become aware of the nature of what their situation was and still is.” I’d been blindly unaware of that, I was too young. It’s taken me years and I’m fascinated by how do you really deal with that culture in a way that is respectful? How truthful can we be and still have authenticity and respect, dignity and deal with the truth, honestly, as best we can. Having said that, that story, when I read it, indicated to me that this would probably be the one that we could deal with that way. Particularly by getting involved with the culture of the Osage and actually placing cultural elements, rituals, spiritual moments. People talk about mystical realism or something. Now this is real. You see the dream. The dream is real. The ancestors come. So for me, I wanted to know how, I wanted to play with that world in contrast with the white European world. I felt that this could have afforded us the possibility. Ultimately what happened was that we were dealing with the script on the basis of the David Grann’s book, which is excellent, but the book also has the subtitle, the ‘Birth of the FBI.’ For about a year and a half to two years, I was doing ‘The Irishmen’ and that sort of thing, and Eric Roth and I were working and we felt that we took the story of the birth of the FBI as far as we could take it, and I wanted to keep balancing with the Osage and it was getting bigger and bigger and more diffused. Ultimately this was supplemented by the times that we went out to Oklahoma and met with the Osage. My first meeting was with Chief Standing Bear and his group, Julie and Addie Roanhorse and Chad Renfro, and it was very different than what I expected. They were naturally cautious. I had to explain to them that I’m going to try and deal with them as honestly and truthfully as possible. We weren’t going to fall into the trap. We think of the cliche of victims or the drunken Indian, this sort of thing, and yet tell the story as straight as possible. What I didn’t really understand the first couple of meetings was that this is an ongoing situation, an ongoing story out in Oklahoma. In other words, these are things that really weren’t talked about in the generation I was talking to and in the generation before them. It was the generation before them that this happened to and so they didn’t talk about it much. The people involved are still there, meaning the families are still there, the descendants are still there. What I learned from meeting with them, having dinners with them, including Margie Burkhart, I think she was the relative of Ernest Burkhart. She pointed out, and a number of other people pointed out that you have to understand, a lot of the white guys there, a lot of the European Americans, particularly Bill Hale, they were good friends. One guy pointed out, he said Henry Roan was his best friend, and yet he killed him. People just didn’t believe at the time that Bill would be capable of such things. So, what is that about us as human beings that allows for us to be so compartmentalized in a way? After they saw ‘Silence,’ they sort of felt a little more comfortable with me doing this. Margie Burkhart said, one has to remember that Ernest, her ancestor loved Mollie and Mollie loved Ernest. It’s a love story. Ultimately what happened is that the script shifted that way, and that’s when Leo decided to play Ernest instead of Tom White. By that point, we started reworking the script and it became really, instead of from the outside in coming in and finding out who’d done it, when in reality it’s who didn’t do it. It’s a story of complicity. It’s a story of sin by omission, and silent complicity certain cases. That’s what afforded us the opportunity to open the picture up and start from the inside out.
Shooting in Oklahoma
(L to R) Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
Scorsese was determined to shoot the film in Oklahoma, where the story is based. He talked about the first time he visited Oklahoma and how he began to visualize shooting the movie there.
MS: Well, I think the first time was in 2019. It was a little confusing because of shooting ‘Irishman,’ doing the CGI, which was a longer post-production, four or five months, and then COVID hitting, but I know we were there before COVID. We at least had two trips there before COVID. For me, I am a New Yorker. I grew up in the lower East side of New York. I’m very urban. I don’t understand weather that much or where the sun is when you’re on the set. I was very surprised to learn that it’s set in the West. That’s because I was driving down Sunset Boulevard one time about 30 years ago, and I saw the sun setting and I said, it’s great. It’s “Sun-set Boulevard.” The sun sets in the West, I go, “oh, now I get it.” Anyway, when I got there, all I can tell you is those prairies are quite something and they open your mind and your heart. They are just beautiful. Especially driving on these roads, straight roads were prairie and on both sides, wild horses, bison and cows, but the wild horses just out to pasture for the rest of their lives and it was like idyllic. So I said, “Where do I put the camera at this point? How much of the sky? How much of the prairie?” Should it be 1.85 or should it be 235? We got to go 235. You’re going to want to see more of this land. Then I began to realize that the land itself could be sinister. In other words, you’re in a place like this and you don’t see people for miles. You could do anything. Particularly, it turns out a hundred years ago, for me, 1920 is like fifty years ago because I was born in 1942, so the 1920s are to me the way the 1990’s are now to younger people. So when they told me, “Marty, this is a hundred years ago,” I keep thinking, “why are we making a period piece? It’s like normal.” I mean, yes, they were old cars. So I said, “It’s not really a Western, it’s normal.” But when I saw that and I realized this is a place where you don’t need the law. I mean, you have the law, but the law isn’t working that way. You can make the law work for you if you’re smart enough, as we know now, many people do. What I mean by that is that it’s still a wide open territory. You have law, but it’s a wide open territory. So the place, as beautiful as it is, can shift to being very sinister. What I wanted to capture ultimately was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of an easygoing genocide. That’s why we went with the story with Mollie and Ernest because that’s the basis of the love. The love is the basis of trust. So when there’s betrayal that way, that deep, and we know that for a fact that it was that way. Here’s our story.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ director Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese also talked about balancing historical accuracy with what he calls the “emotional resonance” of the movie.
MS: This was a constant, historically accurate, and I should say the word “truthful.” You can have a ritual and you shoot a ritual is the way it should be, but it may have been slightly different at the time. We had a lot of support from the Osage authority, the experts who were giving us the indication of how to go about these things, Johnny Williams, and a number of other people. So with them, we tested the accuracy of the rituals, the weddings, the funerals, everything that happened at the funerals, all of this sort of thing. In some cases there was wiggle room because quite honestly, I think the last two generations of Osage forgot about or was taken out of their experience because they had to become white European, they had to become Christians, Catholics, or whatever. So they forgot about all that. In fact, there’s a new resurgence of the learning of the language. We had language teachers there, and Lily Gladstone learned the language and so did Leo, and so did De Niro who really fell in love with it and wanted to do more scenes in Osage. But I suggested that maybe it’s too much for him, but he just liked the sound of it. They were all learning again to put their culture back together through this movie and we were going with them. So what actually happened was, we would ask, does this person put the blanket on this way, is that right? Well, one person would say yes, I would say maybe no. Another one would say, you have a little room here to play with it and have some creative license. So that’s the way we did it throughout every scene that way. That was done a lot in pre-production and during the shoot. So we had that as a basis. There are ways that were never insistent, but there were ways they got to me, certain information where it was Marianne Bower, for example, one of our producers and she’s like my archivist, and she was able to help keep it all together between myself and the Osage.
Casting Lily Gladstone
(L to R) Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
The director discussed casting actress Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart and why her casting was pivotal to the film’s success.
MS: Well, I believe Ellen Lewis showed her to me in ‘Certain Women,’ Kelly Reinhardt’s film. I thought she was terrific and then COVID hit and we weren’t able to meet. So after the pandemic was calming down, we met on Zoom. I was very impressed by her presence, the intelligence and the emotion that’s there in her face, but you see it. You feel it, but it’s all working behind the eyes. You could see it happening. Also, her activism, which wasn’t overtaking the art, in other words, the art was in the activism in a sense. So the art takes over and in a way which we think then would be more resonant later on after you see the movie, you may be thinking about it more rather than a person preaching at you. I think the first big scene we did was one of my favorite scenes where she has dinner with Earnest alone and she’s questioning him, a little bit of an interrogation. “What are you doing here? Are you afraid of him? What’s your religion?” All this sort of thing. Then you begin to see the connection between the two. When she says, “Ha, coyote wants money.” And surprisingly he said, “That’s right, I love money.” So she knows, this is the other thing, she knows what she’s getting into. Even her sisters later, which is also a scene that we put in with the Osage and the Native American actors. They said, “What if we’re talking about the guys while they’re playing that game and we’re talking about my husband and talking about that guy with the blue eyes likes you and, you know, I don’t think he just wants money. It doesn’t matter. He’s nice. He wants to settle down.” Why don’t we just show that that’s how it could happen? So that’s the way the script was ultimately created by these moments. So with Lily, there was that scene, and of course the scene where he’s driving her in the taxi and it’s only one shot. He says something about, “I want to see who’s going to be in this horse race.” And she says something in Osage and He goes, “What’d you say?” And she says it in Osage again. And he says, “Well, I don’t know what that was, but it must’ve been Indian for handsome Devil.” That’s an improv, and you see her laugh for real. So that moment you have the actual relationship between the two actors. These were the two moments. We felt very comfortable with her. Also we had a feeling that we needed her. We needed her to help us tell the story of the women there. We would always check with her and work with her on the script. There were scenes that were added and rewritten constantly.
Reuniting with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro
(L to R) Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
Martin Scorsese has made ten movies with Robert De Niro, and five with Leonardo DiCaprio, but ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ marks the first Scorsese movie to feature both actors. The director discussed his working relationship with both De Niro and DiCaprio.
MS: Well, in the case of Robert De Niro, we were teenagers together, and he’s the only one who really knows where I come from, people I knew and that sort of thing. Some of them are still alive. He knows them. I know his friends, his old friends, and we had a real testing ground in the 70’s where we tried everything and we found that we trusted each other. It was all about trust and love. That’s what it is. That’s a big deal because very often if an actor has a lot of power, and he had a lot of power at that time, an actor could take over your picture, the studio gets angry with you, and the actor comes in and takes it over. With him I never felt that. I never felt that. There was a freedom. There was experimenting and also, he’s not afraid of anything. He wasn’t afraid to do something. He just did it. Years later he told me he worked with this kid, Leo DiCaprio, a little boy in ‘This Boy’s Life.’ He said, “You should work with this kid sometime,” but it was just casual. With him, something like that, a recommendation at that time, I think in the early 90’s, is not casual. He says it casually, but he rarely said that. He rarely gave recommendations. So years go by and I’m presented with Leo with ‘Gangs of New York,’ and we worked together in ‘Gangs.’ He made ‘Gangs’ possible actually. He loved the pictures I’d made and he wanted to explore the same territory. So we developed more of a relationship when we did ‘The Aviator.’ Towards the end of it, there was something happening in maturity with him, not quite sure, but we really clicked in certain scenes and that led to ‘The Departed,’ and then we became much closer. That was a project where Bill Monaghan, me, and other people, we were writing all the time and recreating that character that he played of Billy. During that time, he really found out that even though it’s a thirty years difference, he has similar sensibilities. He’ll come to me and he’ll say, listen to this record. It’s Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald. I grew up with it. He’s not bringing me anything new, but he likes it. That’s interesting. He’ll call me and says, “I had a cold and I was looking at Criterion Films and I wanted to catch up on some of these classics, and I saw this incredible movie. It’s a Japanese picture. It’s called ‘Tokyo Story.’ Did you ever see it?” This was last year, I said, “yeah.” I mean, it took me a few years to catch up. I couldn’t even understand Ozu‘s style, seeing it for the first time in the early 70’s because we used Orson Welles’ cameras, and this guy got it from watching it on a big screen TV. That’s very interesting to me to be open that way to older parts of our culture, newer parts of our culture, of course, and the curiosity that he has about other people and other cultures. There’s a trust. Even if we can’t get it right away, we know we’ll come up with something. Maybe other people have relationships where they come up with it faster. Well, we don’t. We just work it through. For example, the scene between Leo and Bob in the jail at the end. That scene ultimately was finally written, I think a few days before we shot it, working with the two of them and working with Marianne and everybody because we had said so much, and it could have gone so many different ways, but what does the picture really need? How much more is there for them to say to each other after all that’s happened? So we went that way. It’s trust. Particularly doing ‘The Wolf for Wall Street,’ by the way he came up with wonderful stuff that was outrageous. So I pushed him, he pushed me, then I pushed him more than he pushed me, and suddenly everything was wild. It’s really quite something. He had a good energy too on the set. That was also important. Very important, because in the mornings, I’m not really good and I’d get on set and then I’d see him or Jonah Hill or Margot Robbie, or him and Lily, and suddenly they’re all like, “Hey.” I said, “Okay, let’s work.”
The importance of Music in his Movies
(L to R) Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson at a screening of ‘The Last Waltz’ at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
Finally, Scorsese discussed the importance of music in his movies, and how it influences the way he moves his camera. He also spoke about his longtime collaborator, the late musician Robbie Robertson, and his musical contributions to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’
MS: The way I like to make pictures, for the most part I’ve learned, not intentionally, but I feel it is like the pacing of music. The boxing scenes in ‘Raging Bull’ are like the ballet scene in ‘The Red Shoes’ where everything is seen and felt from inside the ring, inside the fighter’s head. The way everything is felt and seen inside the dancer’s head of Moira Shearer in ‘Red Shoes.’ The covering of the band singing ‘The Weight’ in ‘The Last Waltz,’ doing it in a studio was very much according to the music, to the different bars of music and how a camera would move, et cetera. Sometimes I played the music back on the set in the case of ‘Goodfellas’, a number of times. The end of ‘Layla,’ for example, was played back as we were doing the camera moves. For me, ultimately a movie is more like, I’m trying to get to a movie being a piece of music. I think that’s why I do these music documentaries at the same time, I’m trying to get to the pacing and rhythm of something that can be played. For example, you play a symphony and you live with it. “I’ve heard the Beethoven Symphony so many times, I don’t want to hear it again.” No, you play it. “Well, I like the third movement. I want to hear the second movement again.” No, I mean, you live with it. Or Baroque music, anything by Bach or Philip Glass let’s say. In a case like this, very often if a film is playing on TCM, I take the sound off and I just watch. It’s living with me. I live with it. If it’s a Hitchcock or it’s a Ford or a newer one, whatever, I’m looking, and I can tell there’s a musical rhythm to the pacing of the camera and the edit. What I mean by the camera, it’s the size of the people in the frame, the editing and camera movement. I could feel it. So that’s how I exist in a sense. So for me, it’s really about getting the pace of music. That’s done very carefully on set, but also even more carefully in the editing. That’s why this picture is more like somebody pointed out recently, a Bolero, where it starts slower and moves slowly and encircles, and then suddenly gets more intense, and suddenly goes more and more until it explodes that way. So I felt it. I couldn’t verbalize the way I am now, but I felt it in the shoot and in the edit. A lot of the music that kept pushing me was what Robbie Robertson had put together, particularly that base note that he was playing. When Ernest drops her off for the first time at Mollie’s house, she looks at him, she turns, and all of a sudden you hear, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I said, “I wanted something dangerous and fleshy and sexy, but dangerous.” That beat took us all the way through. Then he sent me some hymn and I picked up music from Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music, all this sort of thing. One particular piece called the ‘Indian War Whoop’ by Hoyt Ming and his Pep Steppers was very important. ‘Bulldoze Blues’ by Henry Thomas, which became ‘Going up the Country’ by Canned Heat. All of this, and ‘See See Rider Blues’ by Ma Rainey, and of course Emmett Miller singing ‘Lovesick Blues,’ which became the great ‘Lovesick Blues’ by Hank Williams later on, but this was the first. So it’s all that’s in there, but the drive of the movie is what Robbie put down, and we pulled it through that way.
(L to R) Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ coming soon to Apple TV+.
When star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis work together, the results are usually something special. They’ve collaborated on movies including ‘Forrest Gump’, ‘Cast Away’ and ‘The Polar Express’ and have another, future project to add to the list: they’ll work together on graphic novel adaptation ‘Here’.
And to keep the ‘Forrest Gump’ team together, Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth will handle the script.
‘Here’, created by Richard McGuire, was published in graphic novel form in 2014, though it has its roots in a six-page comic that appeared in RAW magazine in 1989. It is set in the unadorned corner of a seemingly unremarkable house.
Which doesn’t sound like the basis of a blockbuster, but then you have to consider that it follows the same corner between 500,957,406,073 BC and the year 2033, jumping in a non-linear way between all sorts of scenes that take place there. It’s less a traditional story, and more an art experiment that grew to encompass different characters and experiences. Some stories move forward on the page, while others, in the corners, are told backwards. Upon its release, the graphic novel was described as “”an orgy of the ordinary that is slyly clever and unexpectedly moving.”
While that would appear to be more along the lines of Hanks’ work on the Wachowskis’ ‘Cloud Atlas’, we’ve yet to see how Zemeckis, Hanks and Roth will adapt this one into a movie. And, given the talent involved, there’s reason to think it could be something unique – with Zemeckis given free rein to indulge his love of creative visual effects.
(L to R) Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks accepting their Oscars at the 67th Academy Awards.
That said, it also sounds like a complicated sell, harder to promote than, say, the latest Marvel or DC movie, and could represent a risk to companies looking to back it.
Yet given the presence of the three Oscar-winners, this one is naturally generating a lot of interest. According to Deadline, several studios and the big streaming services are all clamoring to pick this one up. Zemeckis and Hanks have a history with Paramount, Warner Brothers, Sony and more, and both were involved in last year’s science fiction film ‘Finch’, which was sold by Universal to Apple TV+.
We’re still waiting to hear which of the interested parties will end up announcing that a deal is in place, but chances are it’ll happen before too long.
A sequel 1994 Best Picture Oscar winner “Forrest Gump” was in the works — and then 9/11 happened.
“Forrest Gump” won six Academy Awards and became a pop culture phenomenon for its tale of a slow-witted but good-hearted man (Tom Hanks) who witnesses and influences many key moments in history.
The movie was based on Winston Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name. Groom wrote a sequel in 1995 called “Gump & Co.,” which followed Forrest through the 1980s. The proposed movie follow-up would have been loosely adapted from it.
Screenwriter Eric Roth, who won one of those Oscars, turned in a draft for the sequel on September 10, 2001.
“Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11,” Roth told Yahoo Entertainment. “And Tom and I and [director Robert Zemeckis] got together on 9/11 to sort of commiserate about how life was in America and how tragic it was. And we looked at each other and said, ‘This movie has no meaning anymore, in that sense.’”
Roth revealed some plot details for the planned sequel, which would’ve explored what happened to Forrest Jr. (Haley Joel Osment). In the film, it’s strongly implied that his mother Jenny (Robin Wright) dies after contracting HIV/AIDS.
“It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS,” Roth explained. “And people wouldn’t go to class with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregation] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”
The planned sequel would’ve followed Forrest into the 1990s, as well, and seen him involved in events like the infamous 1994 car chase involving O.J. Simpson.
“I had him in the back of O.J.’s Bronco,” Roth said. “He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down.”
He continued, “I had him as a ballroom dancer who was really good, he could do the [rotation] ballroom dancing. And then eventually, just as sort of a charity kind of thing, he danced with Princess Diana.”
