Martin Scorsesehas a new film out, and at 80, that makes it a big event. But“Killers of the Flower Moon,”in addition to being one of his most epic in scope, could be one of his most controversial films.

The 3½-hour movie is based onDavid Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” which investigates the 1920s murders of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after oil deposits were discovered on their land.

The film adaptation focuses on the love story between Ernest Burkhart, a white man returning from service in World War I played byLeonardo DiCaprio, and Mollie, an Osage woman played byLily Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet, Nimiipuu and White American heritage and grew up on the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana. The all-star cast includesRobert De Niroas a cattle baron andJesse Plemons作为一个代理在早期的美国联邦调查局。

But was Scorsese the right director to accurately present the Native American side of this narrative?

During a virtual news conference from Los Angeles on Monday, Oct. 16,the master filmmakerinsisted he was, saying he met extensively with members of the Osage Nation, including Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, and other leaders who became consultants on the film.

“What I didn’t really understand the first couple of meetings was that this is an ongoing situation, an ongoing story out in Oklahoma,” Scorsese said. “The people involved are still there, meaning the families are still there, the descendants are still there. They were naturally cautious, and I said I’m just gonna try and deal with (the story) as honestly and truthfully as possible.”

But in a sign of potential audience polarization, Christopher Cote, the Osage language consultant on the film, said on the red carpet of the Los Angeles premiere hours after Scorsese’s news conference that he was conflicted.

“As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” Cote told theHollywood Reporter. “Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart.

“I think in the end, the question that you can be left with is: How long will you be complacent with racism? How long will you go along with something and not say something, not speak up, how long will you be complacent?”

This interviewwith Scorsesehas been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What steps did you and your production team take to ensure that the Osage community felt accurately represented?

A:The David Grann book has the subtitle “The Birth of the FBI.” And, for about a year and a half to two years, while I was doing“The Irishman,”Eric Roth and I were working on the script. We felt that we took the story of the birth of the FBI as far as we could take it. I wanted to keep balancing with the Osage. And it was getting bigger, and bigger, and more diffused.

Margie Burkhart said, “One has to remember that Ernest,” her ancestor, “loved Mollie, and Mollie loved Ernest. It’s a love story.” And so, ultimately, the script shifted that way. We started reworking the script and it became gritty. Instead of from the outside in, coming in and finding out who done it, in reality it’s who didn’t do it. It’s a story of complicity. It’s a story of sin by omission.

Q: What was it like shooting in Oklahoma?

A: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 it sets, you know? I was very surprised to learn 30 years ago that it set in the west. That’s because I was driving down Sunset Boulevard (in Los Angeles) and I saw the sun setting. And I said, “That’s great. It’s Sunset Boulevard. The sun sets in the west. Now I get it.” (laughs)

Anyway, all I can tell you is those prairies are quite something. They open your mind and your heart. They are just beautiful. And especially, driving on these roads through a prairie and on both sides, wild horses and bison and cows. It was idyllic.

然后,我开始意识到土地本身be sinister. In other words, you’re in a place like this, and you don’t see people for miles? You can do anything. What I wanted to capture, ultimately, was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of a kind of easygoing genocide.

Q: Lily Gladstone is amazing. How did you cast her?

A: I saw her in“Certain Women,”Kelly Reichardt’sfilm. I thought she was terrific. We met on Zoom, and I was very, very impressed by her presence, the intelligence and the emotion that’s there in her face. You see it, you feel it, that it’s all working, something working behind the eyes. You could see it happening.

Also, her activism. We had a feeling that weneededher. 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, scenes rewritten constantly because of her input.

Q: You could say Leonardo DiCaprio and especially Robert De Niro are your muses. Why have you returned to them both so often over the years?

A: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, the people I knew. We had a real testing ground in the ’70s, where we tried everything and we found that we trusted each other. It’s all about trust and love.

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. Studio gets angry with you, the actor comes in and takes it over. With him, I never felt that. There was a freedom, there was experimenting, and also he’s not afraid of anything.

Years later, he told me he worked with this kid, Leo DiCaprio, a little boy, in “This Boy’s Life” (1993, which De Niro also directed) and he said, “You should work with this kid sometime.”

So years go by, and I’m presented with Leo for “Gangs of New York,” He made “Gangs” possible, actually. He loved the pictures I’ve made, and he wanted to explore the same territory. We developed more of a relationship when we did “The Aviator,” and that led to “The Departed,” and then became much closer.

Q: Robbie Robertson, the former member of the Band who had been one of your best friends for decades, did the music. He passed away in August. What did he bring to this film?

A:The way I like to make pictures for the most part, is like the pacing of music. The boxing scenes in “Raging Bull” are like the ballet scenes in “The Red Shoes” (1948), 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, Moira Shearer’s, in “Red Shoes.”

Sometimes I play 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’re doing the camera moves. And so for me, ultimately, the movie is more like I’m trying to get to the movie being a piece of music.

This picture is more like “Bolero,” where it starts slower and moves slowly and in circles and in circles, and then suddenly gets more intense and more intense, and suddenly goes more and more until it explodes, right?

A lot of the music that kept pushing me was what Robbie Robertson had put together, particularly that bass note when Ernest drops her off for the first time at her house, Mollie’s house. She looks at him, she turns, and all of a sudden you hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I said I wanted something dangerous and fleshy. And that beat took us all the way through.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com