The formidable film-making force that is Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese will reunite in the spring of 2018 for a new project.
As Scorsese wraps on his latest project, The Irishman, Variety have learned that DiCaprio and Scorsese will team up in the near future to create a film adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
The true crime thriller is based on the bestselling book by David Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z.
Scorsese’s longtime production designer, Dante Ferretti, who has worked with Scorsese on nine movies from The Age of Innocence and Silence said he was to “go to Oklahoma” for preliminary location scouting on Killers of the Flower Moon.
The auteur and his favourite actor have been eyeing up the project for some time and are developing it together with Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, co-founders of Imperative Entertainment.
Rights to Flower Moon – as it’s known to industry insiders – were snapped up by Imperative last year for a reported $5 million, and a script has reportedly been drafted by veteran Oscar-winning scribe Eric Roth of Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fame.
John Atwood, Imperative’s chief financial officer, told Variety that Imperative “are currently conducting preliminary research on the film, but there are no formal attachments nor confirmed start date at this time”.
The story, set in the 1920s, focuses on a string of murders of members of the Osage nation in Oklahoma after oil was discovered beneath their land.
The chilling series of slayings was one of the fledgling FBI’s first major homicide investigations.
Ferretti said “the whole 1920s world of the Indians who lived there needs to be reconstructed” and that he expects to “start preparing this film in September, because Scorsese will shoot it immediately after finishing The Irishman.”
Scorsese is currently getting ready for an early September shoot on the gangster movie, which follows mob hit-man Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro and reportedly funded by Netflix.
Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is available to buy now.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.