Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512899
pple Original Films' Killers of the Flower Moon is both western crime saga and tragic love story. Based on David Grann's best-selling book, and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film highlights the history of the Osage Nation — an Indian tribe that gains great wealth from its oil-rich Oklahoma reservation — and the terror they ex- perienced from those looking to take their land. The film is set in the 1920s and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, a WWI soldier who's returned from the war to work for his uncle, William "King" Hale (Robert De Niro), the owner of an Oklahoma ranch. Lily Gladstone plays Mollie Kyle, an Osage Indian that devel- ops a surprising relationship with Ernest, in spite of her suspicions that he's after her wealth. The film was edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long- time collaborator. They have partnered on 22 projects, three of which (Raging Bull, The Departed, The Aviator) earned her Academy Awards in the "Best Editing" category. Schoonmaker recently chatted with Post about her work on the feature, which runs three hours and 26 minutes, as well as the process her and Scorsese follow in shaping the final cut. Thelma, you and Martin Scorsese have been collaborating for 50 years. Can you share some insight into how a film's edit evolves? "Well, first of all, when Marty shoots, he's giving very intense notes to a script supervisor, and I get those every day. And then Marty and I look at the dailies together, and we talk about what we feel, and I make very careful notes from that. Then I start assembling the film. And when he comes back from shooting and is finished with shooting, then the two of us cut the movie together. "Most people don't understand how important his presence in the editing room is. When I say we do it all together, they go, 'Oh yeah, yeah, sure!' As if I'm just being too modest — but I'm not! Marty is a great editor. I didn't know any- thing about editing when I first met him. He taught me everything, particularly on Raging Bull, which, as you can imagine, was a pretty great film to learn on." How does it develop over time? "From the assembly that I've made, which often has choices in it of diˆerent performances, then, together, we work in the same room for a long time, editing the movie. It's a great, great environment with such a brilliant director, who is a great editor himself. (He) thinks like an editor when he's shooting…He's always thinking how one scene is transitioning to another. And then we start screening for a small group of people, and then we make it larger and larger. "We screen quite a few times and we debrief people afterwards. But just sitting in a room with people, who have never seen the film, is a learning experience that's very, very helpful. You can see if people are fidgeting, or are they laughing at the right place? Or the wrong place? You can feel it, and that is very, very im- portant to our style of editing." I understand that Killers of the Flower Moon was shot on film, with additional nighttime footage shot using the Sony Venice camera. How far behind were you to each day's dailies? "These days, even though we're shooting on film, we get a digital version as well, so, I can start even before I get the actual final transfer of the dailies to digital. There's not much delay." KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON BY MARC LOFTUS LONG-TIME COLLABORATOR THELMA SCHOONMAKER SHARES INSIGHT INTO HER WORK ON MARTIN SCORSESE'S LATEST FILM A EDITING www.postmagazine.com 36 POST NOV/DEC 2023 Much of the feature was shot on film. Schoonmaker and Scorsese work closely together on the edit. Thelma Schoonmaker