Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon has been heralded as one of the first major motion pictures to authentically depict Native American erasure. With help from cultural consultants and the blessing of tribal elders, the film tells the horrific history of the Osage people, who in the 1920s became the targets of murder, violence, and theft after valuable oil reserves were discovered beneath their Oklahoma reservation.
The film features an all-star cast, including breakout Blackfeet/Nimíipuu star Lily Gladstone as resilient Mollie Burkhart, Leonardo DiCaprio as indolent Ernest Burkhart, Robert De Niro as conniving William Hale, and an impressive supporting ensemble of Indigenous talent. But the land itself—the cause of all this turmoil—is equally as integral to the story as these real-life figures portrayed onscreen.
To do the story justice, Scorsese knew he needed to shoot the film where these atrocities played out: in Oklahoma’s Osage County. He hired renowned production designer Jack Fisk (The Revenant, There Will Be Blood, The Thin Red Line) to rebuild the place described in journalist David Grann’s book of the same name. It was a realm characterized by culture clashes, as the Osage—then the richest people per capita on the planet—tried to navigate a new existence between their traditional world and the white one being built around them. Fittingly, Fisk weaved together important Indigenous environs and nuanced small-town settings.
As Killers of the Flower Moon hits theaters, Fisk discusses the research that drove his process, the important collaboration with Osage artists, and the lesson he hopes audiences take away from the film. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
How did you recreate 1920s Osage County?
Marty and the Osage Nation wanted to shoot the film where the story actually took place. So that was a huge advantage, because Osage County has the great American prairie and even some buildings left from the 1920s. There’s also so much heritage from all the Native tribes of Oklahoma that just permeates through the soil. The prairie is so vast and timeless that it makes you feel very small in this great world.
Right in Pawhuska there’s the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, where they have reintroduced buffalo, so there are hundreds of them all around. What I loved most about the prairie was how it changed color. In the winter it’d be red, in the spring it’d be green, then in summer it’d be yellow. It was so alive and exhilarating. We were given so many beautiful things with that location that you couldn’t recreate in Los Angeles, Atlanta, or anywhere else.
In the 1920s, the town of Fairfax was a farm town with 1,500 people and a train station. Since then, a lot of buildings have fallen apart or been destroyed by tornadoes. It’s really just a skeleton of the town left there. We shot a lot of the neighborhoods in Fairfax, because the houses were the right scale for the film. But we couldn’t shoot our Main Street in Fairfax, because there weren’t enough buildings and the ones that still exist weren’t quite right. So we transformed Pawhuska, a larger city of 6,500 people about 30 miles [to the northeast], as best we could into the town of Fairfax. They gave us two blocks of storefronts, and we put our sets up there.
The problem was that nobody knew firsthand what it was like in the 1920s, so I had to take what I could learn from the Osage and what I could learn from photographs, journals, and records to piece together what the world might have looked like at that time. Based on research and conjecture, we put together a world that I think is fairly accurate.
What was it like to collaborate with Osage consultants and locals?
Because of Marty’s approach, Chief Standing Bear and the other Osage elders trusted us. I found the Osage people to be very generous with sharing information, probably because it was more important to them than anyone that the story be told truthfully.
One of the first places I went was [the Osage ceremonial town] Gray Horse. I visited the house of a man named Raymond and left a note on his door because I was hoping to see inside. He called me back, and two days later, he was showing me his house and pictures of his family. I even met his daughter, Cupcake. He was so generous, and we quickly became friends.
Osage artist [and granddaughter of murder victim Henry Roan] Addie Roanhorse was part of our art department. I remember one day she took me to the Hominy Round House, which is a place for spiritual ceremonies, dances, and other gatherings. As she was telling me the story about it, she started crying. It made me realize just how important the spiritual element is to the Osage and how it needed to be respected and honored. I really responded to the Osage people’s spirituality, their artistic sensibilities, and the simplicity of their lives.
From a design standpoint, how did you capture the culture clash at play?
The Osage were generally very sophisticated in what they wore and what they collected in their homes. It wasn’t to be ostentatious; it was about buying things they really loved. For example, for their ribbon work, they were buying very expensive ribbon from France or Switzerland then making traditional clothing out of it. They were buying cars and having them painted at a Fairfax body shop, because they appreciated color and didn’t want to just drive the standard black car.
The white people thought they had some sort of superiority over the Osage and were so unnerved that the Osage were getting so much money. They became greedy and rather one-dimensional in their zeal to separate the Osage from their money. There was an advantage to having money, but there was also a horror connected to it. I often wonder if the Osage thought they would be better off without it and would rather not have had people coming onto their land.
There was also conflict within the Osage Nation, which had always been a communal society. The full-blood Osage wanted to maintain their 1.5-million-acre reservation, but the mixed-blood Osage were influenced by the European Americans and wanted to split it up so they could have all the advantages of the white world. There’s no stopping progress, and once they divided up the land and started selling it off, the white world was thrust upon them. They had these wolves at their door trying to get them all the time.
The Osage started marrying the French back in the 1800s, so there was already this history of assimilation into the white world, which really interested me. I wanted to better understand that to accurately design their homes and belongings. I tried to show their appreciation for the finer things, like china. People showed me so many china collections that their grandparents or great grandparents collected on their journeys and had shipped back home, because they had the means. They also have stacks of the finest blankets, which they are always exchanging and giving away at ceremonies and gatherings.
Looking back on the film, what scenes stand out to you?
There’s a scene where Marty walks you through Mollie’s house. He goes in the front door, walks around the whole house and comes back to [matriarch and murder victim] Lizzie Q sitting on the daybed in the living room. It shows all this activity and Osage and white people together in this small house. There’s a life to it that excited me.
The other scene that really stood out for its location is at the very beginning of the film when Henry Roan is driving Ernest to the William Hale ranch. They’re on this long road and you see hundreds of oil derricks in the background. Ernest asks, “Whose land is this?” and Henry Roan says, “Mine.” I thought that was an important line for establishing the environment of that period.
Why was it important to be part of this groundbreaking film?
I love history, and a great part of our history in the United States is the Indigenous people who were here before Europeans arrived. This film encouraged me to learn more about treaties and how land was transferred away from Indigenous families to white settlers. There was this idea of manifest destiny—that God wanted us to have all this land or he wouldn’t have put it here. William Clark of Lewis and Clark felt so guilty about the treaty he signed with the Osage in 1825 that he said something to the effect of, “If I’m ever going to be damned, it’s for this treaty.” He’d cheated them, and he knew it. I’m always curious as to what the world would have become if the Indigenous people of North America were able to keep building and what we would have found if we came here to visit with our passports.
I’m also fascinated by how horrible man can be to man. Unless we can learn from our history, we’re just going to continue on this same path. We’ve got to somehow rise above and understand that we’re all in this together. Like Rodney King said, “Can’t we all get along?” It’s a heavy topic, and it happened in every country. And it’ll probably continue to happen because I don’t think people are really ready to admit that we might not always be right. But this is just the beginning, because there are millions of Indigenous stories that need to be told. I hope the film gives Indigenous people strength and that more of their stories get told and resonate with all of us, so that we can become better.
