The past came looking forKillers of the Flower Moonin its three most ambitious scenes.
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You feel a sense of responsibility to portray it as realistically as possible.
It becomes something more than just design.
The wedding scene, Marty really wanted to do traditional.
Ernest and Mollie probably didnt have a wedding like that.
The Osage had great parties, and they could go on for days.
We put up tents, we had cooking outside, we brought a lot of people in and music.
On the property is the summer house, the structure that Lizzie died in.
We ended up taking trees out with visual effects because there were too many.
The bride and the bridesmaids are wearing coats from American officers from the time of Thomas Jefferson.
But the Osage men were six feet tall and outdoorsy, and the coats wouldnt fit them.
They ended up giving them to their daughters, and they started using them for special occasions.
In that bank there had been a museum that collected local memorabilia.
An Osage woman,Danette Daniels, had bought the bank, and she let me come in.
One of the first people I saw was Pitts Beaty, Mollies guardian.
Suddenly I knew we were making this film in the right place.
I always had an idea that Masonic halls were mysterious.
Some were decorated to harken back to Egyptian tombs.
The hall was white.
I said to Marty, Id like to paint that Masonic Hall dark blue.
He said, That sounds great.
And he goes, That sounds great.
A lot of times cinematographers go, How am I going to light it?
because theres not an excuse for much lighting.
It instantly became a more mysterious place.
Its a weird scene in there.
A grown man is paddling another grown man; its reminiscent of fraternities or some kind of club initiation.
I wanted to make it weird, and we found paddles in there.
Theres a throne, almost, at each end of the room.
Theres not much else in there; I dont think theres ever much in them.
But as happens with a film, suddenly the days catch up with you and you have to go.
Marty lives in New York, so thats where were gonna shoot it.
Meghan McClure, the supervising art director, supervised that.
Thats where were gonna shoot.
And when Marty heard it was an option, he got so excited.
He went to see three locations and he saw that one and went, This is it.
It didnt matter what it looked like.
He grew up there, hed gone to school there, and it just seemed like it should be.
We recreated that physically for him.
We covered some speakers on the wall in the theater itself.
The end of the film is so powerful, when it seemed like Mollie stopped fooling herself.
I think in her mind, she wanted to have a way of understanding that Ernest wasnt all bad.
The last shot was the circle, with the camera rising up.
We did come back to Pawhuska to shoot that.
He wanted a way of including the present-day Osage into the film.
During shooting, he readA Pipe for Februaryby Charles H. Red Corn.
We couldnt have done it without the Osage help.
The Osage wanted us to shoot in Oklahoma, where it took place.
They wanted to be a part of it.
They didnt want it to happen again with this story.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
