(EXCLUSIVE) Oscar winning writer director Paul Schrader wants to clarify comments attributed to him about Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Schrader, Scorsese’s long time friend and collaborator, was reported to have said he thought Leonardo DiCaprio should have played the FBI agent investigating the Osage murders.
The interview appeared in French, in Le Monde. Variety translated it this way: “Marty compares me to a Flemish miniaturist. He would be more the type who paints Renaissance frescoes. Give him $200 million, a good film will inevitably come out of it. That said, I would have preferred Leonardo DiCaprio to play the role of the cop in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ rather than the role of the idiot. Spending three-and-a-half hours in the company of an idiot is a long time.”
Something got lost in the translation. I immediately emailed Schrader to see if he was — implausibly — criticizing his friend. He was not. Today Schrader posted on Facebook:
“While in Italy for an last month I spoke openly with cineastes on awide range of subjects. Thanks the our clickbait culture one of those comments became a headline in Variety. Roger Friedman emailed me to say that my comments about “Flower Moon” had blown up on the internet. I told Scorsese when I first saw the film that his film that was a great film and I say that now. I accept full well that any comments made on FB are a considered publication choices. But what I don’t understand so well is how entre nous conversations among film buffs are also considered publication choices.”
So there you have it. Whatever happened in Le Monde, it just didn’t travel well. So just forget it. Schrader, often crankily candid, didn’t mean it to come out that way.
