DiCaprio, Scorsese teaming up again for new movie

Scorsese's longtime production designer, Dante Ferretti, told Variety that Scorsese hoped to start shooting “Flower Moon” in the spring of next year. The project is based on the bestselling book by David Grann.

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have made a total of five feature films and one short film since 2002, which have been nominated for thirty-one Academy Awards, winning nine. Films like “Gangs of New York”, “The Aviator”, “The Departed”, “Shutter Island” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” are landmarks in both their individual careers. 

Rights to “Flower Moon” 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 (“Forrest Gump”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). Ferretti, who has worked with Scorsese on nine movies from “The Age of Innocence” through “Silence”, said he was going to “go to Oklahoma” to do preliminary location scouting for the film. 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.

Scorsese and DiCaprio have been eyeing the project for months, and are developing it together with Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, co-founders of Imperative Entertainment.

Scorsese is currently getting ready for an early September shoot on “The Irishman,” a gangster movie centered on the life of mob hit-man Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro. Several sources have confirmed that “The Irishman” will be financed by Netflix, though the deal has yet to be officially announced.