Martin Scorsese on how 'Pather Panchali' had an impact on his new film
Martin Scorsese was just a young boy when he first saw Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali", and it was from that moment on that cinema opened up "many different worlds" to him, according to Scorsese, who relies on that experience decades later in his new film "Killers of the Flower Moon".
Scorsese, widely regarded as one of the world's best filmmakers, is cited to have learned about Indian culture after seeing Jean Renoir's 1951 Kolkata-set "The River". However, his idea of cinematography and filmmaking changed after watching Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali".
"From then on, cinema opened up many different worlds to me. I wonder what it would be like to be a colonised person and a wide part of a colonised world that you live in," Scorsese answered in a group interview to a query from PTI about whether his new film will connect in nations with a colonial past, such as India.
Scorsese revealed that he saw the dubbed English version of Pather Panchali on television in New York.
"And I thought, 'Wait a minute, those are the people I usually see in the background of other films. What's the difference? The difference is that this film is being made by them, by actual people, and I'm being introduced to a different culture, a different way of thinking, a full life, and the universality of it all. How we're all basically the same as human beings," Scorsese stated via virtual interaction from New York.
The director of masterpieces like "Taxi Driver" and "The Departed" stated that he has always been interested in other cultures and how people think in other regions of the world, which motivated him to change the script of "Killers of the Flower Moon".
The original story, based on American journalist David Grann's book of the same name, revolves around the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its investigation into a series of murders committed by the Osage people, a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains, after oil is discovered in Oklahoma, US, in the 1920s.
Leonardo DiCaprio was scheduled to play an FBI investigator investigating the deaths, but Scorsese changed his mind late in the production and decided to tell the event from the perspective of the Osage people.
Jessie Plemons, who appears late in the plot, plays the character of an FBI investigator.
Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is one of those implicated in the killings masterminded by William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro.
According to the filmmaker, he utilised the story of the Osage people to represent practically all indigenous peoples throughout the world who have been "taken advantage of."
"(I said) so let's stick with the story's heart, the indigenous people," he remaked. "The people who can be considered colonised to some extent, or worse, (people) who have been taken over, eliminated, or completely pushed aside."
"Killers of the Flower Moon," which received positive reviews after its global premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is set to be released in India on October 27. Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser also appear.