The New Yorker Radio Hour - Lily Gladstone on Holding the Door Open for More Native Actors in Hollywood. Plus, the Brody Awards

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Lily Gladstone had been in several films, but unknown to most moviegoers, when she got a call for Martin Scorsese’s period drama “Killers of a Flower Moon.” The role was challenging. She plays the historical Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman married to a white man, Ernest (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio), who perpetrates a series of murders of Osage people in a scheme to secure lucrative oil rights. Ernest may be poisoning her with a cocktail that includes morphine, and some of the dialogue is in Osage, a language that Gladstone—raised on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana—had to learn. Gladstone is the first Native person nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and is aware of the historical weight the nomination carries.  “We’re kicking the door in,” she says. “When you’re kicking the door in, you should just kind of put your foot in the door and stand there,” she adds. “Kicking the door and running through it means it’s going to shut behind you.” Plus, our film critic Richard Brody returns with his annual movie honors: the Brody Awards. An awards show exclusively for The New Yorker Radio Hour, he’ll be handing out imaginary trophies—and trash-talking Oscar favorites like “Oppenheimer”—alongside the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Lily Gladstone has been in over a dozen films, including Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. And she's been on reservation dogs created by Sterlin Harjo. But making a life as an actor, it's just not an easy thing. And Gladstone said she was applying for seasonal work at the Department of Agriculture, studying insects when she heard from a certain... Martin Scorsese. Scorsese eventually cast her as a lead in killers of the flower moon.

The film concerns a grisly series of murders that took place in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered there. Gladstone plays Molly Burkart, an Osage woman married to a white man named Ernest, played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio. Gladstone is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and that's a historic first for a Native woman. She spoke recently. recently with Michael Schulman, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Your high school yearbook from Mount Lake Terrace High School has made the rounds online, so I know that you were voted most likely to win an Oscar. There's no question that's true.

It's really sweet. My graduating class and then a lot of people that were in the same drama program, they're reuniting to watch the Oscars in our old high school theater. It's really touching. Well, so then you went and studied acting and directing at the University of Montana, I'm curious, when you got out what your early career was like, what kind of roles were you auditioning for, what were you getting, and what kind of day jobs were you doing for survival? I decided to stay in Montana instead of going to L.A. or New York, like a lot of my graduating class did,

because I kind of felt like if I had gone to L.A. or New York and done like the classic, you know, just audition endlessly hold down another job to support yourself, you know, get an agent. get out there as much as possible. Just thinking about it was starting to kill my passion for it a little. So I stayed in Montana where I had built some connections with some local filmmakers that I really liked. In between the theater tours, I auditioned for a one-woman show that toured into schools, teaching about Native American boarding school experience. So it was like a teacher-actor position that I had for a number of years.

I read about this. This was like you were acting against a recorded track in school auditoriums. Can you tell me what that was? Yeah, it's a Seattle-based company called Living Voices, and I was performing a show that was teaching about Native American boarding school experience and with historical documents projected through, like, behind you on the screen, and pre-recorded voices from other actors that etch out this period in history. The character I played was Denae.

And she was a boarding school survivor who had gone through the Gannado Mission Hospital and trained to become a nurse. And to become a nurse in World War II. And then was kind of an in a letter correspondence with her clan brother who had become a Navajo Code Talker. So I was teaching a little bit about that history as well. So I did that for as many years as I could in my 20s, but kind of got burned out on it. because, you know, it's also a heavy task to walk in with, you know, this one specific curriculum, but finding that you have to do so much just 101 before you even start the show, you know, contextualizing that there's 574 different tribal nations in the United States.

And, you know, we all look different ways now and we all come from different backgrounds and we have a lot of different languages. And yes, we're still here. and no, we don't still live in tepees. You know, a lot of us still have them, but like, you know, but not every Native nation had lodges, you know, just little things like that. Right. And then there's like a sophomore sleeping in the first row or something. Oh, yeah.

Teens are a tough audience. Teens are the toughest audience. I kind of found, I know teachers at the middle school level get burned out, but I've found that middle schoolers are kind of the best audience for that kind of thing. They're still young enough to really enjoy the, theater of it and to like buy into the magical realism suspension of disbelief, but they're also sophisticated enough to like grasp concepts of yes, the assimilation policy was really bad for native people. Yeah, that was, it was really rewarding but incredibly exhausting work, as any teacher

will attest. So that job kept me going, supplementing between cashiering at Staples, and then every once in a while having an independent film that I would get to go do. But the assumption that I've also found as a native actor is there's a lot of roles that I've that have played now that's required that I speak another indigenous language and I'm by no means even fluent in Blackfeet. You know, I can introduce myself. I have a few words and phrases. I know some of the bad words. Can you please curse in Blackfeet right now?

I want to hear. I'm just going to drop this from my blackfeet folks, but I'm not going to say what it means. Sixamese, one of the worst things than funniest things you can say about somebody. You know, it's a fairly PG thing, but, you know, it's my favorite word in our language. So that's, I think, that's an aspect of native performance that I think a lot of people take for granted is how hard it is. you know, we celebrate other actors for picking up other European languages for a role for scenes and sounding proficient and fluent. But for some reason, that same awe and that same credit is often just kind of dismissed for native actors because people assume, oh, that you all speak that. No, it's a huge gift to be able to speak an indigenous language.

I want to move on to Killow to the Flower Moon and your character. Molly, the movie is based on the book by our colleague here at the New Yorker David Gran. When you were figuring out how to play Molly, you know, she was a real person who made real choices and lived through very extreme circumstances. What was most familiar about her and what was most enigmatic or obscure to you? In reading the book, particularly, I got a sense of the kind of person. that I was recognized or that I would recognize in my own community, kind of like, you know, the women I recognized from my grandma's side of the family, my dad's purse side.

What was really exciting was the idea of having a chance to kind of break some, break some, not some boundaries, but some, maybe some stereotypes with her as well in her relationship with her sisters. As a relationship that, like, Native women have with each other, especially our families, it's like we're very, like, you know, we love being together. We love joking. We love gossiping and teasing. And, you know, I could really see that with, like, my grandma's sisters the way that they were together. Being very proper still, but just giggling about everything. And that's like not the native woman that you're used to seeing in cinema. It's like you're used to seeing more like a stoic, like kind of mean, whatever. It's like, well, it's because there's outsiders around. You know, people are regarded. You know, like I said, I didn't want to over. extend like my own cultural understanding into Molly as an Osage woman, but it was a basis. A lot of familiarity I felt with her that reminded me of stories I'd heard about my great Grandma Lily,

who I never met. She passed before I was born. I could hear echoed. I could see maybe where Gran had gotten his illustration, the way that he was able to sketch Molly, the way that he drew her personality. I could feel that. And Molly has a very strange and conflicted relationship with her husband Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. I want to zero in on my favorite scene in the film, a scene that's up there with the all-time great

Martin Scorsese scenes, which is their first date when she invites him to dinner at her house and they're flirting, they're smoking. and she kind of calls him out as a coyote and says, Coyote wants money. And then offers him whiskey. Michael. Coyote.

Coyote wants money. Well, that money is real nice. It's real nice. Especially if you're lazy like me. I mean, I want to sleep all day. I don't want to make a party when it's dark. What's so funny? Hmm?

Do you like Bettenie? Whiskey. Mm. I don't like whiskey. I love whiskey. I have good whiskey. Not bad whiskey. I think we should try something and find out.

Yes. Molly is doing a lot in that scene. She's trying to figure this guy out, and in a way she has. But in a way she hasn't, because, of course, he's plotting to, you know, married her family and take her oil money. Right. And at that point, like, you know, people were starting to pass away. And it was a really difficult transitional time for Osage. And this is also a generation, kind of like the first and second generation that had gone through boarding schools. Somali and her sisters being

boarding school survivors as well. So there's a whole lot of contextualized history behind that. And a lot of that also came from Charles Redcorn's book A Pipe for February, which talks about this period of time. It's a novel that writes about the Osage Rain of Terror from an Osage perspective and kind of how like this slow rise in, you know, as people are dying, the rise in paranoia was kind of slow because there's a lot of things that community would attribute these deaths to that were related to historical trauma. It wasn't immediately obvious that people were being poisoned to death, you know. And you know, like you see, like these new folks coming in, that initial wave is like, oh, these guys are new. And it's like, there's a flirtation

that happens. There's an exoticism that's happening on both sides. So me and the sisters definitely etched that out in that scene where we're gossiping about the men. So what's si we go ask? Hi. Right, what do for them? Right, what do you think? Right, what do you think that she sees in Ernest? You know, it's a dynamic that I'm very used to seeing, even in my own family. Just, it's kind of a sustaining one, and I think you can find it in a lot of relationships,

just this kind of fun-loving, larger than life, you know, inappropriate sometimes. goofy cowboy of a guy with this very self-possessed, like humble, you know, like, you know, acting on protocol, Native woman that he just lives to crack her shell and make her laugh and, like, how much joy she gets from that, too. So just kind of that back and forth, you know. That scene, that scene underwent a couple of different changes. And, you know, you pointed to it, the trickster element of it. It's not going to be explicitly clear to the audience when Molly calls him, Shomikas, he calls him coyote.

She's not just calling him the animal. She's calling him a trickster. One of the trickster figures in oral tradition with Osage is coyote. And there's several of them, but coyotes like the FOP is the one that's always tripping over his own feet, acting very hedonistically in self-interest. and he never really wins. You know, he'll screw up everything for everybody involved in the story in a very funny way, especially when you're telling it to kids.

But in the end, he just never wins. When I was learning these stories, a lot of them reminded me of our trickster stories, Blackfeet stories, even though the structure's different, the landscape's different, like kind of the progression of the stories and the humor of them felt very familiar. And it gave Ernest a place to hide. You know, it's funny. Some of the movies that it called to mine for me are actually these kind of domestic dramas like Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and, you know, suspicion with Joan Fontaine and Carrie Grant, these stories of women who are married to men who they slowly realize are terrorizing them. And of course, that gets more acute as the film goes on. And, you know, she is starting to realize. realize that he's not only responsible for the deaths of her family members, but is actively poisoning her through her insulin. And for the audience, you reach a point where you kind of

want to scream at her to wake up and just run away from the guy. And yet she doesn't do that. And you start to wonder how much is she seeing right through him when he's lying to her face, how much is she deluding herself? I'm curious, was that the question for you? as the story goes on? Well, where I found a place that Molly would have had a huge blind spot and all of that, I mean, one, it's like what you suspect in your subconscious mind we've gotten conditioned to dismissing if, you know, what's right in front of us doesn't check out. You know, he's so good with the kids and he just doesn't seem capable of it.

But one of the biggest clues for me, especially during that period of time where Molly's getting the insulin, the family has pretty much surmised she was also getting a combination of arsenic and morphine. So there was the delivery process having a long time ago played a morphine addict in my first play and doing the research about that, the chemical dependency on that, how the immediate relief of everything, that was a clue to me that, okay, Ernest is the delivery mechanism. So while her subconscious and conscious mind are dancing with each other so much while her body is being eroded by arsenic, but also healed by insulin, and she's addicted to the whole

process. The only thing that she sees consistently is earnest. That's bringing this to her. That's bringing her this relief. So when she does have a sober mind later unknowingly, that's how I approach those end scenes as well. There's just people in my life I've been close to who are recovering addicts and were leaving toxic, abusive, codependent relationships with, you know, be it with people or be it with substance. That was a big clue to me that, you know, gave me some compassion for what Molly wasn't seeing, what she was incapable of seeing, and even if she was seeing and suspecting it, incapable of leaving, literally. I am a studier of Oscar history, and I know. I know that in the past, it's been a real mixed experience for people who have been the first

in their category. One story, Sidney Poitier, of course, was the first black man to win Best Actor in 1964. And not after he won for Lillies of the Field, he was being honored at the mayor's office in New York City. And the reporters kept asking him about civil rights, and he finally snapped. He was not a person who generally snapped and said, why is it everything you guys ask refers to the neagerness of my life and not my acting. I'm curious if you have felt that sort of tension of being out here as an actor, but also as, you know, the face of a community. And in addition to that, you're playing an Osage woman, so it's not even quite your community. One thing that I've really appreciated is I'm friends with Sterling Harjo, the creator of

reservation dogs. And, you know, we're both in the circuit right now for both of these projects. And so when we were catching up and just visiting about kind of this shared space, we're finding ourselves navigating, he put it really well. He said, we're in a position where we've, like, you know, we're kicking the door in. But kind of the reality of what that is and maybe what it has to be, when you kick the door in, you should just kind of put your foot in the, you should just kind of put your foot in the door and stand there. You know, it's like kicking the door in and running through it means it's going to shut behind you.

So it's really nice to, you know, remember that while I'm the first specifically Native American indigenous woman, there has been other representation. I stand on the shoulders of a lot of performers. And, like, it's circumstantial. This point in history, the film that I'm in, the performance that I was blessed enough to be able to carry. It still, it feels like a very shared moment and it feels like a big responsibility to just be and to, you know, celebrate others and to keep pushing for more representation. So I'm just kind of, if I've kicked the door in, I'm just trying to stand here and leave it open for everybody else to come through.

Well, I will be looking forward to it. And also looking forward to the rest of this crazy award season. Congratulations again. And it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Michael. Lily Gladstone won a Golden Globe for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, and she's up for an Oscar in March.

You can read Michael Shulman at New Yorker.com, and he's the author of Oscar Wars, a history of Hollywood in gold, sweat, and tears. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It is that time of year again. Award season. And we're talking about the past year in movies, of course, and long-time listeners will know that this is a very special thing for us on the show. I'm joined once again by Alexander Schwartz, a staff writer with the New Yorker and the co-host of... Critics at large.

A podcast, you should not miss. I never do. And New Yorker film critic, Richard Brody, also known as Mr. Front Row. And this is an annual tradition at the New Yorker Radio Hour, the Brody Awards. So let's first talk about that other award show, the Oscars, a petty side show to be short of the Brodies.

But this year, there's a pretty wide sense that it's a strong year for movies and the Oscar nominations seem to reflect that, at least up to a point. But the big scuttle butt, and I want to hear from you guys on this, is the snubbing of Greta Gerwig.

for Best Director and Margot Robbie for Best Actress. What do we think happened there, Alex? I would imagine, Richard, you may have more insight into this than I do, that there was a sense that maybe this is a big commercial comedy. I think comedies, often direction of comedies, traditionally has not been recognized to the same degree that a big, meaty drama has at the Oscars. That may be what happened to Credit Gerwig.

And then Margot Robbie, is Barbie Oscar material Barbie herself? The irony of it is that this is kind of what the film addresses. You know, everyone made a big stink about the fact that Ryan Gosling, his role as Ken, was nominated. That is exactly what would happen in the Barbie verse that the movie that the movie creates. It's hard to get away from a sense that everything we've been seeing around Barbie is just more promotion for Barbie. So this almost seems too perfect in a weird way. As an offense. Yeah, as an offense.

As a new chapter and misogyny. Well, more that it just, again, plays into the Barbie machine to some degree. It validates the critiques that Barbie itself makes of the culture. And so there we have a new, you know, Barbie cycle. But Richard, isn't it also part and puzzle of who votes for Oscars, even after the reforms that have come through and there's been some change, I think, and the people who vote for Oscars, isn't it still kind of old white guys still at this point? Yes, it is, especially the director's branch.

This is one of the fundamental problems that Oscar nominations face. It isn't the Academy at large that does the nominating. It's the individual branches. which I think is a terrible mistake because it essentially becomes a perpetuation of the contemporary standards of professionalism rather than inspiration and affect. Now, the Barbenheimer phenomenon of paid off not just at the box office, but at the Oscars, too. Barbie did get eight nominations after all, and Oppenheimer got 13 of them, and it's probably a favorite to win the big one, the best picture award. Richard, I think you said that Wikipedia entry on Oppenheimer was better than the movie. I mean, Oppenheimer is a fascinating person.

The story that's told in Oppenheimer, it's not lacking in interest. Every detail is fascinating, but they seem dispersed, tossed onto the screen with no sense of the character driving them. Richard, let's pause for one second. The Wikipedia entry was better than the movie? Like, literally.

Literally, because the facts of his life are really fascinating and really complicated. He was a wonderful. wild man. No, no, no, no, I know, but this is the mean version of saying an American Prometheus. I can get, if you say American Prometheus, the big biography is better than the film, but the wiki entry? Well, it goes in more directions. It presents a more complex character than the one who's in the movie. And that's exactly the kind of movie that the Academy likes to reward, namely a very serious, very earnest film about a grand historical subject. Barbie, by contrast, embarrasses the Academy, no matter how much money it makes,

It embarrasses the Academy to be associated with the movie that some people, in my opinion, entirely wrongly, assimilate to a feature-length TV commercial for a doll. Wow. Was there a nominee that pleasantly surprised you on the other hand, Richard? Some nominee that was egregiously irritating beyond Barbie? The pleasant surprise was that Wes Anderson, who was shut out for Asteroid City, was at least nominated for a live-action short film, namely the wonderful story of Henry Sugar, which I highly recommend, the Roald Doll adaptation. But there's a movie that got many nominations this year, including for Best Picture, that I find almost repugnant, namely the zone of interest.

Jonathan Glazer's very, very loose adaptation of a novel by Martin Amos. I have to say, I felt I had seen that movie before, in fact, many times. That whole, you know, the death camp is out of frame, ordinary life is happening. It seemed to me not an entirely original way of going about things. And it's done in a, am I allowed to say half-assed? It's done in a half-assed way. So Jonathan Glazer wants it both ways. He wants to make sure that you know, that he knows,

that there's really awful stuff going on. And at the same time, he keeps his hands rigorously clean. Let's go to an award show, though, that actually matters, the Brodies. We've been waiting for this for fully a year now, I think it's fair to say. Alex Schwartz is here with the official Brody envelopes. And to be clear, these nominations and awards were not chosen, any voting body. It's all one person.

It's Richard Brody, and no one, including me, knows who the winners will be until they are announced right here on the air. And we're going to start with Best Actor, Alex, who was nominated. And the nominees for the Brody Award for Best Actor are Jason Schwartzman for Asteroid City, Franz Rogowski for passages, Adam Driver for Ferrari,

Zach Ephron for the Iron Claw, And Mike faced for pinball, the man who saved the game. And the winner is? The winner is Franz Rogovsky for Passages. Okay. Passages is the most international feature of the year. It's filmed in Paris by the American director Ira Sachs starring the German actor Franz Rogovsky as a German director, who is married to an English man, played by Ben Wischar, and at the end of a shoot,

has an affair with a woman he meets, played by the French actress Adel Exarchopoulos. And what results is emotional turbulence of a very high order. But turbulence that does not spare the protagonist himself. He's as much buffeted by the storms of emotional chaos as the other characters. Yeah, Richard, I've got to figure that in the Oscars, that secondary other thing, that the winner there is probably the biggest lock of the night, no? You mean Killian Murphy? Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's likely. Yeah. You know, biopics gratify the Academy's sense of dignity. A good actor, playing an important historical figure, makes the world of movies seem like it's playing on the grand stage of political history. Let's move on to Best Actress, Alex. The Brody nominees for Best Actress are Margot Robbie for Barbie, Tiana Taylor for 1001, Michelle Williams for Showing Up, Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon, and Charlene McClure in All Dirt Road's Taste of Salt. And Richard, the Brody Goes to?

This was the toughest choice that I faced. The winner is Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon. I was sorely tempted to select Margo Robbie. For reasons of justice? Because it's an extraordinary performance, because it's one of the most virtuosic comedic performances I've seen in quite a while. But I find Lily Gladstone's performance in Killers of Flower Moon

to be different in kind from just about every other performance I've ever seen. And as much as it's a movie that's filled with dialogue and she handles her dialogue with great aplomb and gives it great dramatic weight. But the essence of the role is presence and silence. It's Martin Scorsese's unique conception of this story, his unique revision to David Grant's book, and she gives this remarkable conception an extraordinary dramatic power by doing as little as possible. Well, Richard, you know, we already talked about Margot Robbie Snub. Of course, Lily Gladstone is nominated for Best Actress.

I wonder what you think her shot is. I think it's very good. Beside the representational fact that indeed no Native American actor has won an Oscar, it is an extraordinary performance, and I think that it's a performance that runs on sheer star power. And if there's one thing that the Academy is not immune to, it's star power. Yes. Okay. So, Richard, if in an ideal world where the Brodies somehow melded with the Oscars themselves... That's not an ideal world. The ideal world is one which the Brodies displace the Oscars. entirely.

That's right. In a pragmatic world where we might be able to make some strides towards integrating the Brodies into the world of the Oscars. And you could make room

for Margarabi in this category. Who would you replace? Because the Oscar nominees for Best Actress this year are Lily Gladstone. I know you would not replace her, of course.

Annette Benning for Niyadh, Carrie Mulligan for Maestro, Emma Stone for Poor Things, and Sandra Hula for Anatomy of a Fall, a movie that we disagree on. Anyone but Emma Stone. I find Emma Stone's performance

in Poor things striking for her handling of language. I don't find it a very satisfying drama, but Tony McNamara's script, which essentially recreates English from the perspective of an adult needing to relearn it from zero, gives Emma Stone a remarkable chance to shine with that dialogue. Well, it's time for the big one. You know, the best director at the Oscars is largely being seen as Christopher Nolan's race to lose. He's up for Oppenheimer versus Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Yorgos Lanthamos for Poor Things, Jonathan Glazer for the Zone of Interest, and the lone woman represented this year, Justine Tray, for Anatomy of a Fall. But who are your

nominees for the best director, Brody, Richard? My nominees are Greta Gerwig for Barbie, Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Kelly Reichart for Showing Up, Raven Jackson for All Dirt Road's Taste of Salt, and Wes Anderson for Asteroid City. And the Brody goes to... It goes to Wes Henderson. Although, I have to say, this was tough, too, because Martin Scorsese's direction of Killers of the Flower Moon is pretty remarkable. Just to keep a three-and-a-half-hour-long film engaging, and I find that that time passes very rapidly,

is a mark of an artistry of a different sort altogether from that of the other directors this year. But what Anderson achieves moment by moment in Asteroid City is almost unparalleled in the history of cinema. There's a level of dramatic specificity, of wit, of substance, of emotional power invested in remarkably small details that perhaps it's rivaled by, you know, Carl Theodore Dreyer or Murnow or Jacques Tatte, but by very few other directors in the history of cinema.

But should I say this with real affection, and I'm a fan of Wes Anderson's, do you think anybody as odd and off to the side in the view of most, viewers will ever win a best director Oscar? The directors who won last year were Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shinerich for everything everywhere all at once. That's a very weird movie, too. It's a sentimentally weird movie, but it's a weird movie. I don't think that the Oscars necessarily shy away from weird. I think they shy away from intellect. The Academy, yet again, nominated a full slate of ten movies this year for Best Picture. And some we've already talked about, Barbie Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower

Moon is also the zone of interest, American fiction, maestro, the holdovers, anatomy of a fall, poor things, and past lives. Richard, you want to take any partying shots at any of those movies before we give out the last brodie? I was happy to see past lives get nominated from a, let's say from an industry perspective. It's a low-budget independent film. It's not one of my favorite films of the year. Far from it, in fact.

But I was nonetheless happy to see that the Academy pays attention to movies that are produced at that relatively low budget level. Okay. Now, Alex, who were the Brody nominees for Best Picture? Well, the moment is finally here. The nominees are Barbie, showing up, Killers of the Flower Moon, 1001, Earth Mama, Passages, Ferrari, pinball the man who saved the game, all dirt roads taste of salt, and asteroid city. And the Brody goes to...

It goes to Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, based on David Grand's book. That's right, our colleague David Grant, mazel tough to David Grant. Finally, he has a little bit of success in his literary life. He gets a Brody, or by association. Richard, you gave the best director award to Wes Anderson.

Usually the best director and the best picture come in one package in the Oscars. Why not here? Well, in this particular case, a great deal depends on the writing, and although Scorsese's direction is as incisive and as imaginative as usual. I think a particular weight

of this film is born by the script. David's book is largely an investigative story centered on the Federal, the Bureau of Investigation Agent, the forerunner of the FBI, who attempted to discover who was killing members of the Osage Nation. And that was the story

that Scorsesey apparently, he told me, he was originally, intending to film with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of the agent, and that somewhere along the line the decision was made that, in fact, it would be not a story of the investigation, but the story of one of the perpetrators, a crucial perpetrator, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, but above all, his relationship with the Osage woman, played by Lily Gladstone, whom he was intending to kill. In effect, Martin Scorsese turned David Grenz book into a version of Eyes

wide shut, into a movie about the almost metaphysical mysteries of marriage. Well, it's been a big night for Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson and many others. Alex Schwartz, Richard Brody, it's always a pleasure. You can find Richard Brody's column on film The Front Row. Thank you so much. Thank you. David. Alex, thank you. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick.

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