Jodie Foster has suggested Martin Scorsese‘s 2023 epic Killers Of The Flower Moon would have worked better an eight-hour streaming drama, rather than as a three-and-a-half-hour movie.
The Oscar-winning actress and director made the comment in an on-stage conversation on Sunday at the Marrakech Film Festival where she was feted with a tribute award this weekend.
Foster was talking about how she saw the future of cinema and her embrace of the streaming drama model in the wake of her experience on True Detective, suggesting the format had replaced the theatrical feature as a means to explore big narratives.
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“Streaming is able to do things that we’re not able to do in traditional mainstream movies anymore. Real narrative now in the United States is on streaming. Big franchise superhero movies are what you see in the movie theaters, but the real, real narrative is on streaming,” she said.
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“I’m embracing this idea of there being these two opposite ends of the industry, one which is mainstream Hollywood, mainstream distributor films, and more independent films on the other end, which are entirely similar to the independent industry that you have in Europe and in other places,” she continued.
“Then there’s streaming. You’re able to tell eight-hour stories, or five-season stories, where you can explore every angle in a way that you could never in a feature. I love the freedom of that.”
She gave Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book on the murders of Osage tribe members in 1920s Oklahoma as an example of a story that would have worked better as a high-end streaming series rather than a long movie.
“He wanted to explore the experience of Native America at that time and what we had was a very interesting movie about two guys who go back and forth and talk to each other,” she said, referring to the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
The actress and director suggested Scorsese could have better told the story from different angles with a longer streamer drama.
“Everybody was sort of excited that the native story was going to be told and what they found was like, ‘Wow, all the native women are dead’,” she said.
“They said, ‘Well, it’s a feature, we didn’t have time’, but there was time. There was an eight-hour limited series that was not made, that could have been made where, if you really needed to explore all the male toxic masculinity, you could have done that, but you could have had episode two actually centered on the native story.”
Foster’s comments were surprising given her strong bond with Scorsese ever since he cast her as a 12-year-old in Taxi Driver, and came less than 24 hours after the director sent a special video message to accompany her Marrakech tribute award ceremony on Saturday.
However, the comments were not said in negative manner.
Alluding to Scorsese’s “great” 2016 show Vinyl, Foster said she hoped Scorsese would do more high-end drama.
“I can’t wait until he embraces that even more, because he has so much to bring to the table,” she said of her longtime friend.
“So many filmmakers have so much to bring to the table, but they have this idea of, ‘Oh, wait I just want to make a feature, but I don’t want to make an hour and 45 minute feature, I want to make a five hour feature. You’re like, wait, why are we doing that in the theater?”
Robert De Niro Epiphany Moment
Earlier in the conversation, Foster recalled how working on Taxi Driver had been a transformative experience for her acting.
The star explained that having started out as an actor as a young child, her appetite for the profession had been wearing thin when she was cast for the film.
“I had a different vision of what an actor’s life was. I thought it was just somebody would give you a script, you would read the lines, you would learn the lines, maybe you would question a few of the lines, and then you you would be told to act naturally. That’s all I thought it was. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is not an interesting job. This is not enough for me’.”
She recounted how De Niro had taken her under his wing in preparation for the shoot and how they would go to local coffee shops to run through their lines together.
“At that time, he was very much in character… so he was really uninteresting. I remember these lunches with him, and just being like, ‘When can I go home?’,” she recounted.
Foster would have an epiphany moment, however, when he introduced her to improvisation during their third meeting.
“It opened my eyes to what acting could be and I realized, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table. I’ve been just saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different,” she recalled.
“I remember how excited I was. I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room, up the elevator to be with my mom, and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany’.
The Godfather was a limited series
Good not great film I’ll never watch again, Leo & de Niro both miscast.
Would’ve worked better if it was from the FBI agent or Mollie’s perspective.
Long live movie theatres!
I said the same thing about One Battle After Another. Would have been much better as a miniseries. I feel like there was more fleshing out to do in regard to Perfidia (Teyana Taylor’s role) especially. I also feel like Regina Hall’s character was robbed.
I think actually here it worked perfectly, not too much not too little which made the almost 3 hours fly by because they managed to keep that tension until the very end. I think its a masterpiecea and in my mind I went, this is what cinemas are made for. The letter at the end gave a perfect closure and also her not being present made you kind of miss her presence, brought you even closer to how her daughter & her father feel about her not being there. I totally agree with Foster on ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ though.
I never actually gave it any thought, but you’re 100% right.
After seeing it I did feel a bit cheated, I would have liked to see more character building