Nobody appreciates cinema more than the entire filmography of Jonas Mekas). Be sure to click Read notes in the list description to get Scorsese’s expanded thoughts on each of his selections.

Of course, Scorsese’s ion for film appreciation has long predated our site: in 1995, he hosted A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, a three-episode series in which he shared anecdotes, historical context and articulate insights about the pictures that made him who he is today. It presciently captures our guiding light here at Letterboxd: to convert the act of watching films into a personal diary, to create and share our own canons, to learn more about ourselves, our colleagues, our friends, our families, the artists we ire and the world around us. 

Killers of the Flower Moon, based on David Grann’s 2017 true-crime book of the same name, details the investigation by the then-fledgling FBI into the systemic murders of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma in the 1920s, all at the hands of greedy white interlopers intent on siphoning the Native Americans’ oil wealth. At the center of the film are Osage heiress Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and her new-in-town husband Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a coyote-brained man pushed to commit heinous crimes at the behest of his ruthless uncle (Robert De Niro). “Westerns, spirituality, organized crime and an unraveling American Mythos… possibly the most exemplary film of Scorsese’s nearly six-decade career,” writes Letterboxd member Stevie. “An Oscar for Leo. A Nobel Prize for Lily. A Presidential Medal of Freedom for Thelma Schoonmaker.”

As my colleague Brian Formo reported in his two-part CinemaCon recap, Scorsese and co-screenwriter Eric Roth rehauled the script—after listening to concerns from DiCaprio and former Osage Chief Jim Gray, among others—to focus more on the Osage themselves rather than the FBI’s investigation, working closely with the Indigenous community to help portray their story with authenticity and respect.

When I met the director recently to learn more about the ways in which his curated selection of Western morality tales, complicated romances and underseen silent films impacted Killers of the Flower Moon, the 80-year-old living legend also opened up about how this very ability to listen with intent has informed and improved his storytelling throughout his decades-long career.

Even though it’s based on a 1947 play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which itself was based on Henry James’ 1880 novel, Washington Square, Scorsese is still careful not to spoil the ending (“I don’t want to give away The Heiress; you should see this,” he urges). With that in mind, he treads carefully: “What’s interesting is, ultimately, how Catherine makes her decision towards the end of the film… The thing about it is: does he [Morris] really want her, or does he want her money? That’s the key."

Scorsese alludes to the picture’s subversive conclusion as he continues pondering Catherine’s choice: “She does what she does. Now, ultimately, whether she’s right or wrong—in other words, whether she reads him right or reads him incorrectly—it’s not important. She makes that change. She becomes strong. As she tells her father, ‘I have good teachers because you told me how not to love.’ It was very powerful. I always felt that Morris, the character played by Clift, when he came back, I don’t think he did love her. And Leo said, ‘Well, what if he did?’”

Mollie and Catherine share more than just character beats, I suggest. There’s a spiritual and physical similarity in their stillness, flickering behind the actresses’ eyes. “Even Lily Gladstone has the appearance of Olivia de Havilland. There’s no doubt. She really looks that way,” Scorsese agrees. “Catherine is very strong, and she doesn’t give in at that point. I think Mollie is the strongest person in this film, played by Lily. Ultimately, she makes a decision. Not to give away anything in my movie, but it’s [about] how far does love go, you know? And she holds and holds and holds until she decides.”

As for DiCaprio, Scorsese describes Clift’s work in The Heiress and in other roles as “a big influence” for the character of Ernest. “Leo would talk about A Place in the Sun—[based on the play] An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser—which we had here in this list, too,” he says. “In a case like that, when he moves that little rowboat, is he really intending for her to go over? There’s a doubt there. There really is a doubt. He has all the evidence that he wants her gone, but is it really in him, you know?”

A later George Stevens picture made an even larger impact. “Let’s not forget the other key film, Giant!” Scorsese emphasizes. “Giant overshadows all this in a sense, because of the great visuals and great production design and wonderful actors and direction by George Stevens. I couldn’t be specific about it, but Giant always was in the back of our heads. It’s always there because it made such a major impression on me when I was a kid.”

In regards to Clift, Scorsese praises his performances for being “very subtle, particularly in Howard Hawks’ 1948 Western interrogates another Texas-set rivalry, this time between a dogmatic cattle rancher (John Wayne) and his adopted adult son (Clift), an orphan whose tender heart compels him to eventually lead a mutiny against his father-figure’s outdated management.

“It’s interesting because the relationship between John Wayne—his greatest performance next to, I’d say, The Searchers—and Montgomery Clift is almost biblical in a way,” he says. “The struggle between the father and the son was very, very important to us in how it reflected itself in Bill Hale, played by De Niro, and Ernest, played by Leo.”

Red River flows from the same headwater stream as another Clift vehicle on Scorsese’s list, not only because the two share a leading man and similar title: Elia Kazan finds Clift as a bureaucrat named Chuck, tasked with overseeing the building of a dam in rural Tennessee. The job involves a lot of convincing: of a racist mayor to desegregate and fairly pay Black laborers, and of an octogenarian widow to accept a settlement in exchange for the flooding of her property, situated on an island in the middle of the Tennessee River.

“In Wild River, this is a man coming in from the outside into an area that is really another world, another planet,” the director explains. “He’s using reason: everything in his kit, so to speak, doesn’t work where he is. They think differently, they work differently, they behave differently and they live differently. They have a different philosophy, yet he has to find the heart of that. The heart comes from Lee Remick.”

Remick plays the widow’s granddaughter, Carol, whom Chuck falls for. “There’s a beautiful scene of the two of them kissing in the car, and there’s a tree reflected on the windshield and she keeps telling him, ‘You can’t get enough of me, can you? You can’t get enough,’” says Scorsese. “That became the scene with Leo and Lily in the car where she goes, ‘Look, your hand on my skin,’ and he says, ‘I want to marry you, I love you.’ All of that came from the tone and mood of Wild River.”

Currently hovering at around 5,000 watches on Letterboxd, Wild River is one of the lesser-seen pictures on Scorsese’s list of Flower Moon companions, just above Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon. In the notes of his Letterboxd list, Scorsese writes that the 1948 noir Western is included for “the friendship between Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston, which goes wrong in a way that was close to Leo and Bob De Niro in Killers, and also for the way the actors look in the frame, and the clumsy, grungy, seemingly unchoreographed fight in a low-ceilinged, dark cantina, which has always stayed in my mind.”

“I want you to see The Last of the Line,” he urges of the film by Thomas H. Ince and Jay Hunt, with a caveat: “Interestingly enough, at that point, one of the key characters is played not by a Native American. All the others are played by Native Americans, but the son of the chief is played by Sessue Hayakawa, who was a great star around that time.”

Scorsese continues: “In any event, [it deals with] the destruction of the very fabric of the culture of the Indigenous people, and particularly the guy [Joe Goodboy] who plays the chief. I think he was 80 years old at the time, not an actor. The last image of him mourning his son, it’s as if it just speaks for the loss of all those cultures. There’s something about it, because it has to do with Christian symbolism—and that’s something that always stuck with me.”

The Last of the Line crams quite a bit of American history into its 24-minute runtime, and The Lady of the Dugout does the same, albeit with a wieldier 60 minutes. Scorsese provides context on the latter, explaining, “It’s interesting because Al Jennings. Al Jennings, he and his brother were real outlaws. He went to jail, he came out, he saw the light and he became a movie director, movie actor and movie producer.”

Scorsese goes on to praise the inchoate silent Western for “its essence of minimalism,” because, “in other words, this is really the way it must have happened, and you see it in their costumes… and also how people are living underground in a dugout. It was just extraordinary, to want to come out that far and live underground.”

Elaborating on The Lady of the Dugout’s reverberating influence throughout the entire Western genre, Scorsese says, “There’s a robbery sequence of a town at the end that is the basis of all the big robbery sequences of a bank in certain movies later on: the Jesse James [film], The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid; particularly the beginning of The Wild Bunch, [Sam] Peckinpah, where the people in the town are waiting for them and they didn’t realize.”

However, another caveat: “The flaw with the picture,” he begins, “is it became a situation where—very often, you still have it now—there were a number of people glorifying the bad guy. A lot of films were made against him, but this was one of the big hits. This is also a film that’s been restored by the Film Foundation. It had the spirit of what the West really might have looked like in motion pictures, not just in stills, and the coolness of Jennings’ performance—basically he’s doing what he did in life. So, for me, I thought it would be interesting for people to see it.”

Encouraged by his willingness to listen—to Burstyn, to his Osage Nation collaborators, to so many others he has created films with—I’m eager to understand why, for Scorsese, listening is such an integral skill to hone in order to create more meaningful art. “For me, it has to do with curiosity,” he replies. “It has to do with who you are, and if I’m gonna work with you, I need to know you. That doesn’t mean I need to know you completely as a person—your personal life, that sort of thing—but who you are, how you think, where you want to go with the art we’re trying to make. If you have limitations, if you won’t do certain things, maybe we’re not meant to be working together, you know?”

Scorsese concludes: “But if you bring ideas and I get excited by those ideas, and we work on them together, or they accept what I have given them and really understand and want to pursue that and make that real, that’s wonderful. With Ellen; the Osage; the Tibetans in Kundun; in Morocco, where we shot The Last Temptation of Christ; the Japanese in Silence and shooting in Taiwan… These are, in a way, blessings for me, because I get to learn more about who we are as people.”

In the spirit of Scorsese, and of story sovereignty, we’ll leave 𐓏𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 (Osage) Letterboxd member Joel Robinson with the last word. The following is an excerpt from his insightful, spoiler-free Killers of the Flower Moon review, which we encourage you to read in full:

“It’s important to me that you, the non-Osage reader of this lengthy piece, know that this is merely a chapter in Osage history. While the effects of the Reign of Terror still live with us today, we do not live as victims. We are a proud, resilient people and our tribe is a thriving nation. I know that for many of you, this will be your first exposure to our people. I do hope it’s not the last.”