Interview With 'Killers Of The Flower Moon' Author David Grann (from 2017)

I interviewed the author of Scorsese's latest adaptation about his book a few years. Here it is again for your listening pleasure.

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Howdy, gang. I saw Killers Of The Flower Moon last night, and long story short it was a masterpiece, finding the emotional center of an insanely difficult-to-adapt book and fitting the entire thing squarely into Martin Scorsese’s life and legacy. It feels too big to try to turn around a review for in 24 hours, which is the drawback of the normal deadlines legacy media movie critics tend to have.

That’s coming soon, but in the meantime, as luck would have it, I interviewed David Grann, author of the best-selling book on which the movie was based, back in 2017. We got deep into what the book meant, the characters involved, why he wanted to write it, what it means, and how he reported it. At the very least, it’s a nice little background/companion piece for the film (which is much different than the book, even if most of the facts are the same).

Here’s how I described the book in the part of the review I am willing to share right now:

Flower Moon the book is a lot of things, but mostly it’s the story of a genocide told through the structure of a true crime tale. Grann delivers a barn burner of a murder mystery about a greedy landowner, his cat’s-paw nephew, his nephew’s Osage wife, and the FBI agent who uncovers it all, before zooming out to reveal that it was all part of a larger-scale plan of dispossession and erasure in which virtually the entire state of Oklahoma was complicit.

De Niro plays that landowner, William Hale, with DiCaprio as the cat’s-paw, William Burkhart and Lily Gladstone as the wife, Mollie Burkhart.

Here’s the interview audio below (which I’ll also be sharing to our podcast Patreon and free feed). Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to that in addition to this — you have no idea how gratifying it is to watch all those numbers go up, allowing us to do the kind of writing, reporting, and audio entertainment that don’t quite fit into the traditional, ad-supported media boxes.

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-Apologies for the light posting this week, I was working on some stuff for GQ and a freelance piece for a traditional publication that I’ll hopefully be able to link to soon. It’s about the state of the biopic and it was sort of a bitch to wrestle into shape, but hopefully it’s finally there (I like to think I expanded on some of the ideas presented here). Just as a sidenote, if you know anyone who’d be good to pitch a book idea to, definitely drop me a line.

-If you’re in or anywhere near Fresno this weekend, Taco Truck Throwdown is on Saturday. I got to judge back in 2016 and wrote about Fresno’s taco culture in 2022 — things I’ve grateful to have gotten to write about even though I’m still pretty bitter about my Uproxx departure. Mike Oz puts these on and, in addition to being my taco tourguide, he’s one of the good ones.