The three-and-a-half-hour movie, Killers Of The Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street), was thought to have worked better as an eight-hour streaming drama, as suggested by Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver), according to Deadline.
At the Marrakech Film Festival, the Oscar-winning actress and director commented on stage on Sunday, where she was given a tribute award this weekend via Deadline. Based on her experience with True Detective, Foster was addressing her view on cinema’s future and her approval of the streaming series format. Foster posited that these dramas have taken the place of feature films for exploring expansive storytelling.
“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 via Deadline.
“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.”
Deadline reported that the actress used Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book–about the murders targeting Osage tribe members in Oklahoma during the 1920s–as an example of a story better suited for a prestigious streaming series format than for 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, according to Deadline, referring to the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
Telling the story from different angles was the main suggestion from Foster, alongside 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 via Deadline.
“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 remarks were startling, given her close relationship with Scorsese since her casting in Taxi Driver at age 12. The comments were delivered just a day after the director paid tribute to her with a special video during her Marrakech award ceremony on Saturday, according to Deadline.