LOS ANGELES, USA – Leonardo DiCaprio showed up as a surprise guest when his frequent collaborator, Martin Scorsese, received the inaugural Legend of Cinema award from CinemaCon, the largest annual gathering of movie theater owners from around the world, on April 27 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Martin received the award, which will be an annual one to be named after the maestro filmmaker, from Jackie Brenneman, executive vice president and general counsel of the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO), which organizes the yearly gathering.

The revered filmmaker then sat down for a conversation as part of the events of CinemaCon. Leonardo appeared as the surprise “interviewer” in the Q&A with Martin during the luncheon at Caesar Palace’s Octavius Ballroom, hosted by Fathom Events.

Earlier that day, Paramount Pictures screened the first footage of Killers of the Flower Moon, the sixth film of the director and his muse.

Leonardo, wearing a suit over a polo shirt, appeared ready with his questions, written on index cards, for Martin, whom he calls Marty.

Sitting side by side, cinema’s acclaimed pair talked about the theatrical versus streaming conundrum, how being a sickly child resulted in Martin’s passion for cinema that opened his eyes to the world and the leading directors then, film restoration (his other love), the director’s work process on and off set, and of course, Killers of the Flower Moon.

In the absorbing conversation widely reported in the media, the 48-year-old actor began by praising Martin’s astounding filmography.

Leonardo enthused, “It’s a body of work that will be revered for centuries, generations to come. His work with the Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project is helping ensure the preservation of our collective cinematic history and has instilled the potential of that reverence and passion for movie-making in an entirely new generation.”

“For the past 22 years, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to witness first-hand how much he’s contributed to the art of filmmaking and preservation. I’m truly grateful for my experiences working with you.”

Then DiCaprio lobbied his first question to Scorsese, dapper at 80 years old in a suit and tie: “My first question begins with theatrical release, the film experience, that inexplicable connection that you have with the audience watching movies.”

“If you could talk about the importance of seeing films projected on the film screen as opposed to the at-home experience and what we’re seeing now in the cinema industry with the onset of streamers.”

Martin, a staunch advocate of theatrical releases, answered, “There is a big difference when you go to a theater, and as I say, that’s somewhat comfortable and the screen is big enough and the projection is good. When you go to that theater, you have to pay attention to that film. Because that’s what’s up there on the wall. Everything else around you is dark.”

“You got a lot of people. At home, you could control it. You could stop the film; you could get up and walk around. In the theater, you can’t. It’s there. It’s happening at that moment for everybody at once.”

“And you know if you go see Avatar, one of the big blockbusters, the audience experience is amazing. But I’ve also seen in my day, that experience was amazing, like, for North By Northwest. It was amazing for Strangers on a Train and Psycho – I was there the fourth night, midnight show at the DeVille Theater in New York.”

“You never heard an audience like that. Screaming. Wild. And so, to experience that, as I say, it’s communal. And it translates differently to the audience.”

“And one very important thing about this preservation business, of this idea of restoration, I think a lot of people may say, ‘Oh, these movies, this guy’s interested in movies.’”

“Movies are not a simple genre. It’s our culture. It’s really who we are; it says who we are.”

“Maybe sometimes it says things about stuff we don’t like but it says who we are. And also, film combines all the other art forms. Just to edit from one shot to another is choreography. It’s poetry.”

“Putting two words together on a page in a certain way, putting two images together in a film in a certain way. It’s poetry. So, it involves all the other art forms. And what happens is that we learn who we are.”

Martin brought up film restoration. “I was very interested in restoring African films because I fell in love with this film called La noire de…(Black Girl) that he (Ousmane Sembene) made.”

“And he pointed out that if we don’t start, the Africans themselves, or have help from others to do this, if we don’t start restoring the films that they made themselves of themselves, not whites coming and making films about them, but about themselves – if we don’t, those movies in the ’60s and ’70s, a lot of them are gone.”

“They said if we don’t restore them, the future Africans won’t know who they are. And the film gets out there. It does get out there.”

“So, for me, if I was a writer, I guess I’d feel the same way. I’d have everybody going around memorizing books like in Fahrenheit 451.”

“But with me, it was cinema. And cinema introduced me to movies, introduced me to everything – dance, theater, of course, music of all kinds. Because I came from a family that was working class, we couldn’t afford theater.”

“So, it was the movies that we all went to. And I learned about the outside world through movies. I saw Satyajit Ray’s film, Pather Panchali, on TV dubbed in English in 1959.”

“I realized that this is a film made by the people that I usually see in British or American films who are in the background fanning the white guys. Oh, so the humanity is there. As a kid, I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. They live like that.’”

“So, the cinema opened up the world to me. Otherwise, I would not have had that possibility.”

Realizing he gave a long answer, Martin quipped, “I’ll try to be shorter.” The audience laughed but no one was complaining. How often do you hear a one-on-one between Martin and Leonardo as an after-lunch treat?

Leonardo said, “What struck me when I first got the opportunity to work with you was what an incredible teacher you were. Not only to the actors but to the entire group.”

“And we’d often have screenings that would set the tone, not only for a specific scene but the entire narrative of the project we were doing.”

“These screenings were so incredibly important and vital to creating the work that I did. And in particular, for the Killers of the Flower Moon, you and I talked about a lot of Montgomery Cliff’s work. We talked about Red River, A Place in the Sun…The Heiress as an inspiration for the narrative of this movie.”

“And it’s very interesting to see Marty when he’s at work because there is this almost a subconscious reel of films that is constantly flowing in his trailer through Turner Classic Movies. He’s working on a piece of the script or he is working out a shot.”

“And these images are in the background – the inspiration of the great directors in the past that are constantly forming his work and in the narrative picture.”

“When did you first start to analyze how movies were directed and how, in your own words, you were inspired by the great films and directors of the past?”

Martin replied, “Well, because I was so very sick. I had asthma at the age of three. It was 1946, and I was kept from any sports, any running, any laugh that could become convulsive.”

“And so, they didn’t know what to do with me so they brought me to the movies (laughter). They really didn’t. So, for me, the movies were my outlet.”

“Obviously, at the age of five or six years old, it’s a different thing, it’s a fantasy. I saw The Wizard of Oz in 1948 on the screen. It was one of the great experiences.”

“The first film I saw, the title I think was Duel in the Sun, which was a frightening experience. I think I’ve never gotten over it. I was five years old at the time.”

“At the same time, there was a station in New York on TV. We had a small TV, 16-inch, in 1949, that showed Italian films on a Friday night for the Italian community in Queens Center, New York.”

“My mother had my grandparents come over, to look at Bicycle Thieves. And I saw that these were movies but they seemed to be no difference between the people who lived with me at home and my grandparents who were crying while watching the movie.”

“And so, cinema somehow became in more ways, the escape. I loved the technical. So, the escape, and at the same time there was a truth that was achieved with the same technology. And it was touching not only the rest of the world but it was touching people – my grandparents, mother, father.”

“And that’s why those films are so good. So, for me, the Hollywood classical cinema you find in John Ford. At a certain point, I was about 15, they showed Citizen Kane on TV. There were editing and commercials.”

“That changed my perception and that made me think about what technology can do. And people would say, ‘Well, you need a new camera.’ Well, where are you putting the camera and things like that. He told the story through vision, yes with the script, of course, but the vision was an extraordinary experience.”

“At the same time, I started to explore more and more foreign films. I walk in in the middle of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and then I see Battleship Potemkin. I fell in love with the Soviet montage, the editing.”

“I think it was Citizen Kane and The Third Man that made me begin to understand what you can do with a camera and with the impact that there must be a person behind that camera, besides the directors, writers, and the whole crew working this way.”

“That did not take away from the appreciation of American classical stuff. You look at The Grapes of Wrath – it’s still a great film but it made me aware that we can make the camera speak.”

Leonardo said, “I remember seeing recently, or someone else talking about Citizen Kane and how he (Orson Welles) was able to achieve some of those shots, and his answer was, ‘It was sheer ignorance.’ The ability to take chances because he didn’t know the rules.”

Martin responded, “That’s one of the great things you learn. I know it’s scary when people give you (a camera) and they say, ‘Go make a film,’ but one of the great things you can do is bring in ignorance.”

“I’m going to do this because I don’t know any other way. And eventually, they find a way. There he was looking at Gregg Toland (cinematographer).”

Leonardo added, “That’s exactly why you wanted to work with a young Orson Welles because he didn’t know the rules.”

Martin said, “He didn’t. Right. It’s interesting. They have rules. It was a factory. They were making films. They’re studios and they had a certain thing. They had stars and the stars represented certain things to the public and people expected certain genres.”

“Yes, they had a way of doing it. Who’s this guy coming in and changing the world? Who’s going to take a chance? And of course, he (Welles) did change the world.”

Leonardo saved the final part of the engrossing conversation for Killers of the Flower Moon, which he and Martin will premiere out of competition in the coming Cannes Film Festival. The crime drama history is Martin’s eleventh collaboration with his other muse, Robert De Niro.

The film, which also stars Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser, is based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same title on a series of Oklahoma murders in the Osage Nation in the 1920s. The killings began after oil was discovered on Native American tribal land.

The actor plays Ernest Burkhart, one of the key figures in the Osage murders. Lily portrays Mollie Burkhart.

Leonardo began the chat on the film by saying, “I got the opportunity the other day to speak to David Grann and I just wanted to give the audience here, the people in this room, some sort of context, for those of you who haven’t read the book, some context about the history of this forgotten part of our past.”

“So, I asked him to write a little something, and this is what he gave. He said, ‘In the late 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the wealthiest people per capita in the country because oil had been discovered under their land.”

“Then, one by one, they began to die under mysterious circumstances. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of one of American history’s most censored conspiracies and terrible racial injustices.”

“Like the Tulsa race massacre, which occurred only 30 miles away during that same period, this critical chapter has long been erased from our nation’s history books. A century after these crimes, we’ve tried to shine a light on a true story.”

“Killers was filmed in Oklahoma, in the very place where these events took place, and several relatives of Osage’s perished appeared in the film. It is an American crime story that is less about who did it than who didn’t. It is about widespread complicity and conspiracy and ultimately, it is about reckoning with our past that is long overdue.’”

Then Leonardo asked, “In the case of the film, Killers of the Flower Moon, what was your specific process in telling this incredibly insidious part of our collective history in the actual location where they occurred? And what was your approach with that, and just realizing that some characters really screwed up?”

Martin answered, “For me, it was, as you recall, the journey they’re taking, the writing of the script, and when they made the big change, my interest as a human being was, how some of these guys, some of these people in the story, could have done what they did.”

“And yet at the same time, accepted in themselves, at the same time said, ‘We love them,’ you know, and then rationalized by saying, ‘It’s a civilization, one comes in, the other goes out. It’s just natural. Just part of the tragedy.’”

“And I wonder how we could create that world where you take the audience, and you put them, instead of the good guys coming in, the Bureau of Investigations, the FBI, coming in and putting an end to it, or as much as possible, putting an end to it, and what if you (Leonardo) had the idea of playing Ernest, as we were talking about during different parts of the movie, he said, ‘Let’s do…Ernest.’”

“He said, ‘Ernest is true.’ I said, ‘That’s where the heart of the picture is.’ It turns out that we learn from many of the Osages there, that Ernest and Mollie were the ones really who were in love with each other.”

“And yet, what he did and how she trusted. And I said, ‘How does that happen? How can we create that?’ So, we just put ourselves into that world of those people, and his character developed that way, line by line, scene by scene, we kept working and working on the script until the last day of shooting.”

Martin added, “When we first got to Oklahoma, the Osage, we had a big meeting with them. And then there was another group of Osage, at Gray Horse, who made a big dinner for us, and as each one got up and spoke, I realized, wait, this is the story, right here. This is the one.”

“They spoke about what it was like, and how the members of their families suffered and were killed and yet these new people that film is about, were in love. And I said, ‘Okay, there’s love and there’s murder at the same time.’”

“It’s about land. It’s all about greed. And so, for me, it was immersing ourselves in that world and the only way to do it was to go there and be there, and stay there, and be with the Osages.”

The prolific director turned to Leonardo and shared, “You’d make a joke about it all the time. You say, ‘Marty never came out of the house.’”

“They rented this house for me. An old man had it, he had died, and it was a big place. He had nurses and had a dog and everything. But it was rather oversized. It’s like, giant in the movie.”

“And I’m a small guy so all the chairs, I couldn’t reach anything. But I stayed there because I was making a movie. And when I’m sitting alone in a room, I’m making a movie.”

“To go out, dinners, forget it. I couldn’t do it because we’re on edge all the time, to make sure we did right by them. Someone said it the other night. He said to me, ‘I wonder if how many of us are capable of such a thing, the complicity of the genocide?’ Complicity.”

“He said, ‘Well, if some of us are capable, that means all of us are capable of it.’ Because you want it to go away. We don’t want to think about it. And so, that’s the character we dealt with but we lived in it.”

“And by the way, we shot in the actual locations. Even the doctor’s office, and the Masonic Lodge, in the actual buildings.”

“I guess I look back at every film I made like another universe. I remember my children and stuff and the role they were in. I look back at it, we were in that universe, and I liked it, in a way. It was tough.”

“It wasn’t an easy film to make. I am a New Yorker and there are prairies out there. There are violent horses, coyotes, yeah. I mean, whatever. We immersed ourselves in trying to write about them as much as possible.”

Leonardo wrapped up by saying, ‘Well, I think that’s all the time we have.” The actor got to ask only about four questions since his director gave lengthy answers, but what a scintillating half-hour conversation it was. – Rappler.com