Two-time Academy Award-winning actor and director Jodie Foster reflects on one of the projects by her longtime friend, Martin Scorsese, and says that the film would have worked better under a different format. Foster is referring to Killers of the Flower Moon, the $215 million drama produced by Apple Studios that didn’t gross nearly enough to cover its budget when it was released in 2023. While the actor did not say that a different format would have represented more profit, she does imply that, at least, it would have covered all the angles in the story, including those that felt lacked depth.
Per Deadline‘s report, Foster was present at the Marrakech Film Festival, where she was given an award for her decade-long career. During her acceptance speech, the actor highlighted the streaming format, and how it could help directors tell wholesome stories with much longer narratives. Using Killers of the Flower Moon as an example, the Oscar winner said that the long 206-minute film could have had a better result if made as a TV series:
“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.
“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.’ 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.”
Jodie Foster Believes the Future Is in Streaming
Jodie Foster’s take on Killers of the Flower Moon has merit, but it’s distant from Scorsese’s usual style of production and his movies. Although he got close to Netflix and Apple TV for The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, his relationship with the streamers regards the creative liberties of pursuing ambitious films with mammoth-like budgets. He doesn’t seem keen on telling stories in a TV series format. While Foster does have a point that the film could have benefited from a serial narrative, it’s not likely to see Scorsese, Leonard DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in such a small-screen project.
The actor and director behind films and shows like Nell and True Detective continued praising the streaming realm, and says it’s the format where “real narrative” has a place nowadays. Foster says that franchise films are for theaters, but television offers the “freedom” of exploring other angles:
“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.
“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.
“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.”
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