By Adam Bloodworth
Killers of the Flower Moon sound editor Mark Ulano reflects on filming with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese in the height of the pandemic
One of the most memorably grim scenes in new Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon depicts Robert De Niro’s character King beating Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest, bent over a table, with a heavy bat.
It’s a signifier of the evil of DeNiro’s character, a white political leader who murdered Native Americans from the Osage tribe for their wealth. In the scene, King lands the bat onto DiCaprio with a deep but flat thud. It is particularly menacing because it sounds so real.
“If you turn the sound off and experience the scene purely as visual, it’s absent of its heart,” says the film’s sound editor Mark Ulano, describing the importance of sound in the scene. “We complete the sounds, we complete the idea, the emotional connection. If you watch us all day doing what we do you’ll have no idea what we’re doing, we’re very sneaky that way.”
Ulano was responsible for creating the soundscape of Killers, from crafting how the soundtrack sits with the visual scenes to putting the microphones on set in places where the sound will be picked up best and made to sound fullest. It’s obvious to say that sound is always important in feature films, but perhaps more so in Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese paid homage to the people of the Native American Osage tribe by hiring Osage natives as consultants on the film, and so giving an authentic audio-visual account of their ways of life was integral.
Throughout the filming process, Martin Scorsese trust Ulano to work autonomously. “His leadership is about trust in the front end and delegating that trust to advocates who will interpret successfully his ideas,” says Ulano. “If you break that trust you’ve disregarded your responsibility in the first place, so that’s primary for me, and Marty expects that from people who are around him. He would be hurt if you were not standing up to that responsibility.”
Filming took place in Oklahoma in the height of Covid which made the process “brutal”, says Ulano. “It was brutal, it was 110 Fahrenheit in the shade and the height of covid. There were 110 Covid personnel alone just to manage the protocols in a state that had 22 per cent vaccination rate and not a hospital bed available in the entire state. People who would look dirty at you if you had a mask on if you went to the local Walmart.”
I could close my eyes and hear his Leonardo DiCaprio’s inner tension
Throughout Killers there is tribal music, particularly through the use of a drumbeat, as well as traditional dancing and spoken language. It depicts as close to an authentic sense of the Osage tribe as possible on the big screen. “Even if we don’t know the language we hear this sort of rhythm in it that we manifest a lot of the culture of the Osage,” says Ulano. Given the nature of the plot, which Ulano says has “evil” within it, the sound designer says that creating the sonic landscape was about “getting it right, getting it accurate. Not maudlin, not overdone, but exactly proportionate.”
The film features celebratory montages of Osage people performing dances, as well as that recurrent drumbeat which builds tension, and conversations in their mother tongue. “Speaking Osage changed the way I even moved as Mollie,” said Lily Gladstone, who plays the central Osage character, in conversation with the Motion Pictures Association.
Getting the intonation right in these key scenes is also Ulano’s job. “I could close my eyes and hear his [Leonardo DiCaprio’s] inner tension through his character because of how he designed his voice to be,” says Mark Ulano. “And how I use my tools to capture those tonalities so that it gets to the audience not in the head but the heart.” Killers is being tipped for Oscars nods. It wouldn’t be the first time at the podium for Ulano, who has worked on more than 120 films since 1975 and won the Best Sound gong for Titanic.
The sound editor believes his long relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio made Killers a better film. He says he and DiCaprio “track each other in our career progression over these 25 years,” and on the set of Killers, DiCaprio introduced Ulano to Scorsese as the duo had never met before. “Leo pulled me and introduced me to Marty and made it welcoming at a peerage level in their old and established relationship. That made it a doorway for me for trust that short circuited the usual run up,” says Ulano.
“It was money in the bank for the film. Yes it’s very satisfying for me but you know… that extra bit coming from that source helped the film because it helped our relationship.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas now
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