Scorsese explained, “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys. Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.” He also added, “I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.” Before the rewrite, Scorsese had spent two years writing Killers of the Flower Moon.