By Yasmin Omar
Martin Scorsese is famed for his long-running collaborations. There’s his creative partnership with editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and actors Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Perhaps less known is his working relationship with casting director Ellen Lewis, who has sourced talent for his projects for over three decades. During that time, she helped launch the careers of Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013) and Juliette Lewis (Cape Fear, 1991), and has populated Scorsese’s wide-ranging cinematic worlds, from 19th-century New York high society in The Age of Innocence (1993) to the Las Vegas of Casino (1995). ‘Because I’ve worked with Marty so long, I do hold a little place in his brain,’ she says, with a smile.
Their latest venture is Killers of the Flower Moon, a haunting, true-crime story detailing the genocide of the newly oil-rich Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, which required a massive ensemble of white and Indigenous actors. As soon as Lewis heard that Scorsese was considering the project, she immediately contacted Rene Haynes – a former colleague on Netflix’s Western miniseries Godless (2017) – who specialises in Indigenous casting (her credits include finding the Native extras for Dances with Wolves [1990] and The Twilight Saga’s wolf pack). Bringing on Haynes was crucial, Lewis says, because ‘authenticity is the most important thing in my job’. To this end, Lewis has made a habit of seeking guidance from local-community experts throughout her career, as she did for Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), Hugo (2012) and Silence (2016).
