‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Ends With a Touching Dedication to Longtime Scorsese Collaborator Robbie Robertson

If you stay for the credits of Killers of the Flower Moon—which opens in theaters today—you’ll see that the movie is dedicated “in memory of Robbie Robertson.”

Yes, the new Martin Scorsese picture is a very long movie, and yes, you’ll likely be dying to use the bathroom as soon as the credits start to roll. But if you can hold it for a few minutes, it’s worth staying through the Killers of the Flower Moon credits. You can pay your respects to the many, many talented folks who helped put together the film, listen to the beautifully mixed sound of a rainstorm, and, perhaps most importantly, witness the touching that dedication to longtime Scorsese collaborator, Robbie Robertson. It’s just a simple text on screen, but for those who know the history between these two artists, it’s plenty meaningful.

Robertson was a musician who died in early August 2023 at the age of 80. The music for Killers of the Flower Moon is Robertson’s last on-screen project. He was best known as the guitarist and songwriter with the Band, who formerly backed Bob Dylan, before Dylan went solo in 1967. Robertson and Scorsese first collaborated on the 1978 Scorsese-directed music documentary, The Last Waltz, which memorialized the Band’s purported final show in San Francisco, featuring guests like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and more.

But that film was just the beginning of a decades-long partnership between Robertson and Scorsese. Robertson wrote the soundtracks for many Scorsese films, including Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Silence (2016), The Irishman (2019), and now, most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s Robertson’s final movie score.

In an interview conducted just days before he died, for the official Killers of the Flower Moon production notes, Robertson said the music in the film was inspired by the musician’s own experience living on the Six Nations Indian Reserve in the early years of his life. Robertson’s own mother was Cayuga and Mohawk, and was raised on a reservation before she married.

“I was gathering pictures in my head of music I heard as a child,” Robertson said. “I’m sitting there and my relatives are all sitting around with their instruments and singing and breathing and coming in. One guy would start a rhythm, and then somebody would start singing a melody to that. It was just haunting. The feeling of the music beside you like that, humming and droning, and the groove and the feel of it got under my skin, and it lives there forever.”

Robertson also researched the history of the Osage people and spent time with them in Oklahoma while writing. And, he said, it was perhaps an even deeper collaboration with Scorsese than their previous work. “I would send music to him and he would
come to me with what power was striking him. This movie, and this particular ritual with Marty this time, took us deeper, perhaps, than we’d ever gone before.”

Working on the film was, Robertson said, a deeply meaningful experience for him. “Starting at Six Nations when music comes along in my life… and then to my history with Martin Scorsese, all the movies leading up to Killers of the Flower Moon—the fact that we’re getting to do a western in our own way, you couldn’t have written this. We’re in awe ourselves that our brotherhood has outlasted everything. We’ve been through it. I am so proud of both our friendship and our work. They have been a gift in my life.”

Robertson didn’t know Killers of the Flower Moon would be his final Scorsese collab, but those almost read as beautiful final words for the late, great musician.