'Killers of the Flower Moon' Debuts At Cannes Film Festival

"Killers of the Flower Moon" got a boisterous nine-minute standing ovation after the three-hour epic premiered Saturday at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival.

Leonardo DiCaprio, director Martin Scorsese and the rest of the cast soaked up every second of the ovation displayed at Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France. Variety posted a snippet of the thunderous applause, and outlet's co-editor-in-chief, Ramin Setoodeh, reports that the nine-minute standing ovation is "the biggest and loudest" of the film festival so far.

According to Variety, Scorsese took the mic after the ovation and addressed the excited crowd.

"Thank you to the Osages," he said. "Everyone connected with the picture. My old pals Bob and Leo, and Jesse and Lily. We shot this a couple of years ago in Oklahoma. It’s taken it’s time to come around but Apple did so great by us. There was lots of grass. I’m a New Yorker. I was very surprised. This was an amazing experience. We lived in that world."

It was a sweet welcome for Scorsese, who returned to the famed film festival for the first time since After Hours premiered in the South of France in 1985. By the way, Killers of the Flower Moon also marks the fame director's seventh onscreen collaboration with DiCaprio, who looked dapper as ever in a classic tuxedo.

Earlier this week, Apple TV+ shared the first teaser trailer for the highly anticipated film, giving fans a first look at the upcoming Western crime drama, which centers on a series of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, after oil is discovered on tribal land in the Osage Nation.

The film, which reportedly worked with a $200 million budget and with a total duration of 3 hours and 26 minutes, is based on the nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

"Greed is an animal that hungers for blood," promises the trailer, amid scenes of violent confrontation and corruption.

The film stars DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart and First Cow's Lily Gladstone as his wife, Mollie. Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow and Tantoo Cardinal are also in the film.