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In an interview shortly before his death, Robertson talked about his own Native heritage and said of getting to do a project that has its 'soul' in that world: 'You couldn't have made something like this up. This is so magical.'
When I spoke with Robbie Robertson over the phone in the last week of July, it was at what everyone might have expected would be the beginning of a great victory lap for the musician. His work with the Band in the late ‘60s through mid-‘70s had been properly commemorated, through a memoir and documentary that covered those crucial years. But the film work that had consumed so much of his attention in the decades since, almost all of it as a close collaborator with, and close friend, to Martin Scorsese? There hadn’t really been a proper nexus point to fully celebrate and explore that. And the impending release of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which had already premiered to considerable acclaim in Cannes, looked to provide it.
But first, it’s worth taking an extended breath to take in the strange magic of Robertson’s score for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and how, like so much of his ground-breaking work on- or off-screen, it feels like music that has emerged right out of the earth and feels like the music of the spheres.
Almost any time Robertson spoke, it was with a tone that seemed older and more seasoned than anyone alive and, at the same time, conveyed an enthusiasm that bordered on the positively boyish. Even though he admitted to being tired that day we spoke in late July, his zeal came through at every moment — most of all when he spoke about his long association with Scorsese, as if he was a kid who couldn’t wait to tell you about his new BFF, rather than somebody summing up a legacy for the thousandth time.
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