Martin Scorsese knows you can sit through 3.5 hours of Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese is on to you. Yeah, he knows you can rot in front of the TV for hours on end. So what's three and a half hours of Killers of the Flower Moon, anyway?

The acclaimed filmmaker, 80, defended the prolonged running time of his new Western drama in recent interview with The Hindustan Times. "People say it's three hours, but come on," Scorsese said. "You can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours. Also, there are many people who watch theatre for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can't get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect."

Scorsese is of course no stranger to long movies, with titles like Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman pushing or even exceeding three hours.

He added that his latest effort — starring Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro — is best enjoyed on the big screen. "Are we intending to make a blockbuster? No, we're making a movie, which should watched on the big screen," Scorsese said. "Other pictures I made? Maybe not. Sometimes, it's the strength of the picture too, if it plays well on a smaller screen, that's interesting. Killers could play on a small screen, but in order to truly immerse yourself, you should take out the time."

Adapted from David Grann's 2017 book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon centers on the suspicious murders of members of the Osage Native American tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, orchestrated by a cattleman named William Hale (played by De Niro) to obtain the wealth of the oil-rich tribe. Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow are also among the cast, with Scorsese taking a non-white-savior approach to the story that Osage Nation leader Chief Standing Bear said has "restored trust" with the tribe.

"After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys," Scorsese told Time in a recent interview. "Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me." Consulting producer Chad Renfro, who grew up in the area of Pawhuska, Okla., where much of the movie was filmed, added that Scorsese "made a story of trust and betrayal." The Osage community, he said, has suffered many betrayals "over hundreds of years of dealing with governmental agencies, and people who came in and took advantage of us."

Killers of the Flower Moon hits theaters Oct. 20.

Related content:

• Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio are out for blood in exclusive Killers of the Flower Moon clip
• Martin Scorsese rewrote Killers of the Flower Moon so it wasn't just 'about all the white guys'
• Leonardo DiCaprio must decide where his loyalties lie in Killers of the Flower Moon trailer