‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman: ‘The invisible work’ is ‘just as difficult’ as any film [Exclusive Video Interview]

Most people probably don’t associate Martin Scorsese with computer-generated imagery, but visual effects have played a key role in several recent films from the master filmmaker, including his latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” As visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman says in an exclusive video interview with Gold Derby as part of our Meet the Experts: Visual Effects panel, 85 minutes of the 206-minute feature have some kind of visual effect.

“The first thing that Marty said to me was, ‘I want your work to be completely invisible. I don’t want to see it, I want these historical references to be what dictates whatever we’re doing,’” Helman explains.

The visual effects supervisor – a three-time Oscar nominee who previously worked with Scorsese on “Silence,” “Rolling Thunder Revue,” and “The Irishman” – says a key aspect of his work on “Killers of the Flower Moon” was being embedded with the production in Oklahoma. The film tells the story of the Osage Indian murders during the 1920s, and much of it was shot near where the actual genocide depicted in the film took place.

“It’s always great working with Marty. I’m always learning something from him. He’s always willing to talk about film and why he does what he does,” Helman says. For “Flower Moon,” “everything has to be completely consistent with this story,” he adds. “It’s just living with that environment that makes the work, in the end, look realistic. Because when I’m working with the artists, I’m remembering the smells, the weather, the tactile sense of working with Marty.”

While there are maybe some obvious places where Helman’s work helped enhance the period piece – a shot toward the beginning of the film that depicts oil fields littered with active derricks, for instance – many of his contributions might surprise those who have seen the film.

“The last shot of the movie, looking down on the drum and then coming out 200 feet up in the air, taking a look at hundreds of Osage dancers that were completely CG because we didn’t have this many [actors],” Helman reveals of the film’s final shot – a present-day sequence that features a large community dance. “Marty had a sense of finishing the movie with the eye of the Osage people. So looking at it from the top and getting people to dance and form an eye – that was all done through visual effects.”

Helman was also responsible for helping to visualize how Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and her sisters were slowly poisoned, many to death.

“We tried to do it with makeup but because we shot it out of continuity, and because the edit changed, we had to reinvent how we would make them sicker throughout the movie,” Helman reveals.

“We all cringe when we hear somebody talking about how a movie is bloated with visual effects or whatever. And I know that it’s not that way,” Helman adds. “What we do is very difficult work. But it’s good to work on something to tell the world that we do other things – and that those things, the invisible work, are as difficult and as voluminous, as all the other work that we do in visual effects. And it’s great to be recognized for that.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” from Apple Original Films is in theaters now.

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