Martin Scorsese on Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon Score

When Robbie Robertson and The Band performed their final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in November 1976, it was clearly an ending for the group, as expressed in the title of the 1978 film Martin Scorsese made about the event, “The Last Waltz.” While that movie — by virtually any imaginable criteria, the greatest rock and roll film ever made — documented a farewell, it itself represented a new beginning: a collaboration between Scorsese and Robertson that would last nearly 50 years and yield an astonishing series of masterpieces including “Raging Bull,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and most recently “Killers of the Flower Moon,” for which Robertson — who died last August at the age of 80 — posthumously scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

Robertson’s work in “Killers” is the apotheosis of his partnership with Scorsese, a score that exhibits the passion, variety, and depth of expression familiar from Robertson’s compositions in Scorsese films like “The Color of Money” and “The Irishman” but points in new directions. For Scorsese, it represents the culmination of everything he and Robertson had been working toward since they first met in the mid-1970s. “I suppose I think of it as a culmination for a few reasons,” Scorsese told IndieWire. “First of all, Robbie’s gone now. So in that literal sense, it’s a culmination. And in another sense, I think that over the years our…