Physically at least, little has changed since Leonardo DiCaprio stood on the
deck of the Titanic and was propelled into mega-celebrity. The frame
is bulkier, more toned, but those boyishly handsome features remain unlined.
At 33 (34 next week) he could still play early twenties, maybe even younger,
if he so chose.
But DiCaprio isn’t particularly interested in pandering to the millions who
fell in love with Jack Dawson. He’s serious, and serious about being
serious. “For me, unless it’s stimulating and invigorating, unless it’s a
compelling story — not necessarily a movie that will make tons of money —
then it’s a waste of time,” he says.
Instead, he’s out there making films with his close friend Martin Scorsese
(four so far), Sam Mendes (the imminent Revolutionary Road), and now
Ridley Scott, for whom he’s made the political spy thriller Body of
Lies. “Ridley’s been on my list of people to work with for a long time
and there are only a couple of people on there,” he says. “Besides Kubrick
he’s probably one of the only directors to have made a masterpiece in every
genre.”
For years, DiCaprio has been doing his best to dismantle his Titanic
image and look instead for darker, edgier fare — a man seeking to avenge the
death of his father in Gangs of New York, examining the human cost of
the gems trade in Blood Diamond and now a CIA man hunting down a terrorist
cell in Body of Lies.
Not that he is interested in making only statement movies. The criterion is
that they have to be good stories that entertain. “It’s important for me to
do movies that spark a debate,” he says. “But they’re hard to find and they
don’t always have a director I would want to work with. I love doing movies
like Body of Lies or Blood Diamond because when you are dealing
with issues the world is facing you get that much more excited.”
DiCaprio answers questions about his work readily enough, but is guarded about
his life outside of it. He has faced endless speculation about his private
life and his break-up with the supermodel Giselle Bündchen some three years
ago. He remains Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, although recently he
said that one day he hopes to start a family of his own. Add that to the
fact that he’s been dating the 23-year-old Israeli model Bar Rafaeli and it
was enough for some US publications to have them marching off down the aisle.
“Do I want to settle down and marry? Sure,” he says, clearly uneasy. “But I
don’t have a crystal ball and so I can’t tell you when that will happen.”
Russell Crowe, his co-star in Body of Lies, first worked with him on The
Quick and the Dead (1995), and says that he wondered if all the Titanic
madness would change him. “Two major things have changed with Leo,” Crowe
jokes. “Now he can drink legally and he’s not a virgin.”
DiCaprio laughs when I mention this. “He’s come up with that line a couple of
times. He actually doesn’t know what he’s talking about, though for
professional reasons I’m going to let him have his shtick. That’s all I’m
going to say.”
Crowe did go on to point out that his co-star had remained essentially the
same “likeable guy, just older and wiser”.
“Who knows if I’m down to earth?” DiCaprio responds. “I think we all go
through an obnoxious phase in our teenage years. There’s a perception of
people in the arts, and sometimes people live up to the image of the
egomaniacal actor who’s a prick to everyone.”
He doesn’t say whether his own obnoxious phase coincided with the release of Titanic.
He was 22 then and had been working in film since he was 16, earning rave
notices for This Boy’s Life, Romeo + Juliet, The
Basketball Diaries and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, for
which he won the first of three Oscar nominations. But Titanic
changed everything. One magazine made him No 1 in its list of the 50 Most
Beautiful People in the World. DiCaprio was unimpressed. “You want to be
remembered for your work rather than being hunk of the month.” he groans.
“After Titanic I was focusing on things that had nothing to do
with the art. All the business with agents and publicists and managers, that
can be extremely frustrating and ultimately a waste of time. There’s no real
control over how the media or the public perceives you. I know who I am. My
friends know who I am. And, hey, I’m not complaining about my life. I’m
doing something that I love and that’s a precious gift.”
He lives in a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills. “I collect art and I
have a good movie-poster collection,” he says. “Everything I dreamt about as
a kid.”
The son of a German-born mother, Irmelin, a legal secretary, and George, a
comic artist, who separated when he was a baby, he grew up in some of LA’s
seedier areas. Once, he and his mother lived in a small apartment on a
corner frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers. “It was pretty
terrifying. I got beat up. I saw people have sex in the alleys.
“At school, when they asked what I wanted as a career I tried to choose
between a travel agent and a biologist.”
But by the time he was in his teens DiCaprio — cajoled by his older
stepbrother, who had already started acting — was appearing in commercials
and long-forgotten TV shows. This Boy’s Life (1993) was his
breakthrough.
In Body of Lies he plays Roger Ferris, a covert CIA agent in Iraq
trying to track down the leader of a funadmentalist cell responsible for
bombings in the West. Ferris is an Arab speaker who has developed a high
regard for the culture and countries where he has to work. But his boss
(Crowe, who put on 50lb for the role) cares nothing for the region and will
sacrifice anyone in the fight against the terrorists.
Filmed in Morocco — doubling for Iraq and Jordan — it was a physically
gruelling shoot for DiCaprio, especially one realistic torture scene, in
which Ferris is subjected to a shockingly violent assault. “That scene in
particular was hard,” he says. “It wasn’t your average film-making
experience.” What did he do to entertain himself such a long way from home
for so long? “Sleep,” he says. “It was exhausting. Ridley and Russell like
to keep up this frenetic sort of tension and, coming from Revolutionary
Road, where it was like a piece of theatre, talking about our feelings
for months at a time, it took a while to adjust to being in Morocco doing
one dramatic sequence after another. But when you get into that pace you
embrace it and it actually became exhilarating.
“For me, the film asks a good question — what do you do when you are trying to
hold on to a higher moral context in an immoral world? Ferris is trying to
do good by his country while his country is slapping him in the face. I’m
very anti-war.”
DiCaprio is also, famously, a committed environmentalist — he calls it his
“second occupation” — and produced and narrated the well-received
eco-documentary, The 11th Hour. “Hopefully our new President will
develop an environmental policy that will put the US at the forefront of
green technology and we won’t waste eight years the way that the Bush
Administration did,” he says.
The film industry is hardly environmentally friendly, I say. “You’re right,
it’s not,” DiCaprio says. “Making movies is wasteful. And the more I get
involved the more I want to change that. But until huge corporations start
to take responsibility and until our Government puts restrictions on them,
nothing’s really going to change.”
As for Revolutionary Road, here he was reunited with Sam Mendes’s wife,
Kate Winslet, for the first time since Titanic. “Kate’s the same
person she was then,” he says. “She’s remained a close friend.”
They play a young married couple whose dreams of escaping suburbia are wrecked
by bitter disappointment. “It’s set in the 1950s, when America was just
starting to develop morally into what it would become, and here are two
people dealing with their own identity, trying not to be clichés. I knew
that Kate and I could really get stuff out of each other, performance wise,
that we could push each other’s buttons. It was exciting.”
There is a buzz around the movie, but nothing like the ballyhoo that
surrounded Titanic. “I’ll never reach that state of popularity again,”
DiCaprio says. “And I’m not going to try.”
Body of Lies is released on November 21 2008. Revolutionary Road is
released in January 2009
