Archive for February, 2010

After this weekend’s trip to Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is ready for another thriller: he’s reportedly attached to star in the film Prisoners, a drama that focuses on a carpenter who kidnaps the person he suspects is guilty of snatching his own daughter and her best friend.

Hollywood makes its share of disappearing children movies (just last week we saw the trailer for Jon Hamm’s Stolen), but DiCaprio tends to exclusively pick substantial scripts, so I’m betting this won’t disappoint. Also, as of now there’s no director for Prisoners, so I’m also curious to see who the picky actor will pair up with. Suggestions?

Source: BuzzSugar

By Chrissy Illey

Leo was born in November 1974 — a Scorpio with Libra rising. “That means I’m trying to balance the passionate and insane parts of Scorpio as best I can, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job,” he says darkly, but with a smile.

He grew up in East Hollywood. His German-born mother, Irmelin, split from his father, George, a comic book artist, when their son was about a year old. George was a bohemian, with radical friends like writer Charles Bukowski. He was a creative guide for Leo. In fact, Leo always speaks of both of his parents with great love and is thankful for their very distinct influences on him.

From his mother, he inherited those pale blue, slightly slanting eyes. He says he can tell her anything and everything. For a long while, it was she who walked the red carpet with him. When he talks about Revolutionary Road’s Frank and April (Winslet’s character) as “two people who should never have been together in the first place — a fascinating train wreck to watch,” you wonder if there’s perhaps anything there about the disintegration of his own parents’ marriage. But he’s spoken before about his upbringing being both solid and inspiring. From a very early age, acting with Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life and breaking out in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Leo was certain of his talent and sure about what he wanted to do with his life.

He is also certain “about different species being pushed into extinction.” His concern for the planet has never faltered, even when his concern for himself did. After the release of Titanic, teenage girls gathered at airports and in streets, so frenzied when they saw him that they would literally want to tear him apart. And while he would never admit to being scared of them, he certainly recoiled from doing blockbuster-type movies afterward. I refer to it as his post-Titanic distress syndrome.

He greets that assumption with a hollow laugh. You wonder if — during those years of Leo-mania — he felt trapped by his own celebrity. “It was never my intention to have my image shown around the world,” he says. Certainly not for barbers in Afghanistan to be arrested by the Taliban for offering a Leonardo DiCaprio-style haircut to their customers.

After Titanic, he famously turned down Spider-Man and Star Wars to do The Beach. People wrote him off and considered the movie a failure, but Leo was reinventing himself, getting rid of the possibility of ever being considered a lightweight. For last year’s Body of Lies, the filming in Morocco was intense and adrenalin-fueled. He tells me, “I almost had a physical breakdown at the end of it.” I admit to him that the torture scene at the conclusion of the movie was so horrifying I couldn’t watch it. “Good,” he says with a laugh, “because so much hinged on it. A lot of what you see is my breaking point.”

He explains that his character in the movie is in a dirty fight in the war against terror. “He is trying to hold on to a semblance of morality and belief in his country, but he starts to question his patriotism. He is trying to hold on to a certain belief system that is lost,” which seems to be why he took that part. “It’s a scary world that the United States has ventured into,” he says. “I am hoping that Barack Obama can come in and change everything, set this country on a different course.”

Despite his superstar credentials and his alleged $20 million take per movie, Leo has never been excessive or brash, never conspicuous in his consumption. He drove his Toyota Prius and kept to himself until he realized a person in the public eye can make the most of such things, and then he produced his eco documentary The 11th Hour. Never does he ram principles down anybody’s throat. His goals go beyond that.

“It’s about something much, much bigger,” he says of his efforts. “It’s about getting the governments of the world to implement environmental policy. We haven’t made a tiptoe toward renewable technologies. We should be the ones paving the way, the ones other countries look up to. It makes me extremely sad. … But Obama gets it.”

Sometimes Leo’s pale-blue eyes can look at you with a stare that is a little intense for a little too long — and suddenly the eyes dart away as if he doesn’t want you to catch what’s inside of him. I read once that when somebody looks at you like that, it’s either because they want to have sex with you or because they want to kill you. In his case, of course, it’s neither. He just wants to frisk you, to make a quick estimate of where you’re coming from. But he doesn’t want the gaze to linger, lest you see something inside him that he doesn’t want to show you.

Being trailed by the paparazzi infuriates him. Yet he’ll answer questions, just not very specifically — sometimes with irony, sometimes for a laugh. When you’re with him, you feel he’s up for anything — there’s only a shadow of the circumspect, shy Leo. But the way he dances between the two keeps you guessing.

“Being an environmentalist and doing this business [making films] opens me up to entirely different worlds. I love juggling those things,” he says. There it is again: the different sides of Leo, constantly at play. The duality seems to make him comfortable. The balancing act is what makes Leo interesting. It’s what makes him clever and what makes him flawed, and most of all, what makes him human.

By Chrissy Illey

There’s something mesmerizing about Leonardo DiCaprio’s face. It’s heart-shaped and sweet, but strangely powerful. His complexion is smooth, in a “When will I start to shave?” kind of way. He’s full of contradictions — irresistibly polite, yet willing to throw horse manure in the faces of paparazzi. He looks both older and younger than his 34 years. He’s equally at home in a beautiful suit or a battered T-shirt.

On the several occasions I’ve met him over the past seven years, he’s always looked kind of scruffy, and every time I’m shocked by how tall he is. He’s supposed to be 6 foot 1, but he appears taller in a reverse Tom Cruise sort of way. His arms aren’t as bulging as they were in, say, Gangs of New York, when he transformed his physique for director Martin Scorsese. But something of that inner strength and inner weight has stayed with him.

A British film critic once described Leo’s relationship with Scorsese “as Brando’s was to Kazan.” It’s intense, with lots of imperceptible thinking going on between the two of them. They’ve done four films together —Gangs of New York, then The Aviator, then The Departed and now Shutter Island, which opens in February 2010.

“My relationship with Scorsese has been a dream come true,” Leo told me when we met in a smoky suite at the Beverly Wilshire last fall. “Not only have I gained a tremendous education in the history of cinema, he’s opened my eyes in a lot of different ways to the art form that I’m part of — through his excessive fanaticism. He’s meticulous and specific.” Then Leo gave me a slow, curling smile. “Someone said that we dislike the same things, and I think that sums it up really well. We understand each other.”

And we understand that Leo would never be so rude, so obvious and so specific as to say what those things may be. He is open, yet unfathomable. It’s clear he doesn’t want to be defined. “Defining yourself to the public on a constant basis is death to a performer,” he explains. “The more you define who you are personally, the less you are able to submerge into roles of characters, and people begin to think, ‘I don’t buy him in that role.’”

He talks so passionately about the parts he plays — you know he’s lost himself in all of them. For instance, when asked about his character in Revolutionary Road, he talks urgently about Frank Wheeler’s despair, his disillusionment, his cowardice. “It’s a film about the disintegration of a relationship, [when you’re] a smile on your face and doing all the things you should be doing in a loving relationship, but the darker side is taking over,”putting he says. “It’s about people who are holding on to their love in circumstances that are ripping them apart. I’m more attracted to doing that sort of thing these days, because things in this world, they aren’t easy, they are very complicated.”

Leo is complicated. He wouldn’t be capable of a connection that lacks complexity. While he won’t go into the specifics of his current relationship with Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, you imagine it can’t be as intricate as his relationship with himself. He must remember his days as a shy boy, a little afraid of girls.

Now he gets to date supermodels — Gisele Bündchen, Helena Christensen, Amber Valletta and Eva Herzigova, to name but a few. You look at him and wonder how he transformed into this powerful-looking being. Remember when we saw him in Titanic? He looked cherubic, childlike, pining over Kate Winslet. How ironic that they should reconnect in such a bleak, torturously unraveling way in Revolutionary Road.

“Kate’s exactly the same person,” Leo says about his longtime friend, meaning that she’s untainted and unspoiled by fame and its trappings. At the Golden Globes, she gushed in her winner’s speech about how much she loved Leo. He blushed with pride for her and tried not to look embarrassed by the emotional outpouring.

He’s always been shy around women. He once said, “I’ve always been a slow starter. My first date was with a girl called Cessi. We had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer, and then when we met I couldn’t look her in the eye.” Still, he’s not comfortable talking about girls. Partly it’s a machismo thing. He doesn’t want to express his intimate emotions like that. He thinks it’s wrong and unfair to the woman, and he doesn’t want to be pinned down as somebody’s boyfriend.

He’s made oblique references to having a wife one day – someone he could feel comfortable with. But one gets the impression that “one day” is still far off. His work is too important to him. I’m not sure he’s willing to let a relationship get in the way.

I remember the first time I met him. I’d gone to his house in the Hollywood Hills to interview his then-girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen. She rambled passionately about how much she loved her dog, a yapping Yorkie named Vida. She and Vida both had urgent eyes that lit up when the housekeeper made her favorite Brazilian empanadas. Dog and owner dearly loved the greasy meat treats.

Leo, meanwhile, was in the open-plan kitchen preparing food to take to a friend. He was fastidiously chopping vegetables. He favored cooking something that was clean and healthy. He said several times to his girlfriend, “Baby, we’re late.” He didn’t want to be rude and ask me to leave.

He could see she was on an unstoppable flow. In fact, she completely ignored his requests and carried on regaling me with the minutiae of her life. Leo, in contrast, was withdrawn and reserved, but not overwhelmed by her. I sensed a distance between them, but it was a distance he seemed resigned to, rather than at odds with.

Gisele drove me home that day, singing a version of Joni Mitchell’s “California.” She told me Leo didn’t sing karaoke, but apart from that, life with him was great. I thought that, apart from being beautiful, they had absolutely nothing in common. But maybe he was trying to complete himself with his opposite, someone who seemed always at ease. Being comfortable in his own skin seems to have been such a task and journey for him.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have been down this road before, but never has it led to such riches. The pair’s fourth big-screen collaboration, and picked up $40.2 million at the box office. That total is about $13 million more than the pair’s previous high mark of $26.9 million, which “The Departed” took in during its opening weekend in 2006, and it’s a clear indication that the duo is doing their most audience-pleasing work to date.

What’s the secret to their cinematic special sauce? “There’s very little bullsh–,” “Shutter” co-star Emily Mortimer told MTV News. “And despite the fact that they’re the most celebrated movie star and director in the world, they’re very down-to-earth and very present.”

The unpretentious vibe extended to welcoming those actors who had never been part of a DiCaprio-Scorsese production. “They let me in pretty quickly,” said Mark Ruffalo. “We ate some cannoli. We had some mostacholi, some ravioli. I told them my last name ended with an ‘o,’ and then we were all very copacetic.”

Once the cameras started rolling, DiCaprio and the cast found Scorsese aggressively pushing them to create the hallucinatory set pieces that capture the frightening spirit of the mental hospital that serves as the story’s setting. “We kept pushing the intensity of each one of these sequences further and further and it wore on all of us,” said DiCaprio. “We had to go to some pretty crazy places.”

But when the director yelled “Cut!” the cast once again found itself in tranquil environs. “He’s a delightful man to work with,” Sir Ben Kingsley said of DiCaprio. “He’s very charming and he’s very intelligent.”

“They’re both so passionate,” added Patricia Clarkson. “What you see with [Scorsese] is what you get, and that’s the beauty of him. He’s so passionate. It’s infectious.”

Check out everything we’ve got on “Shutter Island.”

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