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Harry Smith spoke with actor Leonardo DiCaprio about his role in the new Martin Scorsese thriller, “Shutter Island.”

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Translated by Dicakylar

The massive success has sometimes its tricks. ‘Titanic’ made him rich and famous. But he walked away from his dream of being an ‘indie’ actor. With each film he brings new arguments to be considered one of the best. The latest: the role of federal agent in a Scorsese thriller.

No mather how is he in his new film, critics around the world write that Leonardo DiCaprio has matured. “They have been doing it for ten years, and now it doesn’t offend or flatter me, looking younger is an advantage for my work … I have to listen again and again: ‘he’s now a man!’? Well, okay, man, great, whatever you say … Like everything in life, we must see the positive side.” The actor settles the question with a half smile.

The only child that we can see in Leonardo DiCaprio is that he has a sweet on his mouth. It’s a big man, more substantial than it seems to be on the screen, with puffy face. Years ago he left the teenager fringe. He has a beard (hairless, true). Jeans, white tennis shoes and a blue unbranded t-shirt. Very clean, without the tipical rock stars untidiness. “I careless about fashion,” he once said at the Oscars red carpet wearing a Prada, “is fun and everything, but it isn’t goes with me.” Sitting on a couch, legs wide open, with the elbows on his knees, he looks exactly the 35 years that he has.

Before the release of Shutter Island DiCaprio attended the European press conference at a hotel in London. It is your 23 movie and the fourth with Martin Scorsese ( “a Hitchcockian thriller directed by Scorsese, how could I refuse?”). With the canapés they are serving copies of the bestselling book in which it is based, written by Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River. The first question for the actor: “Have you read it?”.

“Shutter Island is about a federal agent investigating the escape of a prisoner from a psychiatric prison on the island of the title. “It starts as a mystery,” says DiCaprio, “but ends up with a man facing his own ghosts, forced to question his own sanity.”

– Who do you think is the best crazy person perform in movies history?

“There is only one possible answer: De Niro in Taxi Driver. It’s a perfect film, in the first half you like the guy, invest in the character, and suddenly he begins to do things that makes you feel betrayed. As a viewer it makes you think, “Wait a minute, this guy is crazy and until now I was with him, I supported him, I’m embarrassed.”

- With who have you learned more about cinema?

“The first movie I did was the one that taught me about the profession.”

- Critters III?

“Okay, that was my first movie after doing too much TV … but I mean This Boy’s Life. Shooting with 16 years old against De Niro is a great lesson. See those people taking it so seriously awared me. “Now you need to educate yourself, I thought,” you have to watch all the masterpieces. ”

- And what did you see?

“Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Brando, Hoffman … so brutal works … And I didn’t know that they existed! I thought: “I want to do something similiar to this.” Once you’re in that kind of hungry, it never stops and you have to keep trying it.”
It seems that DiCaprio still seeing himself as an apprentice. We Asked him who of his generation is like that magic of the old movies, he didn’t hesitate: “Daniel, he is the man.” He’s refering to Daniel Day Lewis, the strongest of the method actors, who doesn’t leave the character during the shoot months, who, saturated, leaves everything to go and makes shoes in Venice. DiCaprio is not like him. “Neither do I pretend,” he once said, “I give everything on the set, but when I leave, I take off the mask and leave the character, I’d be crazy if it didn’t do it.”

“Leo is a healthy actor,” agrees the actors trainer Larry Moss, DiCaprio is a happy person, he does not suffer unnecessarily, but he is not afraid to dive into his own darkness. ” Moss has worked with DiCaprio in Shutter Island ( “a script that still torturing me), The Departed, The Aviator, Catch Me If You Can, Blood Diamond and Revolutionary Road, that is, in his recent movies. (is also the coach who Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank thanked their Oscars). “The amazing thing about Leonardo, is that, in despite of his look and his star status, he is a character actor: he doesn’t perform offering a version of his own personality, he creates from the scratch, he doesn’t settle down into the past of his character, he goes further and invents his way of walk, how to talk, how to breath … he loves the process of creating another human being. ” By phone from his New York studio, Moss melts in praise: “Leo is open emotionally, he is physically free, very brave, and, working with him is vey funny, he has a very black sense of humor.” With no doubt, “DiCaprio is one of the most important actors of his generation.” Scorsese is always saying it, Steven Spielberg says it too.

But DiCaprio doesn’t have an Oscar ( “I’m an expert at the loser’s face”, he likes to say). He was a candidate for Who’s Eating Gilbert Grape? As supporting actor, and best actor for Blood Diamond and The Aviator. “They will give him soon an Oscar, but that doesn’t matter,” says Moss, “the actors really feel that they’re climbing a mountain whose summit they’ll never met, Leo is a star, the public expect a lot from him, but he expects a lot more from himself” .

On his way to that unattainable summit, DiCaprio has created a bunch of complex and mature characters. Unsympathetic roles like Howard Hughes “for be the cranky producer he lived with people who suffered a germs phobia”. Committed and in conflict, like Blood Diamond “, where he created a perfect accent. Subtle and profound in Revolutionary Road. Even in the brighter roles, like in Catch me if you can, “DiCaprio adds depth to perform it, and although Spielberg advised him no to do it, the actor contacted with the ex-con in which his character is inspired and followed him for days with a tape recorder: “The interpretation is like investigation journalism, with Shutter Island he saw many documentaries about the asylums of the fifties and how they treated patients: the lobotomies, the electroshocks, the horse medication .. .. ”
“Leo doesn’t joke with his job,” confirms Moss, “he is intuitive, but also comprehensive. Even in his earliest films, DiCaprio dived fearlessly into the mental retardation in Gilbert Grape or in the teenage angst (Basketball Diaries).

Between that talented boy and this man, who despite of his merits seems to continue fighting for his credibility, there is a turning point with an iceberg similitude. Of those that hide their seven-eighths impacts below the surface: Titanic.

Ironically, Shutter Island starts with DiCaprio on board of a ship. Vomiting. The book recounts the first crossing of the character and the reason for his sickness: “Teddy was unable to tell his father that was not the movement that turned his stomach. It was all that water. Ranging around until it seemed to be the only thing in the world. And how Teddy thought he could swallow the sky. Until then, he never knew how alone they were. ”

If we substitute ‘water’ for ‘fame’ the preceding paragraph is a good example for what Titanic supposed for its protagonist.

DiCaprio admits he wasn’t ready for such success. He never speaks bad of Titanic (it should be pompous for someone so conscious of his image), but that year, 1997, he didn’t attend the Oscars. “He’s a spoiled brat,” said then the director James Cameron, whom the young hero left him a message the night before: “Simply, It isn’t my style, man.”

Tom Hanks named what followed after that as “the Leo post titanic stress syndrome”. The fame, the models (that part of fashion that he really cares), the lags … His gang-the actor Tobey Maguire, magician David Blaine or the underground director Harmony Korine, was called as the “Mickey Mouse’s rat pack.” Young and rich. DiCaprio spoofed that image of himself in Celebrity, Woody Allen, where he does consume uncontrolled substances and utilizes people.

But Titanic, after all, moved away his idea of the actor who he wanted to be. Daniel Day Lewis would never have accepted a role like Titanic. At 23, DiCaprio, indie actor, became Leo, the folder pretty. He passed from earn two million dollars to earn 20. The occident girls memorized the scene where Jack let down from the table. The Amazonian Indians recognized him shouting “Titanic, Titanic!”. After the man in the iron mask and the beach, it tooks five years to pull off again the criticism with his performance in Gangs of New York. But the global reputation stayed with him forever.

- Do you miss being an ordinary citizen?

“ You never get used to being famous, is never easy to be recognized on the street. It is instinctively uncomfortable when someone stares at you, you put on guard. But I’m going everywhere, I do everything …”

– Do you travel by underground?

“I go to Disneyland! It’s my rebellious attitude, I’m not going to change my life for being famous.”
Anyway, Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio-called Leonardo because he kicked in his mother’s womb while she was in front of a Da Vinci picture and because his grandfather was German- the fame changed him completely. He grew up in the bad side of Los Angeles, surrounded by drugs and prostitution (“There were tough guys, they hit me a lot as a child”). His parents divorced when he was a child, but he keep his relationship with his father, an underground cartoonist. Baz Luhrmann, director of Romeo + Juliet, described him as “the Zelig of the counterculture.” People like Bukowski, Crumb, Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg visited at George DiCaprio home. It was his father who recommended Leonardo to perform, at 21 years, Rimbaud in Total Eclipse.

It’s difficult to imagine how a child spent a half hippy childhood with the Hollywood elite. Going back to the hotel, a court of assistants and publicists abound in a room full of journalists who take weeks to manage their, almost, 20 minutes with the star. Someone asks if Leo’s food is ready. Someone disappears. Another one come back with a note. Then another person asks for the specified pad Thai to rise to the secret suite in which stays the actor (the assistant in question is careful to say the number of the room to the reporters).

–Isn’t it very slave living like this, with so many people always around you?

“Sometimes it is complicated. Very complicated. You find yourself giving importance to things that really don’t. It’s weird. Sometimes you need to set the feet on earth. The industry will find ways to consume you, to take you in a direction that doesn’t satisfy you… It’s a constant fight, but you must to remember why you are into this.”

– How can you maintain the normality?

“We must find a equilibration. I want to continue doing the things that I know I can do the best, but also want to have control on my life. There are people who can do it, I want to be one of them.”

This is a typical DiCaprio answer, long, kind, positive, coherent… and empty. He is an expert in say very well, and a little bit. In twenty minutes in a day when he will answer to 15 other journalists is difficult to obtain oil from one interview. But reviewing the periodicals there are a lot of kind comments on the secrecy of the actor. The Observer, 2007: “In person he is polite, charming, makes jokes, he looks you in the eyes. And he gets, almost with the Rock Hudson perfection, not give a hint of his true personality. ” “He is friendly and natural, but he doesn’t tend too much to the introspection” (The Rolling Stone reporter who spent three days with him in 1999). Time magazine gave him a front page in 2000; to make the article more intimate, the reporter went with DiCaprio to the supermarket (after DiCaprio banned him his home, a bar and the gym). “I know that this article will be a building from the article itself,” says the actor on the text. “That’s what is going to be discussed: Why the hell is he on the cover of the Time magazine?”. About DiCaprio’s self-control, the journalist writes: “It is disturbing to interview someone who is so conscious of himself.” The actor admits that, he doesn’t like the press, and he always tries to be “as dry, dull and boring as possible.” “And even doing it, he is always nice,” says the journalist, “and he be boring, making a list of 20 endangered species.”

Maybe, in part, to avoid talking about his private life with the press, that life that makes people see the star instead of the actor, it’s been years for DiCaprio to find a topic of conversation: the environment. About that he can talk all the time you want. You just have to gave him time to start talking about it…

-With the crisis, is now the environment a priority for politicians?

“The crisis is an opportunity to think about the economy. Thank God, we have an Administration that is going to care about it, once the public health problem is solved, of course… and this will take a while, but that is the democratic process, America is not a communist country, to change something it must be approved by a lot of people, lots of paperwork… but it will finally change. Obama is the man to do it, he wants that the things happens, he doesn’t want just to talk about it.”
DiCaprio has known Obama, who campaigned for, but the person who has most impressed him in his life was Al Gore. “I met him through his uncle,” he says pointing to Shawn Sachs, his publicist (and nephew of White House adviser, Jeffrey Sachs), who stays in a corner of the suite observing the interview. “I was 23, and then the vice president made a hole in his schedule to explain a few things to this stupid actor… He sat with me, drew a circle around the Earth and that was the atmosphere, and a Sun.. Basically he explained me the global warming on his office. Al Gore said, “If you want to get involved in something, here’s your cause.” And Leo obeyed.
Following in the footsteps of his mentor, DiCaprio was producer in the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, it is about the dangers that are facing the planet. His web www.leonardodicaprio.com is divided: on the left, the cinema, to the right, the environment.

DiCaprio uses his popularity to spread his environmental message, and his fame to be a more selective actor. He wants to do important things. “That’s my luck,” he says, “being in a position where I can choose to do something significant.” His upcoming projects as producer-star, includes the thriller Wolf of Wall Street, the adaptation of Brave New World and the biopics of Roosevelt and Timothy Leary. Nothing easy success. “The problem is that it is very difficult to get money for productions that aren’t the typical Hollywood product, it’s a shame, because there are amazing scripts out there.”

- Maybe it doesn’t help that the stars earn $ 20 million per movie…
“Oh, come on, is it our fault? Nonsense!, The actors got off the cache all the time if the project is interesting for us.

- Now that you’re so selective, about what past decisions do you regret?
“I’m so sorry for not have done Paul Thomas Anderson Boogie Nights. I was already committed to Titanic. If I could make that movie, my career would have taken a totally different way, it would be interesting to see where it would have taken me…

- To a place where no one is surprised that you have matured?
“Exactly”.

‘Shutter Island’, the new film by DiCaprio-Scorsese, opens worldwide on February 19th.

Source: elpais.com