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Leonardo DiCaprio: Character Actor
Much like Nicole Kidman, who has been described as the most beautiful character actress in the world, actor Leonard DiCaprio continues to search for roles as all-encompassing as that of Arnie Grape.
Friday, December 24, 2004
By Christina Radish
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Top dog Hollywood screenwriter
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Following his triumphant turn in one of Steven Spielberg’s best combinations of sentimentality and action, Catch Me If You Can, actor Leonardo DiCaprio can now lay claim to the sweeping Scorsese epic everyone thought Gangs of New York was going to be.
“As an actor, you’re constantly searching for that great character,” explains DiCaprio during a recent press conference in Los Angeles for The Aviator. “I came across a book about Howard Hughes and he was set up as the most multi-dimensional person I could ever hope to come across. He was one of the most complicated men of the last century.”
“So I got this book and brought it to Michael Mann (Collateral, The Insider),” he continues. “Along with [screenwriter] John Logan, we came up with the concept of focusing on his younger years and his initial descent into madness, with the backdrop of early Hollywood, and these daring pioneers in the world of aviation that were like astronauts who went out and risked their lives to further the cause.”
“Howard Hughes was the first American billionaire. He had all the resources in the world, but was somehow unable to find any sense of peace or happiness.”
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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DiCaprio devoured biographies, listened to tape recordings and watched old movies to fine tune his approach to the period in Hughes’ life that spanned the mid-1920s through the 1940s, when he was consumed with both aviation and the movies.
“There’s the whole later years of Howard’s life,” observes DiCaprio, making subtle reference to Jason Robards’ memorable performance in the 1980 drama Melvin and Howard. “But the reason this film was made was because of its focus on his younger years.”
“It was being able to show not only the growing up of this man, but also our country and the state of our country,” the actor continues. “The kind of people who were around in early Hollywood and the attitudes of those people.”
In preparing for his role, DiCaprio ventured to northern California to spend a day with actress Jane Russell, who burst to prominence under Hughes direction back in 1943 in the potboiler Outlaw. He also got some good insight into the personal side of the billionaire from his ex-wife Terry Moore.
But it was the time DiCaprio spent with UCLA’s Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz that really illuminated the dark side of Hughes and his struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorders.
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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His new favorite director
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“Schwartz is the leading physician on treating OCD in a non-medicated fashion,” DiCaprio explains. “He really explained to me what OCD is and the brain mechanism that goes into it, and the sticky gear shift that happens when your mind obsesses on one thing and you don’t listen to the other part of your brain that tells you you’re being ridiculous.”
“I worked a lot with a patient of Schwartz’s,” the actor continues. “I spent a few days with this person, talking to him and really trying to find out why he had to repeat or do [certain] things obsessively.”
Much has been made in the media about the apparent similarities between the forces that drove Howard Hughes to isolate himself at the top of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas and those that DiCaprio has had to face in the wake of the unprecedented worldwide success of Titanic. It’s really only by working recently with directors such as Spielberg and now Scorsese that the actor has begun to step out of the ocean liner’s shadow.
Although DiCaprio insists he is someone who prefers privacy to celebrity, he says the reasons he increasingly values the former have more to do with his profession than some sort of aversion to paparazzi and the Hollywood limelight.
“I’m an actor, and I want people to believe me in different roles, and not necessarily know way too much about me,” he says. “I want to be around in this business for a long time.”
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Aviator producer Mann
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“Hughes was so obsessive about everything that he got involved with, whether it be planes or women or the films that he made,” DiCaprio continues. “But certainly, I identified with the Hell’s Angels sequence, and being a part of films that have gone on for many, many months. You’re still there with the director, trying to get things perfect and doing things over and over again.”
Though Scorsese has long been known for the dramatic visual impact of his films, The Aviator is arguable his most visually ambitious work to date, demanding technical mastery at every level. It also reunites him with both DiCaprio and Initial Entertainment Group financier Graham King, whose ability to rack up lucrative foreign pre-sales are the only reason both Gangs and The Aviator were able to get off the ground in the first place.
Even though it sounds like a cliché, DiCaprio says the legendary Scorsese is an actor’s dream to work with.
“He is the man in the business that you can unanimously ask any actor of any age range about, and they want to work with him,” suggests the son of a German mother and Italian father, who last month celebrated his 30th birthday. “He’s not only one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but he’s a film historian. The man has seen almost every film ever made, up until 1980.”
“You get an education while working with him, every single day,” adds DiCaprio. “You can ask him a question about a character or a way that a scene should go, and he can show you 20 different examples of filmmakers that have done that in the past. The way it’s been done right and the way it’s been done wrong. It’s an incredible learning experience.”
Even though DiCaprio and Scorsese are a generation and a half apart, the actor says they discovered a common taste in not just film but other areas such as music and art. They also like to embrace the kind of solid work ethic that comes only perhaps from being the descendants of starry eyed immigrants.
“We’ve had marathon rehearsal sessions,” DiCaprio reveals with a smile. “Sometimes, those can be arduous for people that don’t enjoy the process. But he’s so persistent on making everything he does as authentic as possible.”
“Marty loves to have actors come to the table with an array of different information and new ideas and challenges,” he maintains. “He welcomes that more than anyone else that I’ve ever worked with.”
| Even though DiCaprio’s career is still at a relatively young stage, he ranks the character of Howard Hughes as the one that stayed with him the most after shooting was completed. He even started to ruminate about some of his own OCD-like tendencies as a young child.
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“I remember, as a child, stepping on cracks on the way to school, and having to walk back a block and step on that same crack or that gum stain,” confesses DiCaprio, whose upcoming projects include an ambitious remake with Scorsese of the Hong Kong gangster film trilogy Infernal Affairs. “For this movie, I was constantly stepping on things and reorganizing things. I wanted to encourage that to come back.”
“Once you don’t stop yourself from doing that stuff, it can just go on and on,” he observes. “And, people with genuine OCD who aren’t able to make that distinction, truly live in a 24-hour hell of constantly playing mind games with themselves.”
In the end, the Hollywood native’s willingness to go to whatever lengths are necessary to enrich a performance come from a deep-seated desire for career longevity. This is after all an actor who got his fictional start as a pre-teen on TV shows such as Santa Barbara and Growing Pains.
| “I look at film and cinema as legitimate an art form as sculpture or painting,” he says. “We’re in the first 100 years of cinema. It’s still in its infancy. I want to be a part of pieces of art that people will want to see for generations to come. That’s my dream.” |
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