New Body Of Lies Interview

Body Of Lies Interview


Nov. 14, 2008

Leonardo DiCaprio admits that his latest movie pushed him to his physical limits. But as he relaxes with a coffee, Rob Driscoll finds he's more keen to talk about politics than his phenomenal career

THE premiere is done and dusted and he's been screamed at by hundreds of adoring female fans.

Now it's on with the "day job" for Leonardo DiCaprio as he enjoys a coffee and prepares for his morning of interviews.

The previous evening he was on the red carpet in London's Leicester Square for the first UK screening of his new blockbuster movie Body of Lies.

"It was certainly the biggest turnout we've had for the film on our European tour," he smiles.

But what about the maniacal crowd reaction, almost everyone desperate for a glimpse of their A-list pin-up hero? The man himself shrugs his shoulders.

"Most of the time, it's an out-of-body experience," he explains. "It's fantastic to see a reaction like that, but it feels like it's another person sometimes – because you do these movies and you're off on location for many months at a time, and then there's this image up on screen. I feel very lucky to do what I do, and have people come out and support me like that."

DiCaprio, who celebrated his 34th birthday this week, retains that unique baby-faced charm, and if he's in particularly buoyant form right now, there's a good reason – the US election victory of Barack Obama.

"I got to watch the election in Rome," he says. "I stayed up all night and watched the results come in, it was an overwhelming, resounding victory for our new, fantastic president Mr Obama, and I couldn't be more excited."

For, despite the poster-boy fanbase – a legacy from the days of Titanic, the movie that turned him into a veritable superstar – DiCaprio is these days a heavyweight political individual, a longtime vociferous Bush opponent and an impassioned environmentalist. Last year he even made his own documentary feature The 11th Hour, about planet Earth in crisis.

Yet there's never any dry and dusty polemic from citizen DiCaprio; every heart-felt utterance is delivered with a smile and easy attitude. In fact he'd probably rather take our time up extolling the virtues of Obama, but in the meantime there is Body of Lies to discuss, a hard-hitting political thriller directed by Ridley Scott which reunites DiCaprio with Russell Crowe 13 years after co-starring in The Quick and the Dead.

The movie is a compelling terrorists-versus-CIA action-drama which pushes DiCaprio to new physical limits, all very gritty and unglamorous. He stars as US Intelligence agent Roger Ferris, working undercover to infiltrate a terrorist group orchestrating a campaign of bombings in the Middle East, while a bulked-up Crowe plays his cynical veteran mentor.

DiCaprio describes the shoot – several months in Morocco, standing in for Jordan – as one of the toughest of his impressive career. "I've done a lot of action sequences before, but this is a Ridley Scott movie," he says.

"So much of the movie-making process is waiting around for a director to figure out what they want, and here you have a director who is so precise and trims so much of the fat out of the film-making process that none of it's a waste of time.

Physically, the film put DiCaprio through his paces, no more so than in a graphic scene towards the end where his character is being tortured. DiCaprio looks almost bashful when he says, "People are always wondering what the big injury story is – mine is that I got a cold!

"The torture scene was a very important sequence for me – I don't even like to use that term, I'd call it the interrogation scene. We knew that it was a pivotal moment in the movie, and that the film wouldn't have the same weight, intensity or realism unless that sequence was as authentic as possible.

"So I got to talk to the ex-head of the CIA, and several CIA operatives, to ask what would a person in this situation do? What would he reveal to the enemy? What would the enemy try to extract from him information-wise? And all this stuff culminated in a really hard, three-day sequence, shot in a tomb underground in the middle of Morocco… and I got a chest cold afterwards!"

Working with Crowe once again was a particular thrill for DiCaprio, who was only 18 years old when they co-starred in The Quick and the Dead, the Hollywood Western made in his pre-Titanic era. "We formed a special friendship because he was this promising actor from Australia who'd just done Romper Stomper, and I was very young, just off What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and we were converging on this big-budget movie starring Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone, and we didn't know where to fit in," recalls DiCaprio.

"He's the same guy that he was back then. He's incredibly funny, he's committed to his work, he's a fantastic actor, he's great to be around."

Crowe would undoubtedly likewise have great things to say about DiCaprio, not least his three Oscar nominations, the first for Gilbert Grape 15 years ago, and two more recent Best Actor nods for The Aviator (for his portrayal of Howard Hughes) and Blood Diamond.

DiCaprio manages to juggle this impressive, almost stately Hollywood career and his strident political profile with a personal penchant for glamorous living and glamorous girlfriends – his latest is Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, but there's never any chance he'll enter into discussion on that particular subject.

The work, meanwhile, shows no sign of abating. Early next year we'll see him re-united with his Titanic co-star, British actress Kate Winslet, in Revolutionary Road, a haunting drama set in mid-50s America, about a suburban couple trapped by the social confines of their class and era. DiCaprio knows that acting once again opposite Winslet will rekindle interest in all matters Titanic.

But the film, directed by Winslet's husband Sam Mendes, is a project DiCaprio found impossible to resist.

"Kate is one of my best friends, and the truth is, we've been in communication a lot since Titanic, and this project came out of nowhere – it was one she'd been secretly developing with her husband," he says.

"We both knew very well the territory, all the stuff that would come with us working together again, but this was a unique piece of material, in a sense that, as far as a relationship movie goes, it's diametrically opposed to what we'd done before."

Body of Lies opens on November 21

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