The Observer

Carole Cadwalladr The Observer, Sunday January 28 2007 Article history

Playing Leo A child-star first Oscar-nominated at 19, Leonardo DiCaprio has 'come of age' with every movie since then. On eco-ethics, Martin Scorsese and even growing up, he's every inch the leading man these days - and far too charming to brag about his new nomination, for Blood Diamond. If only he could sink Titanic ...

I don't know, maybe I just asked the wrong questions but on Tuesday, the day on which Leonardo DiCaprio received his Oscar nomination, I meet DiCaprio the serious artist, and DiCaprio the ecowarrior and DiCaprio the impassioned idealist, and it's only the next day that I get to meet DiCaprio the 'Hollywood hellraiser' - the boozy, chain-smoking, skirtchasing one - and that's only via the pages of the Daily Mirror

Blood Diamond Release: 2006 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 Runtime: 138 mins Directors: Edward Zwick Cast: Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Jimi Mistry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Sheen More on this film Oh, it's annoying this. Because as well as interviewing him I spend five hours traipsing around in his wake and immediately after he leaves me, I discover, he heads off to his premiere and 'a marathon nine-hour all-night booze bender'. And what a bender! With his 20-strong 'entourage', he's seen racking up a £10,000 bar bill, trawling three different clubs including, slightly hilariously, I think, Boujis, the inner sanctum of Sloaney prepsters as frequented by Princes William and Harry, returning to his hotel at 6am, carrying on partying for another couple of hours, and then leaving to fly to Rome in that most environmentally friendly of all vehicles: a private jet.

So, like I say, annoying. Because I can't help thinking that DiCaprio on a nine-hour all-night booze bender would be significantly more entertaining that DiCaprio on a five-hour carbonated water one. Although if a young man in possession of a multimillion dollar fortune and a freshly minted Oscar nomination can't go and cut loose, who can?

I do hope that he's offsetting those carbon emissions, mind. Because DiCaprio has been one of the more convincing celebrities to have jumped on the environmental bandwagon - he's been on it longer, apart from anything else, having been personally converted by Al Gore almost a decade ago in a sort of personal version of An Inconvenient Truth

'I got the opportunity to meet him and he took out a chalkboard and drew planet earth and drew the atmosphere around it and really hit home 20 years of research that he had been compiling on the subject. He said this is the most important issue that's going to be facing all of humanity in the future and I thought "wow". So I got involved with a lot of different organisations.'

For the past three years, he and his production company have been developing a full-length feature film on the subject, 11th Hour, a brave-sounding affair, which he describes as, '16 environmental scientists and noble laureates and people like Stephen Hawking and Gorbachev talking about global warming.'

There's a demarcation between this serious Leo and the tabloid Leo that the New York Times describes as 'a new form of old-fashioned Hollywood stardom that uses celebrity to advance social causes yet rarely lets the public beyond the glittering veil of the photo op'. But frankly, if he was a kettle, I'd be on the phone to trading standards demanding my money back. There's a part of me that can't help feeling that I've been sold a pup. On the other hand, it does at least make me think, gosh, he really can act.

He was astonishing as a teenage actor: This Boy's Life with Robert De Niro at 18, an Oscar nomination at 19 for What's Eating Gilbert Grape. But then ... then, there was Titanic. Oh dear, yes there was. It was huge in every way for DiCaprio, his defining role, the one that shot him to superstardom. And unless you happened to have been female and 13, left his credibility in tatters.

He's re-emerged since then, was well-reviewed in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and nominated for an Oscar in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, but they are as nothing compared to his most recent work, The Departed, in which he's terrific, physically transformed even, as a potato-faced undercover Irish cop. And Blood Diamond, released last Friday, another Titanic-expunging performance as a mercenary-cum-diamond smuggler who swashbuckles his way to moral deliverance.

In person, he's polite, charming, makes jokes, engages eye contact. And manages in an almost Rock Hudson-like way to give almost no hint whatsoever of his actual personality. He's looking good though, almost faintly burnished - tanned and polished and still absurdly boyish. There's a few lines on his forehead but you can't really take them seriously. And he's in fine spirits. A publicist tells me that it's the most cheerful she's ever seen him - he heard about his Oscar nomination only an hour before the interview - but he's pleasingly unjaded about any of it.

'I haven't had the chance to call my family or friends yet. But I'm very excited about it. We all are. The film got five nominations. I can't say we expected any of it. Certainly I was really excited when I heard Djimon [Hounsou]'s name because he had been snubbed by some other awards organisations. And thankfully and rightfully so, he got a nomination too.'

He's been up for an Oscar twice before, 'so I'm pretty good at the loser face now' - although when Titanic was nominated for 14 awards, he didn't bother showing up. James Cameron, the director, called him 'a spoiled punk - the message I got on my machine the day before said: "It just ain't me bro."'

'It wasn't a pompous attitude,' says DiCaprio now. 'My only reasoning was that, you know, I didn't really understand the reason to go up the red carpet and to the Academy Awards if you weren't personally nominated. It's kind of that simple. But to go through that whole ritual is kind of showing up at an awards ceremony just for the sake of showing up, you know, it's just not me.'

The 'bro' is quite telling. I don't get 'bro's from him. Reading back through his cuts, it becomes apparent that there's a Leo for every occasion. With American male interviewers from publications like Rolling Stone, he sounds like a Californian surfer boy: it's all 'dude' this and 'dawg' that. With Brazilian lingerie models, if his success rate is anything to go by, he's Mr Stud-u-like - as well as dating Gisele Bundchen for several years, he's had flings with Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Amber Valletta, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova, Demi Moore, Alicia Silverstone, Paris Hilton and, most recently, the Israeli model, Bar Rafaeli. Look hard enough and you might spot a theme there, although possibly somebody should tell him that not even models trust men who only date models. And on Tuesday, when I meet him to talk about Blood Diamond, a film that sits squarely in the freshly created genre of ethical action adventure movies, he's a caring-sharing ethical adventure hero.

When I ask Djimon Hounsou, the actor who played opposite him in Blood Diamond, and who was nominated for best supporting actor, what it was like working with DiCaprio, he says: 'He's just very cool.'

'Cool?' I say.

'Cool,' he says. 'I don't know how else to explain it. He's just, you know, cool.'

And you can see what he means because even though he still apparently hasn't quite got the hang of facial hair - there's a light scattering of what used to be known as 'bumfluff' on his chin - he is a 32-year-old Hollywood leading man now, not the milk-cheeked pubescent mummy's boy who adorned a million teenage walls. And, what you wouldn't necessarily know from seeing him on the screen, is that in the flesh he has that magical, starry, ingredient X. He has, quite simply, presence.

He's been nominated for Blood Diamond but in many ways it's his relationship with Martin Scorsese that has come to define DiCaprio as an adult actor. First in Gangs of New York, then in The Aviator and now in The Departed

'My relationship with Scorsese has been pretty much a dream come true for me. In a lot of different ways. Not only have I had a tremendous education in the history of cinema and the importance of cinema, he's opened my eyes in a lot of different ways to the artform that I'm a part of through his excessive fanaticism about movies and movie history. I mean the man loves movies, it's amazing, and it's infectious. And not only that, if you'd asked me when I was 15 years old if there was one person who would be the dream director to work with, I would have said him.

'I aggressively went after Gangs of New York to try to work with the guy, because I remember seeing Taxi Driver at a very young age when I was about to work with De Niro, and I remember saying to myself, wow, I've never forgotten that I was an audience member when watching a movie before. I've never felt that suspension of disbelief dissolve. I felt like I was in that character's head.'

It's very much a mutual admiration society. This is Scorsese on DiCaprio: 'He reminds me of that excitement when De Niro and I stumbled upon a way of working together - a similar kind of energy to the actors in the 1970s. It's very rare for me to find that kind of connection again. Leo will give me the emotion where I least expect it and could only hope for in about three or four scenes. And he can do it take after take.'

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's as if Titanic were the aberration: he was brilliant before, he's brilliant again. But what an aberration. And hearing him talk about the feeding frenzy that followed the film, the Leomania, there are times when it's almost as if he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from which he's taken him almost a full decade to recover.

'I was 22, 23 years old, and it was completely surreal. It was insane. Nobody could have predicted it or the effect it would have in so many countries. I shudder when I hear myself complain about it ... and so many people have so many more real and monumental problems but it was a bizarre, bizarre scenario.'

There is literally nowhere in the world he can go and not be recognised. He was recognised in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest by indigenous Indians. He was recognised in a dusty provincial nowhere village in Mozambique while filming Blood Diamond. And while he's never bad-mouthed Titanic, he turned down the Mark Wahlberg role in Boogie Nights to play it, a decision he has said that he regretted.

The Departed and Blood Diamond seem to mark a moment in DiCaprio's career when he's finally grown up although he says that that's a headline 'I've actually gotten in every one of the last four or five films'.

When I call Philip French, The Observer's film critic, to talk about DiCaprio's career, he disagrees, calling him a 'superb actor who hasn't yet quite become an adult'. He points out that his strong suit is in playing characters who are still in the process of becoming a man - like Danny Archer in Blood Diamond

'He had quite a troubled childhood I think, didn't he?', Philip says. 'And you can see certain patterns in his work. A lot of his films are about people in dysfunctional families. And he's very often played a boy seeking a father figure.'

It's a telling observation, perhaps. His early films saw him mentored by a string of big-name directors and he says himself that, 'Michael Caton-Jones was very much like a father figure to me when I made This Boy's Life. I didn't know how to conduct myself on a movie set, I didn't know what the rules were, I didn't know what kind of investment you make in a movie.'

And forget Freud, it's not such a stretch to see Scorsese as the ideal father. Although he idolises his actual father too, George DiCaprio, the son of Italian immigrants who's routinely described as 'an underground comic distributor' and whom Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director, once described as the 'Zelig of the counterculture'. He knew and hung out with Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground. And although he separated from Irmelin, his wife, when DiCaprio was one, and lived a vaguely hippy, what sounds like a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, DiCaprio junior is no doubt about the influence he had upon his artistic ambitions.

'I give a lot of credit to my father for steering me towards material or directors or subject matters that at a young age I wouldn't necessarily have had any exposure to. Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, for example, I wouldn't have known anything about that guy. He's someone whose opinion I've always respected more than anyone's as far as ... not necessarily as far as career choices, but on interesting or fascinating subject matters, or meaningful art. And I've always continued to speak to him before any decisions are made.'

In some ways, DiCaprio is the ultimate product of the Hollywood machine. He was born and brought up there, in the poor, rough, druggy end of Hollywood, but it was Hollywood nonetheless, and he first appeared on screen, in his favourite TV show, Romper Room, at the age of five.

'If I'd lived in another state even or another city it probably would never have happened. It was force of mere location that I got to go and audition as much as I did, to go after school to multiple auditions. You know, my parents supported me, driving me every day after school, for years.'

He says he's always regarded 'actors as an elite group of people', that one of his earliest memories is of saying that he wanted to be one and he has in essence grown up on screen, an extreme environment, that Spielberg commented after Titanic, made him 'the young man in the plastic bubble'.

If he wasn't an actor, he says that he'd be a biologist but he himself is an organism who has adapted spectacularly to his environment. He is almost perfectly evolved, he has grown shells and antennae and skins that adapt and mutate and provide perfect cover - in films, at press junkets, wherever - but it does make you wonder. In nature, it comes at a cost.

Jennifer Connelly, his co-star in Blood Diamond and herself a former child actor, tells me: 'Outwardly it made me very precocious. I was able to function in an adult environment. But inwardly, I'm not sure it didn't emotionally stunt me in some ways.'

When I tell DiCaprio this, and say that she says it took her a long time to learn to be young again, he says, 'Hmm. Really? Maybe I have the opposite problem ...'

It's a joke. Or at least half a joke which he immediately mitigates with one of his masterly equivocations, but Spielberg, who directed him in Catch Me If You Can, says that it was DiCaprio's 'innocence' that made him want him for the part. 'The whole film's about the death of innocence. But Leo hasn't lost his.'

He hasn't. And he can act, he really can. I saw both The Departed and Blood Diamond last week but to my mind, the greatest performance I saw was of him playing himself.


Source
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/jan/28/awardsandprizes