GQ (UK) "Man of the Year" Issue - December 2006
Leonardo DiCaprio - Leading Man
Part 2
When Leonardo DiCaprio first saw This Boy's Life, he had no idea wether he had done
anything good, but there was one part of the experience in which he could take an uncomplicated pleisure:
"The greatest moment was watching the pride that my grandfather had. That's the image that I
remember the most. Because he's a coal miner from Germany who worked in the coal mines for thirty
years, went through World War II with his family, moved to the Bronx, had one of the most hard-core
lifes you could ever imagine, worked his entire life. And to see him proud of his grandson...
The premiere in L.A., I remember him having a giant suit on that had there gold sailor buttons on it,
and he looked kind of like that guy on Fisherman's Friend, like Ernest Hemingway, and he was
standing in front of the poster, greeting people, my image next to him. He had this round sort of stump
of a thumb, and he was sitting there pointing [imitates a heavy Germanic accent as he gestures to the poster]
, 'Zat's my grandson.'"
How did he lose the thumb?
Coal falls. My grandfather came from an era where they would work fifteen hours, six to seven days a week,
and still not have enough food to feed the family. The stories that my mother tells me of what it was like in
war-torn Germany for a peasant family, basically. Pretty amazing stories."
Did he have to fight in the war?
"Yeah."
On the German side, I guess.
"Yeah. Well, listening to my grandparents tell their stories of the propaganda that was going
on then, for people that weren't necessarily educated and didn't keep up with politics, they really
genuinely didn't understand what was going on. Really didn't."
Where did he have to go to fight?
Russia, I believe. Conditions that I would never imagine living in. Pretty horrible time."
°°°°°°
About eight years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio decided that
he wanted to become seriously engaged in environmental issues and activism. A mutual friend
arranged for a private one-in-one visit with the vice-president, Al Gore, in the White House.
"He basically brought me through the issue of global warming... It was like, 'I hear you want
to get into environmental issues, and I'm glad you came to me, because you may have heard that
the depletion of rain forests is important, you may have heard about oceans being polluted, you
may have heard about the mass extinction of species, but I'm going to tell you an issue that not
many people are talking about nowadays. It's called global warming. Heard of it?' I'm like, 'Yeah,
I've heard of it.' He was just feverishly talking about it, drawing charts for me. I have a picture
of me and him and the chart he drew of the earth and our atmosphere." For an hour, Gore gave
him a personal version of the presentation that recently mutated into the movie An Inconvenient
Truth. "I want to have this put in print," says DiCaprio. "Every citizen of the
United States, every citizen of the world, that is able to go see that film is socially and
morally obligated to see that film."
Since then, DiCaprio's environmentalism has taken many forms: He has mad informational films and TV
specials, has his own environmental Web site, has hosted environmental events and spoken at Earth
Day rallies, and has made Japanese TV ads for hybrid cars; and before the last election he visited
fourteen states, giving speeches and supporting John Kerry. He is now making his own environmental
documentary, called The Eleventh Hour.
I've got my issue, and I just want to kind of focus on that to see what can actually happen if
I stay my course."
You have to be aware that, however you do it, some people are always going to say, 'What's that
actor know about anything of this?'
"Thats's completely understandable, too. I often put myself in the position of not being an actor
and say, How would I feel if somebody's preaching me about their issues? 'You live in a complete
different world than I, dude....' I try not to impose my beliefs on anyone. I'm just backing an
issue that I think is so important, and I'm trying to do everything I can do to get the awareness
out for people who will listen. Some people won't want to listen, some people will be biased and not
take it seriously coming from me, but this is what I've chosen to do. Because it really is something
I'm passionate about, it's something I just feel drawn to do. And I have to do it."
Does it infuriate you or annoy you when people question your sincerity?
"I don't really care. What does that really matter, anyway? What's more infuriating to me is not
people questioning my integrity in the issue, but just how little is being done. It really is
unbelievable to me. It really is astounding. I've been working with environmental organizations,
and you see people committing their entire lifes, and the amount of progres that they get must
be so disillusioning."
°°°°°°
In what ways are you most German?
"I can be very blunt, to particular people in my life. Straight-forward. I don't sugarcoat things.
But that isn't to everyone; that's only to people I care about. And work ethic - they have a tremendous
work ethic in Germany. My mother and my grandmother both came from war-torn Germany, and they have
much more nuts-and-bolts attitude toward life. A lot of things are black-and-white. I do have that
in me, and I've gotten that from them. When you're dealing with the artistic world, you can't always
look at things as black-and-white, but it helps on the business side."
And how are you most like your father?
"He's taught me patience more than anyone else - tolerance with people - and [he's] someone
who's always pushed me to see the other side of a viewpoint. He's opened my mind to a lot of things."
George DiCaprio's counterculture connections and credentials are legion. Before he left New York,
he lived with the Velvet Underground's Sterling Morrison, and both dated and created a comic
book with Laurie Anderson. He was encouraged to go west by Robert Crumb to work on a movie version
of Crumb's comic "Fritz the Cat". When Leonardo was born, the novelist Hubert Selby Jr. gave him a
pair of boxing gloves. (George now has these. By contrast, his son has a pair of Robert De Niro's
gloves from Raging Bull that he bought at a charity auction.) Bukowski was also around,
among many others. "It was that Los Angeles underground hippie sort of movement," his son
now says. "There was always that sort of counterculture going on around me, and it was just
normal."
And you knew Timothy Leary?
"Of course Timothy Leary. Yes !"
He married my father and my stepmother when I was 20 years old, and took the Koran and I think the
Bible and tossed them aside and said, 'You're not going to get married by these books,' because he
had some objection to one book and some objection on the other, and he said, 'You're going to get
married to the holy palm trees.' And there were two giant palm trees, and he married them, and it
was a wonderful ceremony."
Had you known him throughout your childhood?
"Yeah. We'd been to his house many times. He was a genius. He was like a prophet. Everyone would
go up on the hill to be with Timothy. You'd get your sacred couple of hours and hang out with him
and talk about the future. He was really into what the future would bring and felt intrinsically a
part of the future, even in his later days, when he knew he was passing. He looked at death like
he was passing in a different dimension, not that he was dying. It was pretty fascinating to see
a man in his last days like that."
DiCaprio is working on a bio-pic of Leary's life and, all being well, will soon be playing him.
°°°°°°
DiCaprio followed This Boy's Life with an even better role, in What's Eating Gilbert
Grape, playing the Grape family's affected youngest boy, Arnie. This marked the first time
Dicaprio did any research for a role. He spent a week or two hanging out with mentally disabled
children in a Texas home, compiled a checklist of around a hundred mannerisms, and then showed them
to the film's director, Lasse Hallström, one by one, to find out which he liked: "The way he
uses his fingers and does this, the hand movement, the way I would walk, the kind of pitch of voice,
the way he would read, the language he would use..." The character that resulted was far more
than a compilation of tics; he was remarkable, extreme and believable.
This was a first in a series of bold and compelling pre-Titanic roles. There was nothing
obvious about portraying the renegade poet and drug addict Jim Carroll, as he did in The
Basketball Diaries, nor, before the movie's success, when it would be both praised and derided
for its MTV-generation gloss, in taking the male lead in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet,
updated, but still using Shakespeare's verse. And then there was DiCaprio's little-seen but
enjoyable free-spirited portrayal in Total Eclipse of another renegade poet, the nineteenth-century
French tortured symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, opposite David Thewlis' Paul Verlaine. It was on the set
of Total Eclipse, somewhere outside Paris, that I first met Leonardo DiCaprio. He was 20.
I watched him have his leg cut off in front of some nuns (one played by his mother). He told me how
he had researched all the animals that have become extinct, complained how terrible French food is,
said that he had always wanted to meet River Phoenix and once passed him going the other way in a
crowd at a fancy-dress party but said nothing and later that night Phoenix died, and asked me,
"Would you rather have oral sex with an elephant, drink the afterbirth of a hyena, or be raped
by a pack of wild dogs?"
The next day we went shopping in Paris, because he needed to buy some shorts to take to Africa
with him. I asked him more questions, and when I ran out of appropriate ones, I tried some back of
my notebook that had been for LL Cool J: Did you really think Rick Rubin was black? Are you
actually a big-butt freak? Why are you attracted to the symbolism of boxing? He gamely answered
those, too. Afterward, down in the metro station, he eyed the turnstyles and goaded me, and
together we ran toward them and jumped.
°°°°°°
Even back then, DiCaprio would politely choose to share next to nothing about his romantic life,
such it was ("I would love her as a person", he told me of an unnamed girlfriend, "but I don't
know what's it like to fall in love."), and he has since stuck to that without fail. And various
rumored assignations, he was widely reported and assumed to be dating the model Gisele Bündchen for
several years, but they avoided red carpets and any public discussion of whatever they did or didn't share.
Perhaps he might say a little more if asked a little less.
What do you understand about love now that you didn't understand when you were 18?
"Boy, you got some heavy questions, huh? What I understand now? That it's a huge commitment.
To embrace it properly. And that at 18 years old, you have almost no chance of having a love
that will survive for the rest of your life, but you don't know that at 18."
That's one of the great but slightly sad things about being 18.
"Yeah. But it is kind of sad, because you kind of do know that the next some-odd
years of your life, there's no chance of anything surviving at all. Without repeated heartbreak
and the reconciliation - that's the only way."
Do you think you understand more or less about women as you get older?
"More. Through trials and tribulations."
Do you get happier as you get older?
"Yes. Definitely. Don't you agree? I think teenage life is filled with narcissism and giant
mood swings that are unnecessary and constantly inflating problems to phenomenally unrealistic proportions."
°°°°°°
When Leonardo Dicaprio was 4 or 5, he saw this funny guy on a TV program. He was weird looking
and kind of insane and seemed like a goof, and Leonardo decided it would be fun to run around
the next day at school pretending to be that crazy man: "Because that's what I did a lot. I was
like walking windup Vegas impersonation show." He even copied that funny mark above the man's eyes.
"Didn't know", he says.
That was the day DiCaprio was sent home from school for impersonating Charles Manson and having
swastika on his forehead.
°°°°°°
Leonardo DiCaprio has been getting older. But very, very slowly.
"It's a fact", he concedes with an edge of patient amusement. "I have looked young
for many years."
Sensibly, he chooses to see this as a position thing for an actor, one that has allowed the cloaks
of younger men to rest easily on his shoulders, rather than be frustrated that biology and
physiognomy may have short-changed him of a gravitas he has otherwise deserved. What can one do?
He's not the kind of man to stare despairingly into the mirror and wish upon himself the
ravages that time eventually brings to all. Anyway, it seems as though his life clock may have
been ticking slowly on the inside as well as on the outside, and has a theory why this may be so.
How old do you feel now?
Not my age. [He is 32.] Younger. Midtwenties. Because if you accumulate all the time
that I've had on-set where I wasn't actually living life, you could probably substract
years and years. That's not like lifetime."
So if you filmed twelve months a year---
"I'd never age. Physically, emotionally, or mentally."
°°°°°°
When we meet for the final time, at the Peninsula hotel in New York, Leonardo DiCaprio leads me
up some stairs to a table in a restaurant-bar, sits down, then looks a little anxious, says,
"I have to wash my hands", disappears and returns a couple of minutes later.
"Oh, man", he says. "Woooh. Pouring sweat." He explains that he has just
rushed from Time Square.
As we sit and talk, he notices something happening through the second-floor window behind me.
By chance, this hotel bar faces the Manhatan showroom of the world's largest diamond company,
De Beers (one that no one, surely, would ever confuse with the fictitious market-molding multinational
jewel sellers Van De Kaap in Blood Diamond). And tonight they're having a party. "A giant
De Beers party, swinging and rocking", DiCaprio says. It seems fitting.
We talk, and he eats chicken pizza and tuna sashimi, sips ginger ale.
After just over half an hour, he takes his baseball cap off and turns it around so that it
is facing backwards. Since we last met, he has been dashing across the world promoting his two
movies, and he says that he needs it to stop.
"For example, I'd like to absorb sunlight. I haven't seen the sun for almost two weeks now."
Shall I write, "As he speaks, he looks sadly out of the window toward the waning sunset,
knowing that another day has passed him by"?
"Boo-fucking-hoo, right?"