|
New York Times Magazine - November 24, 2002
The Kid Stays in the Pictures By Marshall Sella part 2
The actor's fame was so far-reaching that in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, barbers started peddling a
DiCaprio-style haircut dubbed ''the Titanic.'' The Taliban reacted unsportingly, arresting 22
barbers, and were especially enraged that the coif was evidence that citizens were screening
forbidden videos.
After ''The Beach,'' whose environmental themes still deeply resonate with him, DiCaprio decided
to take a strategic breath in his career. Despite the appearance that his box-office draw was a
cooling ember, Hollywood offered him everything that came down the pike. He said no to all of it:
the role of Anakin Skywalker, ''American Psycho,'' Heath Ledger's part in ''The Patriot'' and even
the lead in ''Spider-Man,'' which subsequently turned his best friend into a star. This was no
time in his career, he reckoned, to play a superhero. With ''Gangs'' on the horizon, he resolved
to make his next screen appearance a Scorsese creation, to work at last with his dream director.
In the storm of all that followed ''Titanic,'' it's impossible not to wonder if part of him
regrets the film. ''No, nothing I regret,'' he says. ''I did go through a transformation, but
there's been case after case of people who've been put in that position and conformed to the
public's perception of them. They've essentially become the cliche that people have made up for
them.'' He winces and pulls a survivor's smile. ''What grounds me is, at the end of the day,
I don't bring my work home with me.''
It
would be absurd to imagine that DiCaprio has been the hapless victim of unadulterated lies,
orchestrated by a penny-press cabal that snatched his name out of a fedora. The shocking fact is
that he has gone clubbing. His cocktail of choice is vodka and cranberry juice. He has got drunk
and propositioned women and, through his wilder years, has stayed up way past his bedtime, more
than once.
Naturally, the notion that DiCaprio is a nonstop party boy has been exaggerated; Harvey Weinstein
laughingly recalls hashing out details in a ''Gangs'' script meeting at 3 a.m., then waking the
next morning to read that DiCaprio was causing turmoil in an Italian disco at the same hour. But
even the tabloids weave their caricatures with some strands of factual thread. Jim Carroll
remembers DiCaprio's discovery of the nightlife. ''It was Marky Wahlberg who turned him on to the
club scene,'' Carroll says. ''The women who'd come to the 'Basketball Diaries' set -- models, all
these girls. He plowed right through 'em, man.''
Martin Scorsese scoffs at the uproar over DiCaprio's wingding years. ''This is a very good-looking
young kid,'' he says. ''What's he doing? My God, he's going to a club! Is he crazy?''
For his part, DiCaprio prefers to focus on other personal flaws. ''What I still have to master
about myself is I have compulsive problems,'' he says. ''I waste time obsessing over meaningless
garbage. Like collecting every childhood toy that I've ever wanted. Just stupid stuff like that.''
The inevitable moment of self-editing ensues. ''O.K., that just sounded like the most lightweight
confession you've ever heard,'' he quickly adds, a bit appalled. ''This is my big flaw, I collect
childhood toys!' But I concern myself with garbage a lot of the time. I'm trying to stop that. I
tend to be judgmental of people without giving them a chance. But in all fairness, that comes from
meeting a lot of jerks.''
DiCaprio rounds on me. ''Besides, let's be honest here,'' he says. ''As much as I want to be fair,
aren't your flaws the last damn thing you'd want people to know about you?'' He laughs and pokes
my arm. ''If you had, like, an addiction to kiddie porn, would you want to see it in an article?''
His tone abruptly shifts. Playful porn discussions are clearly not wise. ''Porn is extremely
destructive, man,'' he says, flickering into solemnity. ''More than people understand. There's
this great line in 'The Mind of the Married Man' on HBO -- like, 'Why can't you just be with your
wife?' And the guy says, 'How can I, when I have 200 channels of porn scrolling through my mind
every five seconds?' And it's true. I don't like to watch that stuff.''
''Isn't going to strip clubs a form of porn?'' I counter.
''Yeah. And I've done all that stuff. But I think, ultimately, it mutates your ability to just be
with one person.''
Despite this newfound stateliness, DiCaprio doesn't seem to crave an especially Ozzie-and-Harriet
existence, though he may not yet have honed his grasp of the whole ''marriage'' thing. ''I want a
kid someday,'' he says. ''I would love to have a wife I feel comfortable with. It just has to be
the right person, where you still treat each other as equals, and you're both independent enough
to a point where you can go off to Alaska at a moment's notice with your friends and leave for two
weeks, and it won't be an issue. And that it won't get monotonous, so you don't feel like you're
wasting your life just lying around all afternoon with your wife. You know what I mean?''
''You're not in a relationship right now, are you?''
''No. Hey, I'm not going to sit here and say that I wasn't a little bit of a Don Juan in the past.
But I'm certainly not like that anymore. Not that I'm sitting here saying I'm ready to settle
down.''
In the wake of Gisele and the other single-namers who have sashayed through DiCaprio's life, it
doesn't seem he's in the market for another Burton-and-Taylor-style romance. ''It is tougher to
date another celebrity,'' he says. ''You have a lower-percentage possibility of having a successful
relationship. There are just that many more people chasing after that person. How many Hollywood
relationships have been successful? Tracy and Hepburn . . . I don't know.''
Despite
the fact that Scorsese, among many others, compares him to a young Brando, Leonardo
DiCaprio is anything but a method actor. He performs in spurts. His technique is to know the
material and work the character instinctively in the moment, then drop it the moment the cameras
stop rolling. ''I rehearse it; I think about it -- usually the night before,'' he says. ''But I'm
not Daniel Day-Lewis in the sense that I'm sharpening knives during lunch. I'm eating during lunch.
I think I might go crazy if I were in character 24 hours a day. I have a limited focus. Daniel,
he's an intense dude. That said, he's not unapproachable.''
''And you?'' I ask. ''Are you difficult to work with?''
''I don't think I am at all,'' DiCaprio says after an age. ''I'm pretty damn easy to work with. I
don't pull ridiculous movie-star stuff. I can honestly say that.''
Day-Lewis says that he admires DiCaprio's natural technique. ''Leo's loose,'' he explains. ''The
work doesn't look pondered over. He's got a head working there, but there are times when your mind
can become an impediment.''
Spielberg agrees. ''Leo doesn't have an intellectual approach to acting,'' he says. ''Which is
great, because I don't get him polished -- I get him raw.''
Of course, DiCaprio's current obsessions are not confined to acting and noncanoodling. He's
engaged in any number of environmental causes. As with everything DiCaprio, his interests are
magnified; when Alec Baldwin attacks political foes, it's a one-day story. When Leo DiCaprio pores
over environmental abstracts, he ends up interviewing the president of the United States on ABC,
to the dismay of experts. ''I believe in doing a couple things and doing them really well,'' he
says. ''And being an actor and being an environmentalist are things that I'm going to do. One of
the things coming up is a new documentary on PBS. I'm going to produce it and be the, I don't know,
the anchor kind of guy. It's going to be pretty cutthroat about what we're doing to our
environment, how the United States is terrible in that respect. Because we're the worst. We're the
worst of the worst.
''Take frogs. The frog is the barometer for the condition of a certain habitat. They're amphibians,
and they're really susceptible to the forces of nature. I remember when I was a kid and I used to
go frog hunting in Malibu. They're wiped out now, never to return.''
DiCaprio, in his career, has not come full circle. He has finished one arc and is starting a fresh
one. That is the hard environmental reality of fame. But it's striking that -- for all the chat
about his fall after ''Titanic'' -- he is now working with the two most powerful directors in this
country, and both want to work with him in the future. His next film, again with Martin Scorsese,
will be ''The Aviator,'' a film based on the early years of Howard Hughes.
Of course, though the two directors have their similarities -- DiCaprio never fails to equate them
as masters of the form -- Scorsese and Spielberg live at opposite ends of the creative spectrum.
Scorsese is the quintessential New Yorker, the neurotic who is engrossed in every detail, and
presents stark, metaphorical visions of America. Spielberg is the ultimate Hollywood insider whose
films are often paeans to purity and simpler times. So it's striking that DiCaprio struck up a
shorthand with both. Initially, he hadn't expected to like Spielberg, given rumors that he'd heard
about the director being ''difficult and power-trippy,'' but now DiCaprio speaks glowingly of him.
Liking Scorsese, on the other hand, had always been a foregone conclusion. The genius who made
''Taxi Driver'' could do no wrong.
''He reminds me of that excitement when De Niro and I stumbled upon a way of working together -- a
similar kind of energy of the actors in the 70's,'' Scorsese says. ''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.''
The contractual game of selling a movie is something Scorsese has always despised, which partly
accounts for his pleasure in having found a star he considers not only talented but also -- he
hopes -- bankable. With the many delays the $97 million ''Gangs'' has suffered and the
well-publicized friction between Scorsese and Miramax over the film's length and budget, the
director has a lot on the line. And in Hollywood, delay inevitably carries the stench of failure.
Then again, with all of its own delays and cost overruns, ''Titanic'' itself was prejudged a
bomb.
For DiCaprio, however, the advent of this double release is a win-win proposition. Presented with
the dueling icons of Leo the grimy avenging angel and Leo the breezy Cary Grant-style scoundrel,
the market will decide which DiCaprio will get his Christmas wish. If even one of the films is a
hit, he'll be back on top. The kid stays in the pictures.
Well, not ''kid.'' DiCaprio bristles at being characterized as a man-child. He repeatedly makes a
point of saying that now that he's older, he's seizing far more control over his career and is
prepared to be more difficult on the set when he needs to be. That said, Spielberg can't resist
describing his work with DiCaprio as being that of a ''paternal director.''
''As a parent, I don't direct my kids,'' Spielberg says. ''I may misdirect them so they discover
that, Gee, dad can be wrong sometimes. When you misdirect a child, the child will make a discovery
that empowers him to say, 'Wow, I found something out all on my own.' I encouraged Leo to watch
his takes over and over again in video playback. And he would watch with the focus of a subparticle
physicist. Then he would nod his head and say: 'I have an idea. Let's do one more for the Gipper.'
That was his mantra. He would do Take 9 with an abandon that showed me how deep his courage ran as
an actor. And often, that was the take I used.''
Spielberg, of course, often explores themes involving the purity of youth; even at 55, he wouldn't
flinch were he to be called boyish. ''This whole movie's about the death of innocence,'' he says.
''But Leo has not lost his. The thing I often say to Leo is: 'Don't ever lose that little boy in
you who can get his feelings hurt so effortlessly. That's going to serve you well as an actor.'
There's something that we want from Leo -- always to be who we've forgotten we are.''
Scorsese doesn't see it that way at all. The vengeful brute he directed in ''Gangs'' didn't seem
to awaken the dad in him. Unasked, knowing that DiCaprio attained his highest degree of fame as a
teen idol, he simply says: ''This is not a boy. This is a man.''
It's a strange coincidence that in the wake of his own experience, DiCaprio's next two roles
(after ''Gangs'' and ''Catch Me'') will both be Icarus figures. Scorsese wants to explore the
flaws of Howard Hughes -- the era before the tycoon's sanity went bankrupt. ''It's the idea of
someone who wants to be the fastest man in the world,'' the director says, ''to fly up to the sun.
But the wings get melted.'' The planned Baz Luhrmann epic of Alexander the Great has that same
element: a profile of Messianic charisma, of a man Luhrmann describes as ''the first to understand
self-promotion, the first to be a legend in his own time. The cult of personality was born with
him. His only flaw was that he chased the unattainable.'' So DiCaprio may be able to draw on the
Icarian experience of his fallen-idol phase, if he ever truly fell.
In the meantime, he can burnish his public persona and join De Niro below the media radar. ''The
odd thing is, the number of people who want to associate with you is multiplied when you have a
movie coming out,'' he says, narrowing his eyes to convey savvy. ''And they don't even realize
that. I've seen people around who don't say hello to me. Then, when it's movie time, they'll come
up and say hello. It's a great barometer for, like, who's a jerk and who's not.''
He pauses, then reverts to the sanctuary of his environmentalist discourse. ''See, that's
essentially my frog -- my barometer.''
At
the end of the day, there's always sports. At the Chateau Marmont there is a Ping-Pong table,
and DiCaprio is unable to resist a challenge. Before we play, though, he stops to make sure he has
registered his key information. ''You got that straight about 'Gangs,' right?'' he asks, listing
his talking points. ''My character living in a pluralistic society; Bill the Butcher being a
nativist; no clear-cut villain; creation of a new country?''
We hit the table, and it's soon clear that this is going to be a sound pummeling. At first, he
taps through a few friendly volleys, trying to be civil. But as the game begins, he's smashing the
ball savagely and with expert spin, occasionally shouting gleeful phrases in German, which he
speaks passingly from his boyhood summers in Europe. More than a few times, the Nepalese elephant
etched on his T-shirt becomes little more than a blur, as he slams the ball so hard that it gets
lost in the ivy of the brick wall behind me.
''Watch it in here,'' he says, stabbing into the leaves with his paddle. ''This is where rats like
to live!'' Whacking away at the thicket, it's unclear at times whether he's trying to find the
ball or kill rodents. Beyond the politeness of our practice volleys, he has no mercy; this is the
sports equivalent of one of his on-set spurts, and he has no intention of failing. So he wins one
for the Gipper. The five points I manage to take are mainly by virtue of his own net-shots. And
working off nervous energy -- exerting himself outside the bounds of his public persona -- seems
to offer him release.
Leaving the hotel, he's keen to show me his ''golf cart.'' We drive around a bit, and he's
effusive about the car; it qualifies both as one of those toys he collects and as a noble
invention that spares the environment. ''See, every time you brake or coast, it recharges the
battery,'' he says, explaining the complex monitor on the dashboard. ''The reason why all cars
don't use this technology is because of the oil companies.''
Just then, we pass a tree-shrouded driveway to the hotel, where a stylish blond woman is
disgorging from a black S.U.V. ''That'll be Nicole Kidman, I suppose,'' he says sardonically. On
cue, the woman turns slowly to collect something from the back seat; DiCaprio does a double take
and shouts in exasperation. ''It is! It is Nicole Kidman. Oh, my God.''
The car buzzes along a few beats as he ponders the irrationality of stardom, of all the beautiful
people who spend their work lives crafting their dramatic personas and then watch strangers craft
their real-life ones. ''Nicole Kidman,'' he repeats, rasping like an old-time studio exec. ''That's
Hollywood, baby!'' Thanks a lot to Gabi ! ***
|