It’s easy to dog Leonardo DiCaprio. His career started out on such a high note, “This Boy’s Life,” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” (Oscar nom), and then devolved into a lot of unmentionable crap. He earns points for working with Marty Scorsese, but he never really felt at home in any of those films until, “The Departed.”
In our minds, he’s hit his stride, he was very solid in Ridley Scott’s so-so “Body of Lies,” (and finally felt like a man playing man’s roles instead of a young adult doing so), and he seems great in “Revolutionary Road” (we said Leo was “outstanding“)
Maybe working with Scorsese is paying off because DiCaprio’s taste is a lot higher-minded than we would have thought for him.
On Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 being in his top 5 movie list: “By definition, you’re very correct, but I think it’s hard to… I don’t even define 2001 as a film; it’s more of a religious experience.”
De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” (aka “Bicycle Thieves”): “Top three! That’s one of the purest movies I have ever seen.”
DiCaprio also loves Kubrick’s “The Shining,” (who doesn’t?), but we have a super special place in our heart for that one.
On “Revolutionary Road,” he calls the experience a brutal one: “It was one of the more emotionally painful movies. It was depressing, making this film, I have to say. As great as it was to work with Kate, I was happy to get out of…not happy to wrap the film, but happy to stop arguing with my wife for months straight, confined in a tiny suburban house. We were really shooting in a tiny little house, and the entire crew was there, smashed into this little two-bedroom house. There was no way to get out; there was nowhere to run. The claustrophobia was pretty intense after a while. After eighteen months of work, I’m trying to figure out what normal life is like again.”
Also, who knew that Leonardo turned down “Boogie Nights” to do “Titanic”? We may have heard that one before, but it never stuck.
DiCaprio also professes his love for Brian Atene’s audition tape for Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” in 1984 leaked in 2006 and became an interweb sensation due to Atene’s unintentionally hilarious hubris and over-acting (you must watch this). The full interview is over at GQ.
