Leonardo's renaissance
He's an A-list sex
symbol who has dated a string of supermodels, yet Leonardo DiCaprio
fiercely guards his privacy and has always been more interested in
hard-hitting films that 'change things'. Chrissy Iley meets that rarest
of breeds: an edgy Hollywood star
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Photograph: Tom Munro
The last time I was in a room with Leonardo DiCaprio was in
2001. It was his kitchen, and I was interviewing his then girlfriend,
Brazilian gorgeousness Gisele Bündchen. Her Yorkshire terrier was
yapping and she was talking non-stop in a dizzying way, with demanding
eyes, lavish hair. She was warm, volatile and had a sense of
entitlement. Leo was withdrawn, quiet and perhaps a little lost,
chopping vegetables meticulously in the kitchen. He was making food to
take over to a friend's house and he kept saying, 'Baby, we're late.'
But Baby carried on talking and demanding empanadas. Gisele and the
yorkie were going crazy for the tasty meaty morsels. Leo just kept
chopping vegetables. Eventually, Gisele drove me home. Joni Mitchell's
'California' was playing, and we sang along. She told me Leo didn't do
karaoke, but apart from that, life with him was great. But it didn't
surprise me when they split up. It seemed as if they had nothing in
common.
Seven years on I'm in another room with DiCaprio, a slightly
smoky suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where he's promoting Body of Lies,
Ridley Scott's hard-hitting terrorists-versus-CIA movie. He's in a
battered grey T-shirt and jeans, and though he's 6ft 1in he looks taller
- perhaps because he's long limbed, perhaps because one expects movie
stars to be Tom Cruise-sized. He's not as chunky as the look he adopted
for Gangs of New York, where he gained 30lb, but he's still powerful
looking. He appears both older and younger than his 33 years. His eyes
are penetrating; he's polite and smiling, but guarded, in a subtle way -
there's no hostility here.
Body of Lies reunites DiCaprio with Russell Crowe. The last time they appeared together was in The Quick and the Dead, when DiCaprio was only 20. This was the pre-Titanic age, when he was known for sensitive, artsy portrayals - as a retarded boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and being beaten up by his cruel stepfather, Robert DeNiro, in This Boy's Life. 'And he [Russell] had just done Romper Stomper, so we were both very wet behind the ears,' says DiCaprio. 'We were handpicked as two people who had done interesting performances that year. It was our first encounter in a big-budget film.
Russell was very cool to me back then, and supportive of me as a young actor. After all these years he's still the same guy. He's carved out a fantastic career for himself.'
He describes Crowe as one of the most committed and powerful actors of his generation. Really, I say, I thought that was you. He rocks back in his chair and laughs. 'Well, you know, people don't say that sort of thing about themselves.' He may be giggling, but part of him knows it's the truth. DiCaprio has graduated into a heavyweight. A meticulous performance as the obsessive-compulsive Howard Hughes in Scorsese's The Aviator earned him a second Oscar nomination (the first came for Gilbert Grape), while his roles for the same director in Gangs of New York and The Departed brought gravitas and kudos. His third Oscar nomination was for Blood Diamond, which he considers a movie that changed things: people are now more aware of conflict diamonds, he says.
So was the dynamic between you and Crowe the same, I ask. Did he still seem like a mentor? Could he be supportive in the same way? In the film, Crowe and DiCaprio are on the same side but at loggerheads with each other, and the tension is fascinating.
'It was strange that it hadn't changed. It was just like walking into a room 15 years later, even though a lot of things have happened to both of us, and a lot of changes have gone on in the world. But we have both developed as actors, we both have more experience under our belts, and there was a different way in which we conversed in that period and now - in terms of arguing our characters' points back and forth. I don't think we did that back then,' he says. 'Not that we didn't take it seriously, but we never had the responsibility we do now. So yes, I noticed the difference in that regard, for sure. I knew he was going to be like that because you can see it up there in the screen in all the work he does. He is very committed.'
He uses the word committed as if it were the highest accolade. The earlier DiCaprio was already thoughtful, hypersensitive even, but through taking risks in lower-budget movies such as The Beach and Blood Diamond, and making his own eco statement in The 11th Hour, he gets to earn the moniker 'very committed', too. Certainly in Body of Lies there is no room for a lightweight. It was a long, tough shoot, mostly in the desert, and involved several months in Morocco, standing in for Jordan.
'I had a very hard shoot, very rough. I've done a lot of action sequences before, but this is a Ridley Scott movie. You are always moving locations at lightning speed. At any given second Ridley would come in and say, "I want a helicopter to come in and shoot two missiles and I want that to be on camera and I want to have a surveillance camera 2,000ft in the air shooting on top of your head." At some points you really don't know what's going to happen. It's a huge adrenaline rush as an actor because you have to be prepared dramatically to have any given scene changed at any moment. It makes you trust your instincts more. It makes you delve deep into yourself. The better you know your character the better you know how he would react in any scenario, and Ridley will throw curveballs constantly. He is editing seven different cameras at the same time and then he'll say, "I don't believe that. I don't care how much we've talked about this scene, it's not coming across, so I'm going to change everything." He's a very run-and-gun director. He likes to keep up the pace of a film unlike any director I've met. You'd better be prepared for anything. Someone like Scorsese, I suppose, is a lot more meticulous in the way he sets things up. He's very specific and takes a lot of time with each angle.'
The pace of the film is unyielding; there's a scene at the end, when he's being tortured, where I could hardly breathe. 'Good,' he exclaims. 'I had a problem with that scene, so I'm glad it worked for you.'
But it's so graphic, so real, I couldn't finish looking at it.
'It was a pivotal point in the whole movie,' he says. 'It was make or break. If that scene didn't work the movie couldn't sustain itself. We needed to make it important, pertinent and controversial. I spoke to ex-heads of the CIA about what my character would be doing and how he would be handling himself. Because so much hinged on it I almost had a physical breakdown at the end of it. So a lot of what you see on the film is my breaking point. I physically collapsed for a few days after that. I got sick because of the intensity of it.'
One of the themes of the movie is truth: who you trust and who you lie to. So, who would he lie to, and why? 'Intrinsically, an organisation like the CIA relies on secrecy. It is about covert operations, so we're doing a movie about modern-day CIA operations and practices. I think we got as close as we could get to how the US operates in this war on terror.'
He makes no attempt to answer this question as a personal one. His answer is long and articulate, and difficult to interrupt. He seems to be saying that while you can't trust terrorists, you can't trust Americans either.
'That is very symbolic of the truth. You have this character that is in a deceitful world, trying to catch the enemy that he could never trust. But it is a dirty, ugly war. He's trying to hold on to a semblance of morality and a belief in his country while his country is letting him down, and ironically he's starting to trust people who are - while not exactly the enemy - not the people he's beholden to. You have to start thinking out of the box. He starts to question his patriotism, what he stands for morally. This character is not somebody who is either good or bad. He is trying to hold on to a certain belief system that is lost.'
And then you realise that DiCaprio probably is talking about himself. When you ask him about Bush or Palin he is unequivocal. His anti-Palin rants are legendary. He says simply, 'I hope that Barack Obama wins because I haven't been happy with the last eight years, and that has been reflected in the polls. It is no secret that the Bush administration and the way they handled not only the war on terror but everything else has only a 10 per cent approval rating. So yes, I can only hope for Barack Obama; for a brilliant mind to come in and change everything. It is a scary world that the United States has ventured into. And Barack Obama can set this country on a different course.'
Leonardo DiCaprio straddles two diametrically opposed worlds: the greed and instant gratification of Hollywood and impassioned environmentalism. He drives what he calls a golf-cart car, a Prius, and he made The 11th Hour, a detailed documentary about our planet in crisis. He is alarmed about 'human beings regarding this planet as a service station'.
And yet the message comes with a smile. He once picked up a journalist's tape recorder after they'd both ordered lunch and the writer went to make a call. He told the machine that the writer shouldn't be eating hamburgers, even though DiCaprio himself had ordered one, because cows release methane gas; but you can't have tuna either, he said, because the nets capture innocent little dolphins. He was being jokey but serious at the same time. He doesn't mean to preach. Besides, he has been a Hollywood bad boy - one who liked to throw horse shit at Italian paparazzi and hang out in bars with gaggles of models wearing tiny outfits.
But the contradictions work to make him human. That's why he relished the idea of playing a more complex character in Body of Lies, one that was neither a hero nor a villain. He laughs: 'Of course it was so much easier to play someone caught in a moral web, who tries to manipulate people as best he can, but who knows he is also being manipulated. He goes on a personal journey where he realises that he is not part of any specific nationality any more. It's not about nationality; it's about what's right or wrong for him.
'When you are given an opportunity to make a film like Body of Lies, and I would put Blood Diamond in the same category, of course you jump at these opportunities. Blood Diamond shed a different light on that trade.'
I would like to think, as DiCaprio believes, that Body of Lies will shed a different light on the war on terror, but it opened in the US in a week dominated by the recent Wall Street crash and had to settle for third place in the movie charts behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Still, DiCaprio argues gamely, 'Historically we are going to look back at this type of movie and it will make people really think about what was going on at the time.'
One imagines that DiCaprio will have greater success with Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road, which reunites him with Kate Winslet. A haunting, gnawing movie based on the novel by Richard Yates, it's set in the mid-Fifties, post-Second World War but pre-Mad Men. Winslet and DiCaprio's relationship is sour and spiralling. They play a young married couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who are stuck in suburbia, trapped by the social confines of their lives and of their time. Frank has lost his nerve and lost his way. April is a trapped housewife, a homemaker who wants to go to Paris and be bohemian, but finds herself pregnant with a third baby.
The story resonates with DiCaprio because, as he asks, 'What is the American dream supposed to be? And how similar are we now to that era, in a lot of ways? It's about two people going crazy in that kind of environment. Being stripped of their identity and feeling they are living a life of clichés. What drew me towards it was that it's very reflective of the United States's moral position in the Fifties and this is where we still hinge ourselves morally, how we view our family, our fundamentals. And also, I'm a huge fan of Kate and Sam.'
But he seems uneasy that working with Kate again conjures up Titanic. DiCaprio was already one of the most famous and perhaps one of the most beautiful men in the world before Titanic. He could have had anything he wanted. But after Titanic he couldn't go out without a million girls chasing him, screaming, and he hated it. He turned down everything big-box-office after Titanic: said no to Anakin Skywalker, American Psycho and Spiderman, which turned his best friend Tobey Maguire into a star. He feared it: 'It was never my intention to have my image shown around the world.' Or to see barbers in Afghanistan arrested as they enraged the Taliban by offering a Leo DiCaprio-style haircut labelled 'The Titanic'. Then there was the time at an airport in Paris when a teenager grabbed his leg and pressed her head into it, clutching desperately. He tried to tell her that if she would get off his leg he would talk to her, but she wouldn't leave. The incident marked him. He wanted to be an actor, not a celebrity. He didn't do any movies at all for a couple of years because he was said to be suffering from 'post-Titanic distress syndrome' - the kind of fame where everyone wants to talk to you but nobody wants to listen to what you've got to say.
'The movies that I'm doing now are the movies that I've always wanted to do,' he says. 'If I'd had these opportunities when I was younger I'd have done them in a heartbeat. But you don't always get the chance to make films that you have a kinship to when you're starting. I took some time off after Titanic because I needed to let the dust settle, and recharge my battery. I felt, "OK, you've been given a tremendous opportunity, what are you going to do with it? Now your name can finance movies that you do want to do." That wasn't something that I wanted to squander. I wanted to wait until
I felt I could really contribute something that had the kind of edge I'd always been looking for since I started.'
Although these films might have had edge without box office, the combined effect was to make Leo an almost impossible combination, an edgy Hollywood star. His character in Revolutionary Road might be his best bet yet for an Oscar. He seems to light up when he talks about his darkness. 'It's a film about the disintegration of a relationship. We're putting a smile on our face and doing all the things you should be doing in a loving relationship, but the darker side is taking over. It's people who are holding on to their love in circumstances that are ripping them apart. I'm more attracted to doing that sort of thing these days because things in this world... they aren't easy, they're very complicated.'
You wonder if his relationship with Bar Refaeli, the Israeli supermodel, is uncomplicated. He is a Scorpio with Libra rising. 'That means I'm trying to balance the passionate, dark, insane parts of Scorpio the best I can, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job.'
DiCaprio started off strangely shy around women. He says, 'I've always been a slow starter. My first date was with a girl called Cessi. We had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer and then when we met I couldn't look her in the eye.' He doesn't seem to look many people in the eye directly for long, but that hasn't stopped him romancing Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova and Amber Valletta.
He says that he would love to have a wife he feels comfortable with. He says he wants a kid 'some day'. We have to skirt borders very carefully when talking about intimate things, not least because he doesn't want to be defined by his relationships with supermodels. For a long time he would take his mum to premieres instead of an inamorata. He has never liked to talk about his girlfriends, be pictured with them, or give tantalising details away, because that would feed the paparazzi, who have made him miserable. Instead, he's one of those actors who feels that 'defining yourself to the public on a consistent basis is death to a performer. The more you define who you are personally the less you are able to submerge into the characters you do, and people will think, "I don't buy him in that role."'
So the image we have of him is amorphous, a bad-boy superhero, soulful but likes to party, committed to his work but not necessarily to his long-term girlfriends. He once said his ideal wife would be one who was independent, who wouldn't mind if he went off to Alaska at a moment's notice with his friends. Robert De Niro is his friend. Not the kind of hanging-out-with friend, but the kind of friend who would recommended him to Martin Scorsese. 'I was humbled by that. De Niro-Scorsese is my generation's choice of greatest actor-director dynamic. It is to the previous one's Brando-Kazan.' He is about to start a fourth film with Scorsese, Shutter Island. They are muse and mentor. 'I have so much respect for him. Who doesn't, you know?'
Scorsese had to wait years for his Oscar. Does DiCaprio mind missing out three times? 'I have a theory. We all have our personal choices of who we think should win, but there are certain times you look back at the movie that won that year and you think, "How was that humanly possible?"'
Sometimes people get the Oscar for the wrong movie, I suggest. 'Yes, but I am not feverishly hunting one down. I am trying to do the best work I possibly can and making movies that will have resonance for years to come. I think if you try for an Oscar or a goal like that, the more people are going to see it as transparent. It's not on my radar. If it happens, great, but I'm happy to continue working as I am, really.'
He is happy being an active person. 'Life's too short to be lazy and passive, and I don't like to stay in one environment for too long, or get set in one way of thinking. I love to travel, get involved in different environmental projects. Stimulate myself.'
It's been written that you like to be on your own a lot. 'No. I think I'm more of a people person.' Is it true that you have the same set of about 10 really good friends that you grew up with because you don't need new friends and never lose old ones? 'Mmm,' he considers. 'I suppose, yes. I do have about 10 really good friends. But the fact I don't have new ones is not true.'
It is true that you don't necessarily know who to trust, he says, returning to the theme. 'People who are celebrities are shrouded in mystery. Jack Nicholson said, "By the very nature of being known you meet more people in an average week." It makes you hold on to the people you know and trust. But at the same time I try to keep an open mind, because there are a lot of fascinating people out there. Being an environmentalist and also doing this business opens me up to entirely different worlds, and I love to juggle those things.'
So it seems there are two contradicting Leos: shy, untrusting, circumspect Leo, and gregarious, up-for-anything Leo. He's been careful to display both, so I'll never pin him down as one or the other. He's answered everything, but not very exactly. He's played a perfect game. He keeps you smiling and he's laughing, even. He doesn't let you get too close, but he doesn't let you notice the distance.
Body of Lies reunites DiCaprio with Russell Crowe. The last time they appeared together was in The Quick and the Dead, when DiCaprio was only 20. This was the pre-Titanic age, when he was known for sensitive, artsy portrayals - as a retarded boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and being beaten up by his cruel stepfather, Robert DeNiro, in This Boy's Life. 'And he [Russell] had just done Romper Stomper, so we were both very wet behind the ears,' says DiCaprio. 'We were handpicked as two people who had done interesting performances that year. It was our first encounter in a big-budget film.
Russell was very cool to me back then, and supportive of me as a young actor. After all these years he's still the same guy. He's carved out a fantastic career for himself.'
He describes Crowe as one of the most committed and powerful actors of his generation. Really, I say, I thought that was you. He rocks back in his chair and laughs. 'Well, you know, people don't say that sort of thing about themselves.' He may be giggling, but part of him knows it's the truth. DiCaprio has graduated into a heavyweight. A meticulous performance as the obsessive-compulsive Howard Hughes in Scorsese's The Aviator earned him a second Oscar nomination (the first came for Gilbert Grape), while his roles for the same director in Gangs of New York and The Departed brought gravitas and kudos. His third Oscar nomination was for Blood Diamond, which he considers a movie that changed things: people are now more aware of conflict diamonds, he says.
So was the dynamic between you and Crowe the same, I ask. Did he still seem like a mentor? Could he be supportive in the same way? In the film, Crowe and DiCaprio are on the same side but at loggerheads with each other, and the tension is fascinating.
'It was strange that it hadn't changed. It was just like walking into a room 15 years later, even though a lot of things have happened to both of us, and a lot of changes have gone on in the world. But we have both developed as actors, we both have more experience under our belts, and there was a different way in which we conversed in that period and now - in terms of arguing our characters' points back and forth. I don't think we did that back then,' he says. 'Not that we didn't take it seriously, but we never had the responsibility we do now. So yes, I noticed the difference in that regard, for sure. I knew he was going to be like that because you can see it up there in the screen in all the work he does. He is very committed.'
He uses the word committed as if it were the highest accolade. The earlier DiCaprio was already thoughtful, hypersensitive even, but through taking risks in lower-budget movies such as The Beach and Blood Diamond, and making his own eco statement in The 11th Hour, he gets to earn the moniker 'very committed', too. Certainly in Body of Lies there is no room for a lightweight. It was a long, tough shoot, mostly in the desert, and involved several months in Morocco, standing in for Jordan.
'I had a very hard shoot, very rough. I've done a lot of action sequences before, but this is a Ridley Scott movie. You are always moving locations at lightning speed. At any given second Ridley would come in and say, "I want a helicopter to come in and shoot two missiles and I want that to be on camera and I want to have a surveillance camera 2,000ft in the air shooting on top of your head." At some points you really don't know what's going to happen. It's a huge adrenaline rush as an actor because you have to be prepared dramatically to have any given scene changed at any moment. It makes you trust your instincts more. It makes you delve deep into yourself. The better you know your character the better you know how he would react in any scenario, and Ridley will throw curveballs constantly. He is editing seven different cameras at the same time and then he'll say, "I don't believe that. I don't care how much we've talked about this scene, it's not coming across, so I'm going to change everything." He's a very run-and-gun director. He likes to keep up the pace of a film unlike any director I've met. You'd better be prepared for anything. Someone like Scorsese, I suppose, is a lot more meticulous in the way he sets things up. He's very specific and takes a lot of time with each angle.'
The pace of the film is unyielding; there's a scene at the end, when he's being tortured, where I could hardly breathe. 'Good,' he exclaims. 'I had a problem with that scene, so I'm glad it worked for you.'
But it's so graphic, so real, I couldn't finish looking at it.
'It was a pivotal point in the whole movie,' he says. 'It was make or break. If that scene didn't work the movie couldn't sustain itself. We needed to make it important, pertinent and controversial. I spoke to ex-heads of the CIA about what my character would be doing and how he would be handling himself. Because so much hinged on it I almost had a physical breakdown at the end of it. So a lot of what you see on the film is my breaking point. I physically collapsed for a few days after that. I got sick because of the intensity of it.'
One of the themes of the movie is truth: who you trust and who you lie to. So, who would he lie to, and why? 'Intrinsically, an organisation like the CIA relies on secrecy. It is about covert operations, so we're doing a movie about modern-day CIA operations and practices. I think we got as close as we could get to how the US operates in this war on terror.'
He makes no attempt to answer this question as a personal one. His answer is long and articulate, and difficult to interrupt. He seems to be saying that while you can't trust terrorists, you can't trust Americans either.
'That is very symbolic of the truth. You have this character that is in a deceitful world, trying to catch the enemy that he could never trust. But it is a dirty, ugly war. He's trying to hold on to a semblance of morality and a belief in his country while his country is letting him down, and ironically he's starting to trust people who are - while not exactly the enemy - not the people he's beholden to. You have to start thinking out of the box. He starts to question his patriotism, what he stands for morally. This character is not somebody who is either good or bad. He is trying to hold on to a certain belief system that is lost.'
And then you realise that DiCaprio probably is talking about himself. When you ask him about Bush or Palin he is unequivocal. His anti-Palin rants are legendary. He says simply, 'I hope that Barack Obama wins because I haven't been happy with the last eight years, and that has been reflected in the polls. It is no secret that the Bush administration and the way they handled not only the war on terror but everything else has only a 10 per cent approval rating. So yes, I can only hope for Barack Obama; for a brilliant mind to come in and change everything. It is a scary world that the United States has ventured into. And Barack Obama can set this country on a different course.'
Leonardo DiCaprio straddles two diametrically opposed worlds: the greed and instant gratification of Hollywood and impassioned environmentalism. He drives what he calls a golf-cart car, a Prius, and he made The 11th Hour, a detailed documentary about our planet in crisis. He is alarmed about 'human beings regarding this planet as a service station'.
And yet the message comes with a smile. He once picked up a journalist's tape recorder after they'd both ordered lunch and the writer went to make a call. He told the machine that the writer shouldn't be eating hamburgers, even though DiCaprio himself had ordered one, because cows release methane gas; but you can't have tuna either, he said, because the nets capture innocent little dolphins. He was being jokey but serious at the same time. He doesn't mean to preach. Besides, he has been a Hollywood bad boy - one who liked to throw horse shit at Italian paparazzi and hang out in bars with gaggles of models wearing tiny outfits.
But the contradictions work to make him human. That's why he relished the idea of playing a more complex character in Body of Lies, one that was neither a hero nor a villain. He laughs: 'Of course it was so much easier to play someone caught in a moral web, who tries to manipulate people as best he can, but who knows he is also being manipulated. He goes on a personal journey where he realises that he is not part of any specific nationality any more. It's not about nationality; it's about what's right or wrong for him.
'When you are given an opportunity to make a film like Body of Lies, and I would put Blood Diamond in the same category, of course you jump at these opportunities. Blood Diamond shed a different light on that trade.'
I would like to think, as DiCaprio believes, that Body of Lies will shed a different light on the war on terror, but it opened in the US in a week dominated by the recent Wall Street crash and had to settle for third place in the movie charts behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Still, DiCaprio argues gamely, 'Historically we are going to look back at this type of movie and it will make people really think about what was going on at the time.'
One imagines that DiCaprio will have greater success with Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road, which reunites him with Kate Winslet. A haunting, gnawing movie based on the novel by Richard Yates, it's set in the mid-Fifties, post-Second World War but pre-Mad Men. Winslet and DiCaprio's relationship is sour and spiralling. They play a young married couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who are stuck in suburbia, trapped by the social confines of their lives and of their time. Frank has lost his nerve and lost his way. April is a trapped housewife, a homemaker who wants to go to Paris and be bohemian, but finds herself pregnant with a third baby.
The story resonates with DiCaprio because, as he asks, 'What is the American dream supposed to be? And how similar are we now to that era, in a lot of ways? It's about two people going crazy in that kind of environment. Being stripped of their identity and feeling they are living a life of clichés. What drew me towards it was that it's very reflective of the United States's moral position in the Fifties and this is where we still hinge ourselves morally, how we view our family, our fundamentals. And also, I'm a huge fan of Kate and Sam.'
But he seems uneasy that working with Kate again conjures up Titanic. DiCaprio was already one of the most famous and perhaps one of the most beautiful men in the world before Titanic. He could have had anything he wanted. But after Titanic he couldn't go out without a million girls chasing him, screaming, and he hated it. He turned down everything big-box-office after Titanic: said no to Anakin Skywalker, American Psycho and Spiderman, which turned his best friend Tobey Maguire into a star. He feared it: 'It was never my intention to have my image shown around the world.' Or to see barbers in Afghanistan arrested as they enraged the Taliban by offering a Leo DiCaprio-style haircut labelled 'The Titanic'. Then there was the time at an airport in Paris when a teenager grabbed his leg and pressed her head into it, clutching desperately. He tried to tell her that if she would get off his leg he would talk to her, but she wouldn't leave. The incident marked him. He wanted to be an actor, not a celebrity. He didn't do any movies at all for a couple of years because he was said to be suffering from 'post-Titanic distress syndrome' - the kind of fame where everyone wants to talk to you but nobody wants to listen to what you've got to say.
'The movies that I'm doing now are the movies that I've always wanted to do,' he says. 'If I'd had these opportunities when I was younger I'd have done them in a heartbeat. But you don't always get the chance to make films that you have a kinship to when you're starting. I took some time off after Titanic because I needed to let the dust settle, and recharge my battery. I felt, "OK, you've been given a tremendous opportunity, what are you going to do with it? Now your name can finance movies that you do want to do." That wasn't something that I wanted to squander. I wanted to wait until
I felt I could really contribute something that had the kind of edge I'd always been looking for since I started.'
Although these films might have had edge without box office, the combined effect was to make Leo an almost impossible combination, an edgy Hollywood star. His character in Revolutionary Road might be his best bet yet for an Oscar. He seems to light up when he talks about his darkness. 'It's a film about the disintegration of a relationship. We're putting a smile on our face and doing all the things you should be doing in a loving relationship, but the darker side is taking over. It's people who are holding on to their love in circumstances that are ripping them apart. I'm more attracted to doing that sort of thing these days because things in this world... they aren't easy, they're very complicated.'
You wonder if his relationship with Bar Refaeli, the Israeli supermodel, is uncomplicated. He is a Scorpio with Libra rising. 'That means I'm trying to balance the passionate, dark, insane parts of Scorpio the best I can, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job.'
DiCaprio started off strangely shy around women. He says, 'I've always been a slow starter. My first date was with a girl called Cessi. We had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer and then when we met I couldn't look her in the eye.' He doesn't seem to look many people in the eye directly for long, but that hasn't stopped him romancing Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova and Amber Valletta.
He says that he would love to have a wife he feels comfortable with. He says he wants a kid 'some day'. We have to skirt borders very carefully when talking about intimate things, not least because he doesn't want to be defined by his relationships with supermodels. For a long time he would take his mum to premieres instead of an inamorata. He has never liked to talk about his girlfriends, be pictured with them, or give tantalising details away, because that would feed the paparazzi, who have made him miserable. Instead, he's one of those actors who feels that 'defining yourself to the public on a consistent basis is death to a performer. The more you define who you are personally the less you are able to submerge into the characters you do, and people will think, "I don't buy him in that role."'
So the image we have of him is amorphous, a bad-boy superhero, soulful but likes to party, committed to his work but not necessarily to his long-term girlfriends. He once said his ideal wife would be one who was independent, who wouldn't mind if he went off to Alaska at a moment's notice with his friends. Robert De Niro is his friend. Not the kind of hanging-out-with friend, but the kind of friend who would recommended him to Martin Scorsese. 'I was humbled by that. De Niro-Scorsese is my generation's choice of greatest actor-director dynamic. It is to the previous one's Brando-Kazan.' He is about to start a fourth film with Scorsese, Shutter Island. They are muse and mentor. 'I have so much respect for him. Who doesn't, you know?'
Scorsese had to wait years for his Oscar. Does DiCaprio mind missing out three times? 'I have a theory. We all have our personal choices of who we think should win, but there are certain times you look back at the movie that won that year and you think, "How was that humanly possible?"'
Sometimes people get the Oscar for the wrong movie, I suggest. 'Yes, but I am not feverishly hunting one down. I am trying to do the best work I possibly can and making movies that will have resonance for years to come. I think if you try for an Oscar or a goal like that, the more people are going to see it as transparent. It's not on my radar. If it happens, great, but I'm happy to continue working as I am, really.'
He is happy being an active person. 'Life's too short to be lazy and passive, and I don't like to stay in one environment for too long, or get set in one way of thinking. I love to travel, get involved in different environmental projects. Stimulate myself.'
It's been written that you like to be on your own a lot. 'No. I think I'm more of a people person.' Is it true that you have the same set of about 10 really good friends that you grew up with because you don't need new friends and never lose old ones? 'Mmm,' he considers. 'I suppose, yes. I do have about 10 really good friends. But the fact I don't have new ones is not true.'
It is true that you don't necessarily know who to trust, he says, returning to the theme. 'People who are celebrities are shrouded in mystery. Jack Nicholson said, "By the very nature of being known you meet more people in an average week." It makes you hold on to the people you know and trust. But at the same time I try to keep an open mind, because there are a lot of fascinating people out there. Being an environmentalist and also doing this business opens me up to entirely different worlds, and I love to juggle those things.'
So it seems there are two contradicting Leos: shy, untrusting, circumspect Leo, and gregarious, up-for-anything Leo. He's been careful to display both, so I'll never pin him down as one or the other. He's answered everything, but not very exactly. He's played a perfect game. He keeps you smiling and he's laughing, even. He doesn't let you get too close, but he doesn't let you notice the distance.
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