Leonardo DiCaprio Revisits His Career, From "Growing Pains" to "One Battle After Another"

At 15 years old, I think I had a firm idea of what kind of actor I wanted to be, what kind of career I wanted to have. More so than anything, I wanted to have longevity and look at it as a marathon, not a sprint. I came from doing commercials, after-school specials. I was on a great TV show for a year called Growing Pains. Very luckily, I got this incredible opportunity to work alongside Robert De Niro in This Boy's Life and that propelled my film career. And then it was about that next choice. I think there was two different films at that point that I got offered and Gilbert Grape was one that they were sort of hesitant to hire me on. And there was a much more lucrative opportunity at that time that I said no to. And I really worked hard on creating that character. I think it was my first experience with real character development. And to me, I have incredible memories of making that movie and it was a pivotal moment in my life. Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, they're cinephiles and they both have a reverence for cinema history and being in real, tactile, tangible places where you feel almost like you're a chameleon. You're able to immerse yourself in that. Something clicks in you as an actor and you feel like you're there. Paul Thomas Anderson creates this sort of microcosm on set. It's very lo-fi and you really feel like you're intimately in these spaces. Those shop owners were real shop owners, real corrections officers, real nurses. Paul brought us to so many different locations that infused our characters with the reality of the ecosystem around us. Quentin's the same way. I remember the moment where I drove down Hollywood Boulevard and we turn a corner and we're in 1969 Hollywood. For seven square blocks of some of the most touristic areas in Los Angeles being completely transformed to represent the culture of that time was just mind-boggling. I remember taking a real flamethrower and torching down the greatest stuntmen of all time through cinema history and he brought them all in one room to play Nazis and I burned them three days in a row. We shot the entire film in magic hour which meant it was about an hour, hour and a half of the sun coming down and the elements were constantly stopping us from propelling ourselves forward. Production got delayed from the freezing temperatures. Cameras froze a lot of the time. My hands were freezing a lot of the time. One of the moments with Chivo, the great cinematographer who did that film, he kept moving around me with the camera and my breath hit the lens for the first time. And I was like, Chivo, sorry, my breath was all over the camera and I remember Chivo saying to me that moment, Cabrón, we broke the third wall. I'm like, what does that mean? He goes, that's exactly what I wanted. It's like the character interacting with the camera, the landscape. These guys were just constantly, it was so fun to watch them experiment with everything in that partnership and to film in those environments and those ecosystems was an incredible experience. Martin Scorsese has these very deliberate screenings for days and days and days with all the actors, sometimes crew members, cameramen, lighting people, whoever, wardrobe, to get the essence of what he's trying to capture. One particular scene, you might watch two movies just for that scene. I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich. Marty wanted to show an era of opulence and decadence and the idea that they were almost like Roman emperors where there were no rules. I remember one of my biggest moments, which was, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. That moment, I had tonsillitis the day before and we had to shut down production and wait two weeks to do that again. It was great because then I got to think about all the different beats of that speech. Those speeches were very, those were things I rehearsed for a long period of time but it was amazing to have a partner like Jonah alongside me. Jonah Hill, who's one of the great improvisational actors I've ever worked with. The stuff with Jonah was to me the most magical sort of titillating moments in the film because we never knew what direction the scene would take at any given moment. Yeah, my wife, yeah, my wife is my cousin or whatever but it's not like what you think, whatever, you know. I think it was one of the most free and exciting and spontaneous and hilarious film productions I've ever been a part of. I've never seen Martin Scorsese that happy on a set in my life because there were really no rules. We really were more free on that film than I can remember ever being on any film in my life. Who knows, there may be a great renaissance with production in the future but it certainly seems like the cinematic experience is under threat. But, you know, I'm not here to push or advocate that people must see things in theatres. I'm just a fan of it myself and that's how I grew up and I think that's how they're best experienced.