‘I felt responsible in a whole new way’

Leonardo DiCaprio has appeared in three dozen films in a career that spans almost four decades, but he isn’t a fan of watching himself. There’s only one film the actor says is an exception to the rule: 2004’s The Aviator.

In a new interview for Esquire, the 50-year-old Oscar winner tells One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson why the Martin Scorsese-directed project remains one he holds near and dear to his heart 20 years later.

“I rarely watch any of my films, but if I’m being honest, there’s one that I have watched more than others. It’s The Aviator,” DiCaprio shared. “That’s simply because it was such a special moment to me.”

He explained, “I had worked with Marty [Scorsese] on Gangs of New York, and I’d been toting around a book on Howard Hughes for ten years. I almost did it with Michael Mann, but there was a conflict and I ended up bringing it to Marty.”

DiCaprio played the aviation pioneer alongside Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. The supporting cast includes Ian Holm, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani, Kelli Garner, Matt Ross, Willem Dafoe, Alan Alda, and Edward Herrmann.

The film is based on the 1993 non-fiction book Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, and follows Hughes from 1927 to 1947, during which he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It went on to earn 11 nominations at the 77th Academy Awards, including Best Actor for DiCaprio.

Reflecting on working on the project for several years before it ever reached screens made him feel like more than just an actor, DiCaprio said, “I was thirty. It was the first time as an actor I got to feel implicitly part of the production, rather than just an actor hired to play a role. I felt responsible in a whole new way.”

“I’ve always felt proud and connected to that film as such a key part of my growing up in this industry and taking on a role of a real collaborator for the first time,” he added.

DiCaprio has grown used to collaborating with directors over the years, and his latest project under the direction of Anderson is a prime example.

One Battle After Another is the first time DiCaprio and Anderson have worked together, an experience that the Oscar winner can only speak well of.

“I know One Battle After Another has been on your desk for a long time,” DiCaprio told Anderson. “It was a personal story for you in a lot of ways and certainly pertinent to the world that we’re living in right now. But ultimately, wanting to do this movie was pretty simple: I’ve been wanting to work with you — Paul — for something like twenty years now, and I loved this idea of the washed-up revolutionary trying to erase his past and disappear and try and live some sort of normal life raising his daughter.”

The Killers of the Flower Moon star leads a star-studded ensemble cast in the action thriller film as Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary who is being hunted by Sean Penn’s police character, Steven Lockjaw, and must reunite with his ex-revolutionaries after his daughter, played by Chase Infiniti, is taken.

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One Battle After Another also stars Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills, Bob’s former lover and the mother of his daughter, Benicio del Toro, Wood Harris, Alana Haim, and Regina Hall. In the film’s trailer, Perfidia is apprehended by law enforcement prior to the start of the movie’s events, leaving Bob and Willa (Infiniti) to go on the run and seek refuge with an ally, Sensei Sergio (del Toro).

Anderson revealed he’d been working on the black comedy for several years, which is reportedly loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. “By the time I came to you, four or five years ago, the script was probably 80 percent there,” he told DiCaprio. “I had never quite figured out the story’s policies on phones.”

He added, “You brought me to the idea that Willa having a phone is a choice to rebel against her father’s wishes. Now that was a good idea. It’s always fun when that happens with a new idea, that immediate shift where you lean into something that you were entirely opposed to. The movie benefited from it.”

“It’s about the disconnection between generations,” DiCaprio replied. “It’s about how this daughter and father relate to one another, and that we are living in a completely different world than the next generation. We think we understand it, but we don’t. This is how they communicate.”

One Battle After Another premieres in theaters Sept. 26.

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