On 11/22/2025 at 10:14 PM, akatosh said:

With One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio Proves He's In A League Of His Own

Hollywood has long been built around the idea of movie stars. Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, and Bette Davis are but a few of the classic examples. Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and more dominated the 1970s.

The 1980s were fueled by Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Murphy, Molly Ringwald, Meryl Streep, and more. By the 1990s, it was the likes of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, and more leading the charge.

But with the rise of IP and franchises in Hollywood during the 21st century, a true movie star is harder to come by than ever. Someone who is certifiably charming, extremely entertaining, and able to put butts in movie theaters is rare. Hollywood's new age of stars, like Glen Powell, Sydney Sweeney, Adam Driver, and Florence Pugh, have seen those challenges.

Yet, DiCaprio is still going strong. One Battle After Another's box office performance, crossing the $200 million milestone, is another hallmark of his status as a legitimate A-list movie star. But is he the only one Hollywood has left to offer

It's an oversimplification to put all of One Battle After Another's success on DiCaprio's shoulders. It was a rave-reviewed movie with a huge marketing spend by Warner Bros. that sold itself as more of an action/comedy thriller to get audiences in theaters. But DiCaprio's starring role also certainly helped its cause.

He's been one of the industry's most consistent box office draws since Titanic shattered records 28 years ago. One Battle After Another is his eighth movie to make over $200 million worldwide since 2010, with only two wide-release films of his not hitting that mark during these last 15 years.

That's an elite performance by the actor, especially when he's doing that without any major franchises and only a rare IP like The Great Gatsby remake. Several other actors have grossed more than him during this stretch, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who's delivered these results without any sort of franchise play.

In fact, it's hard to imagine One Battle After Another coming remotely close to the same performance without DiCaprio at its core. Just look at this year's movies. Dwayne Johnson couldn't turn The Smashing Machine into a financially successful launch. Powell is in the midst of The Running Man underperforming. Even Cruise's The Final Reckoning finished below what you'd expect for the last Mission: Impossible film.

One could point to his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood co-star as an actor who could have brought in similar business for One Battle After Another after he turned F1: The Movie into a $631 million blockbuster. But, while Pitt has had hits since 2010, he's still had fewer $200M+ performers than DiCaprio despite being in several more projects.

With DiCaprio limiting his acting roles in comparison to many of his contemporaries, there's an event nature to anything he does now. He's not at risk of audiences feeling over-saturated with his screen presence and growing tired of him, something that's happened to Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, and others previously.

In an age where Hollywood is looking at Powell, Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and others as the next generation of movie stars and hoping Cruise, Pitt, Washington, George Clooney, Matt Damon, and others can keep delivering hits, One Battle After Another further proves DiCaprio may just be in a league of his own.

He's not just a movie star who can deliver Oscar-worthy work. He can consistently get audiences to see his stuff in theaters. And with the rise in popularity of streaming and VOD, that's more important than ever before.

https://screenrant.com/one-battle-after-another-leonardo-dicaprio-last-movie-star/

Such a heartwarming thing to read.❤️

Leo and the complete OBAA cast (Teyana, Chase, Regina, Benicio and Sean) nominated for the Astra Film Awards

+Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography

Leo in NY at an OBAA promotional event.

OBAA and Benicio won.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DRrm39cAVSR/

Not sure if this is real?

Thanks for the updates guys. 🙂

First win for LEO!!

ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE
BEST FILM:
One Battle After Another

TOP 10 FILMS (ranked):
1. One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3. Weapons
4. Hamnet
5. Marty Supreme
6. It Was Just an Accident
7. No Other Choice
8. Sentimental Value
9. Train Dreams
10. The Secret Agent

BEST LEAD ACTOR:
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Amy Madigan, Weapons
Runner-up: Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST:
One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Sinners

BEST DIRECTOR:
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Ryan Coogler, Sinners

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Hamnet

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:
One Battle After Another
Runner-up: Sinners

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE:
Sinners
Runner-up: One Battle After Another

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE:
Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another
https://atlfilmcritics.org/

OMG Leo is finally doing actors on actors interview!!

New interview. Heat 2 confirmed.

Cover Story: Leonardo DiCaprio On ‘One Battle After Another’, His “No Regrets” Career And The Fight To Save Cinema

December 3, 2025 8:58am

If Leo DiCaprio had turned down Titanic and played Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, who knows what might have happened? Instead, he honored his agreement with James Cameron, and the rest is history.

But although the decision turned out to be the right one, DiCaprio often wondered if he might have missed his window to work with Paul Thomas Anderson, an opportunity that no amount of money can buy. Thirty years went by, until along came the script for One Battle After Another — a satirical take on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland — with an offer for DiCaprio to star as Bob, an Antifa-like radical gone underground who is forced out of hiding to find his missing daughter (Chase Infiniti). But, like PTA’s previous Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, there’s a lot more to it than that, including a sadistic colonel (Sean Penn), a compassionate martial-arts sensei (Benicio del Toro) and an underground cabal of murderous right-wing businessmen called The Christmas Adventurers Club. That DiCaprio’s character navigates this perilous road — replete with high-speed car chases and gun battles — clad the entire time in a tatty bathrobe and leaves most of the heroism to others in the cast is entirely consistent with how he has run one of the great star careers of his era. After all, this is the same guy who, when faced with playing a virtuous lawman in Martin Scorsese’s Native American drama Killers of the Flower Moon had the script rewritten and overhauled so he could play the existentially tortured no-good who slowly poisons the Osage wife he loves, just to please his greedy uncle.

It’s been a long, steady climb to the top. Look back at many of DiCaprio’s other best turns — from The Aviator to Revolutionary Road, Catch Me If You Can, The Revenant and Inception — and you can recognize his preference for flawed characters that put him through the emotional wringer. He also has an uncanny knack for attracting the best directors in the business, from Quentin Tarantino to Alejandro González Iñárritu, Steven Spielberg, Sam Mendes and, most famous of all, Scorsese, who traded Robert De Niro for him as a muse after collaborating on 2002’s Gangs of New York and will shortly be pairing him with Jennifer Lawrence for their seventh film together, What Happens at Night.

DiCaprio’s commitment to sophisticated, auteur-driven adult movies is much-needed — the outlook for theatrical audiences is as bleak as ever. But, as he explains here, the biggest movie star leading that space is doing his part to uphold a legacy.

The reactions to One Battle After Another have been as strong as any I’ve observed since Oppenheimer and Sinners. I cannot imagine anyone feeling that way after watching a movie on a streaming site. It’s a respite from the current climate for original movies, which is bleak. Even your movie had to overcome an earlier narrative about its budget, before anyone had seen a frame of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film. How in decline is the ambitious original film made for the theatrical experience? 

This year seems like one of the most lightning-rod moments in cinema history. We’re up against it — the future of the cinematic experience — more than ever, I feel. Getting people to come to the theaters seems like more and more of a challenge. That isn’t to say it can’t happen; the Barbie–Oppenheimer summer was an amazing thing, and hats off to those two incredible movies, but it certainly seems more and more like the theatrical experience is becoming more and more minimized for original material and completely new, out-of-the-box storytelling. And that’s possibly going to be subjugated to streamers now. Whereas the theatrical experience may be for the newer technological wonders that people want to experience in the theater.

I just hope that’s not the case, and I hope that there’s still room for original material going into the future. But, at the end of the day, man, the tide is changing. It’s going to be a fight, and things are going to have to become so unique for audiences that they garner it worthy to go see it in the theater.

That was never a line drawn by me, you, and the previous generation that went to see everything in the theater…

Is it becoming like collecting vinyl? Do we have to decide what categorizes the movies we’ll wait for to see on a streamer and what categorizes the movies that are worthy enough to see in the theater? It remains to be seen, but people always have that argument constantly about, “Oh, well, I’d prefer to watch it at home, and what’s the difference anyway?” I think there’s arguments to both. I guess I’m part of the old school ilk of people that love to be in a communal experience. I think we’re primates that feed off each other, and I just love going to the theater.

You can’t fake that feeling, like I had walking out of Oppenheimer or at the Chinese Theater premiere of your movie, and it’s nice to be able to be moved like that. I just saw it again. There was a small crowd, but they got every line, the shock registering when PTA wanted it to, the audience laughing where he wanted them to. I guess I’m saying, “Good on you, guys,” for holding up your end of the bargain. So let me launch into some important questions…

Before you do that, I’d like to say that I’m so very proud of this movie. Proud to be involved in it, and really proud that however many people actually came to the theater to see it. The ones that did so really expressed a genuine and sincere feeling that it was made to be seen in the theaters, and that they really loved watching this movie there. The VistaVision thing is even more interesting because, as we’re talking about the endangerment of the cinematic experience, this movie went even more lo-fi, picking up an endangered and nearly extinct cinematic format that has, god, I don’t know how many cameras, but I think only four projectors. One in LA, one in Boston, one in New York and one in London. But it was really cool to hear people’s appreciation for being able to see something in a completely different format. We watched it that way in London, and to see that kind of flickering light strobe through the theater…

We are so inundated with such hi-fi experiences now that it actually took me 10 minutes to adjust to the feeling of film again. But then I really got into it. It was like playing a record and feeling the warmth of it. The Brutalist is the only other film since One-Eyed Jacks in 1961 to be shot in VistaVision. That was period, ours was a modern-day film. I’m not a film expert, I couldn’t talk to you about the exact differentiation between that and 35mm, but it certainly felt like things were more tactile and real and had a warmth to them. When I saw The Brutalist — or The Master, which was shot in 65mm — I felt like I was in that era. It was raw and real, and you felt like you could jump into that world. It was really cool to watch it in that format. And I’m really appreciative that, no matter how finite, the group of people who saw it that way loved the experience too. [Laughs.] On to your important questions.

After Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, the coolest Halloween costume was the Hawaiian shirt over the Champion sparkplug T-shirt that your co-star Brad Pitt wore as Rick Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth. How gratifying was it to see so many trick-or-treaters and partygoers this Halloween in a bathrobe, sunglasses, wool hat and a cell phone?

Definitely a cool experience. I even saw one on a baby, which was amazing. What’s funny is, I think that print of bathrobe actually became discontinued while we were making the movie. But there were enough out there that were similar. That costume… I think we talked about that costume more than any I’ve worn. In pre-production, we had the whole team — Paul and everybody — trying to figure out what my look should be, because it was going to be Bob’s superhero outfit throughout the rest of the movie.

There was one point in which Paul and I had come up with a parka that he would have had in his emergency kit. There would be a parka with all kinds of explosives in it. And then the sound guy came up to us and said, “No. No parka, no parka.” And then Paul and I were like, “Well, Bob’s sitting at home, he’s watching The Battle of Algiers again for the 200th time, and he’s in his sweatpants and his weird wide-toed shoes that he walks around in, getting stoned. It’s a little cold out but he’s got to go. Does he think about stripping down? Does he think about becoming the revolutionary? No, he’s got weed in his system, and he’s got to go.” So that became his one look for the rest of the movie. I love that he never takes anything off. He just keeps moving forward.

Same with Benicio’s sensei character and his karate pants.

Exactly, and he’s got to go, too. It’s like you get these guys in this slice-of-life moment of what their day-to-day is like, and they’re on the move. And then I had this vision of those gigantic sunglasses that I remember from the ‘80s and ‘90s, the ones you put over your reading glasses. And that became his Star Wars outfit. We had a lot of different discussions about Bob’s look — days and days and days of what that look should be like. So, it was very gratifying, Halloween and all.

The film is full of meme-worthy laugh lines, from “semen demon,” “Viva la revolution!,” and “Thank you, Sensei” to the Christmas Adventurers Club. How do you land those without interrupting the tension in that propulsive narrative?  

Some of them were improvised, some were written in the script. “Viva la revolution!” just came out in that moment. We had a great flow, an amazing set decorator and location scout, and that rolling carpet down to [the Sensei’s] Harriet Tubman immigration center was already set up for us and it was our last goodbye. For that whole sequence of lines, I have to give so much credit to Benicio who I got to work with probably the most in this film. He was so very specific about what his character was. He came out right from the set of The Phoenician Scheme, and he had this cacophony of amazing ideas of who Sensei was. And that’s why we really stopped production for three months to wait for him, because we knew that there was only one Sensei in this world, and that was Benicio. And he came in with so many different ideas. That whole Harriet Tubman thing came from his imagination. We had a whole other sequence set in place where I was going to make a kill. And he was like, “Well, if this guy kills somebody, what is my allegiance to him?”

Crossing that line from idealist to killer would have changed his character?

We spoke about it for days. We were like, “Yeah, true. You do admire him. You’re an admirer of the French 75. You’re a revolutionary yourself, but how much are you going to risk your life for this guy?” That propelled us all to that sort of made-up road trip we came up with in a week. The whole immigration center that he had going on in his house, his entire family unit, that was all made up within a week. A lot of those lines between he and I were just improvised. He came in with that sense of ocean waves and that inner peace. His calmness with my hysteria, it happened on day one, we could feel it was a beautiful thing. I just give so much credit to Benicio for his specificity and his character because it gave me so much to play off of, that “Thank you Sensei!” stuff just kind of happened. And then the “Viva la revolution!” stuff happened, and then the stuff on the rooftop with his guys. He imagined [the Sensei] would have a crew, and that he would have a crew at the hospital. He’d have crews everywhere. He’s got the whole neighborhood on tap. That was all made up. A lot of this stuff was improvised and a lot was written. It was a mixed bag.

It reminded me of Brad Pitt dropping off your Rick Dalton character on set, and spontaneously reminding him, “You’re Rick f*cking Dalton, and don’t you forget it.” PTA and Quentin Tarantino are writer-director auteurs. How open are they to things they didn’t write?  

Writer-directors are interesting, because there’s some things that are sacrilege to try to change. I include Marty, who, to a degree, writes his own work and certainly does tons of writing on the scripts for his movies, along with Quentin and Paul, very specific writer-directors who only do their own material. It’s about finding those sweet spots, those moments. They hire us for that reason, to find those moments, but it’s about navigating that within the context of the structure that they’ve written, because sometimes they have a very specific idea of what they want done according to their script. But, yeah, it’s about the actors finding those moments. And sometimes they use them and sometimes they don’t. You’ve just got to throw it out there as much as you can, whenever you feel it’s right.

Sean Penn said he grabbed PTA’s script when he was coming out of the shower and that he sat on the floor and didn’t even dress as he ripped through it. You were in earlier; how much did PTA let you under the hood as he wrote it? Or did you read the finished product like Sean? In that case, how did you react, knowing the journey you were taking with him?

Well, I would say it was the same as Sean. I mean, the way that character was written, Sean brought this incredible vulnerability and pitifulness to the character that made it not your typical villain. He brought a humanity to it that I saw immediately on screen. This vulnerability of a guy that wants to belong to the Christmas Adventurers Club — it’s become his only identity — and yet he’s battling this voracious appetite for Teyana Taylor’s character and is so heartbroken by it, he wants to erase it. There was just so much complexity that Sean brought. But I guess your question is… what is your question specifically?

It was about your reaction when you read the script, finding out where these characters were going and how they were going to get there, in scenes that move at 90 mph.

Paul had put so much thought into this — 15 to 20 years of thought into all these different characters — that it was obviously very personal to him, and it really tapped into the state of the world right now, the extremism that we all feel, from both sides. He did it in such an elegant, beautiful way with these very human protagonists that were all flawed. When I first read the script, I knew it was something incredibly special right out of the gate. I just loved how he goes against the norm with so many tropes that we see in movies. He just takes the opposite direction for my character. I just love that he was very equipped as a revolutionary, and you have this expectation of him being able to utilize all these tools from his past.

But then he’s put into a situation where he’s so ill-equipped at this particular moment to try to garner whatever skills he has, because he’s inebriated and he’s become lazy and just out of touch and disconnected with the world. I just imagined this man, sitting in this tiny little shack—and we looked at 10 different shacks to find the perfect one. I just imagined him sitting there, no internet, watching DVDs, completely paranoid. Maybe he goes out to the local bar, or does some mechanical scrap work in the back of his yard, but his main objective is, “Don’t tread on me.” No government allowed, no social media, no nothing. And the one singular idea that Paul had that made it all cook was him just not remembering his password. I couldn’t believe how long this went on, whereas maybe that would be one blip in a story, in any normal screenplay that I usually read.

It certainly becomes the gift that kept giving, prompting numerous meltdowns by your character…

It becomes my entire identity — this goddamn password! The scenes just progressively became more and more tense, and the audience comes with you on this journey, where it’s like, “Goddammit, you finally found it at that right moment when the pressure’s on.” The tension that he created in that script was unbelievable. I always talk about tension in movies and stakes, however big or small, and whether the audience is with you. Each one of these characters has their own set of tensions — and they’re all converging. It’s like a pilot landing a plane without any autopilot, and [PTA] somehow lands the ending of this movie in such a brilliant way. It’s all done analog, and without any of the traditional expectations that you have for a movie. He landed this plane on his own and he did it brilliantly. It was all right there, written in that script. And I was just so proud and excited to be a part of it, right from the beginning.

When you did Killers of the Flower Moon, you encouraged Marty and Eric Roth to turn the whole narrative on its ear, and you went from being the good guy to the conflicted guy who was slowly poisoning the woman he loved for her oil rights fortune. How much of a say do you want when you’re an actor on a movie like One Battle After Another, compared to also being producer like on Killers, where you have sway in everything we’re going to see onscreen?

In other words, how do I differentiate myself from just being an actor to somebody who’s a producer of the movie and changing the structure? 

Well, yeah. With Killers, that creative overhaul that you suggested — and which Marty, Eric Roth and Robert De Niro embraced — added at least a year to the development process. But it allowed you to make something more complex. It was darker and more diabolical, and it pulled you out of the traditional hero role. To me, it was worth it.

Well, thank you, I appreciate that. I mean, what can I say other than it was a real gut instinct? The screenplay initially was the Tom White character [played by Jesse Plemons after DiCaprio switched from playing white hat to black hat], and this full investigation. I think, more than anything, it took away from Lily Gladstone’s character’s evolution. And [the rewrite] brought this horrifying story more into the household, this sort of diabolical, twisted household of manipulation, and made it less the white savior thing, which I think would’ve been, in my opinion, a mistake to go down. It brought us into the family dynamic where there was a certain amount of love, guilt and a horrifying betrayal at the same time. After talking to Marty, we just felt it was just a much more interesting way to go, with the psychology of how this man could do it, under the guise of manipulation from De Niro’s character, her dilemma of wanting to keep this family together, my character’s sort of schizophrenia, and what the right thing to do is.

It was heavily influenced by Montgomery Clift movies: A Place in the Sun, The Heiress, The Search, Red River. When we saw those movies, we were like, wow. What if we could mesh these things together to try to create some sort of twisted look at all this while being able to bring the Osage and Molly into it, and the community into it more, rather than it being purely a film about the FBI’s investigation? Even though that script was very good, and it would’ve made another interesting movie, what I thought was that it would be a film about something the audience would’ve already figured out in the first 10 minutes of the movie. This way got us into the community more, the household more, and the inner family dynamics, which I just felt was more interesting and more heartbreaking.

You’ve said your biggest regret was not doing Boogie Nights with PTA, playing the Dirk Diggler role. The one you starred in instead won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, and for the longest time was the highest-grossing film ever, making $2.2 billion. It stamped you as a globally bankable star that has allowed you the leverage to make films like One Battle After Another. Choosing Titanic was a smart move, to me. Can you recall what you felt when you had to choose?  

Well, I think that was my answer to a question in the guise of speaking to Paul, and, without getting too personal about my own life, the question was, “What do you regret most?” We were sitting here talking about movies. It came from the standpoint of just being a fan of his work for so long. I do remember watching that movie and it being just a lightning rod moment for my generation. It was like the arrival of a new cinematic titan, one who was speaking to my generation. Now, I don’t think anyone could have done a better job than Mark Wahlberg in that movie, so I said it from the perspective of being just a really sincere fan and then watching the way Paul has progressed as a storyteller with these very esoteric, existential films he’s made since then that keep you thinking. Boogie Nights was the launching pad for a new artist. So, it’s less about that specific film and more about wanting to have worked with Paul.

Any regrets about choosing Titanic? It launched you and Kate Winslet to enviable careers, but it sounded like a hellacious experience, with James Cameron going past double the original budget and all those scenes in cold water…

No regrets. I mean, fully now in retrospect, I look back at that film and realize the thanks and the appreciation that I have for being a part of it, and to have been able to be in this incredibly fortunate position and not only to have been a part of that movie, but to be able to be the conductor of my own choices since. That has been just the greatest gift. The dilemma for me at that point, was, of course I would’ve loved to have done both movies, but it just couldn’t happen at that moment. And then, here we are, all these years later and it’s this great sort of reconnection. We’ve gone on these paths together, and then to come back around and be able to collaborate with Paul on this is just amazing. But yeah, I mean that moment, I don’t know what my ability or my career would’ve been without that film making it possible to be able to steer the course of my own career. So, I’m very thankful.  

You’ve prioritized great directors in choosing your film roles, Martin Scorsese being atop the list. What can you tell us about What Happens at Night, which puts you alongside another Oscar winner in Jennifer Lawrence? The loose description conjures comparisons to The Shining and Shutter Island. What can you say about it, and do you hope to make it next?

It’s a work in progress. But what I do know is that Marty has this incredible yearning and connection to this material. I don’t know if I could compare it to The Shining or Shutter Island. I think he’s heavily influenced by films like Vertigo, in that the film that he wants to make is about human relationships, about the acceptance of grief, the ability to let go. It’s a love story, but it’s simultaneously about accepting the reality that you’re given in this life. It’s going to be an interesting journey. We’re still putting all the pieces together, but Marty has a very firm idea of what he wants to do, and there’s going to be a lot of exploration when we make this movie, because it can go in a lot of different directions. But at the core is this relationship between a man and a dying woman. They’re put into a set of circumstances where we don’t know what’s reality and what’s not.

You’ve also been working with Michael Mann on Heat 2, either as Chris Shiherlis, the role played by the late Val Kilmer, or Vincent Hanna, the detective played by Al Pacino. What can you share, and — as a guy who doesn’t usually do sequels — what are the challenges in continuing the storyline from the revered original?

This is very much its own movie. We’re still working on it, we’re a ways away from production. It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there. The book is already out there, so there are no big secrets that I’m divulging. It’s set in the future, and the past, from that pivotal moment in what I think is the great crime noir film of my lifetime. It’s one of those films that just keeps resonating, that we keep talking about, that has been imitated so many times and influenced so many different movies. So, we’re working on it. But it’s certainly exciting, and I think I look at it as its own silo, in a sense. We can’t duplicate what Heat was, so it’s paying homage to that film, but giving it its own unique entity.

If you wanted me to know if you will play Hanna or Shiherlis, you probably would have said.

We’re discussing it. You know the book?

Loved the book.  

What do you think? 

It’s a tough one. Shiherlis, unable to see his wife and son again, starts over in a new criminal enterprise and he’s got the big journey. But I love the Hanna character for his dogged pursuit of Neil McCauley. I’ve seen Heat 100 times, easy, and I wish I could help your decision. You’ll have to pick one.

We’re in mid-discussion.

This a full-circle moment for me. My first conversation with Michael Mann came when I’d broken a story in Variety about how he and you had decided that the film about James Dean you were doing with him wasn’t going to work out.  

Wow, that was so long ago. My god, I was 18.

So, that was my headline, and then I wrote that he would instead pair Pacino and De Niro in this movie he’d written called Heat. He called me up and was rightfully pissed. He was like, “You wrote a story about a movie that isn’t happening and gave short shrift to what will be the first pairing of two of the greatest actors of this generation?” I did another story, because he was right. Now, you came close on James Dean and again on The Aviator, and now it’s happening with Heat 2. This sounds a lot like your long-held desire to work with PTA.  

What I love about Michael Mann as an artist and as a person — and I’ve heard this from other actors along the way — is that he is extraordinary to work with, because there’s nothing that he hasn’t thought of. He’s thought of every single nuance and detail of the character, of the world, and he’s going to have an answer for any questions you might have. When we did the James Dean screen test, I remember it was at Warner Bros. They put a top hat on me. I did my best. I think we had two days to shoot a screen test. I was probably just a little too young at that time. Then we moved on to developing The Aviator together. That was the Howard Hughes book I remember carrying around in my backpack for almost 10 years, while I was voraciously reading about who that man was. I had a huge passion to play him. Michael developed that entire screenplay with John Logan, and it was just masterful. He had just done Ali, and after doing one major biopic, he didn’t want to do another, he said, “It’s yours, kid.” I said, “OK, thank you.”

Marty was the guy that I took it to. He picked up the script, saw the first page with The Aviator on it, and he said, “I don’t know anything about aviation.” And then he said, “But I didn’t know anything about boxing either when I did Raging Bull.” Then he delved into the character and the screenplay that Michael had set up, which was masterful, nuanced and fully realized. It was a struggle for me, because I was so obsessed with the later Hughes too. But it took us both a while to get to this one idea, where we were just focused on the onset of his degradation and his OCD, compounded by his germ phobia. And there’s another film to do, which is later on, which is him stuck in the hotel room in Vegas with inches of dust around his apartment building. But this was the onset of it, and the aviation stuff was spectacular. Michael really was the architect of all of that. And so, yeah, I’ve always wanted to work with Michael. He’s got an incredibly brilliant mind, and there’s no stone that he leaves unturned.

It sets up that race to be a pioneer before his mental illness defeats him, ending in that heartbreaking scene where he repeats the phrase “The way of the future.”

That was in the script. I remember Marty and I meeting with [screenwriter] John Logan. We wanted to rip the whole script apart. John very casually sat there as we slowly went through the entire script. He was like, “Yeah, but that’s already there.” Or “Well, we could flash-forward to this, but do you see that it’s already there?” Finally, we were like, “OK, you’re right.” We shot the script that Michael and John wrote, with some minor changes, but it was just one of the best screenplays that I ever got to be a part of making.

Your character in One Battle After Another starts out a fresh-faced revolutionary, but by the time he’s called on to find his daughter, he’s no John Wick out of retirement. He’s this pothead in the bathrobe, emerging out of a cloud of weed smoke. The hero moments fall to Benicio and Chase Infiniti, who plays your daughter. He’s a flawed character tasked with being more than mediocre. He has no superpower, or, if there ever was one, it has long ago been dulled by weed. Why do you like to play these kinds of roles?  

I talked about one singular idea that changes the course of the entire narrative, and that being not remembering the password. That became a theme that we then carried on through the rest of the film. The original screenplay did have, certainly, one ruthless heroic moment in the beginning, and then the tail end of how the movie ended was left TBD. I give a lot of credit to Paul, because every time we came to the fork of the road of my character doing something that was traditionally heroic, we’d both hem and haw. Sometimes that was literally on the street the day of shooting, or in the dojo on that day.

It was Benicio who said, “This is too much. If he’s going to kill one of these guys, I will have blood on my hands.” We kept on working on it, and we didn’t have a distinct idea of how the movie would end. I remember the moment where we were still delineating what to do, whether Bob has a traditional heroic moment at the end of the movie. And Paul said, “No, this needs to be passed on to the next generation. Her parents’ mistakes, the ideals of her extremist revolutionary parents, all that needs to be passed on to the next generation. She’s got to be faced with something that she never asked for, which is having a gun in her hand and saving her own life, because it’s now about her.”

You were good with that?

I got it at that moment. I was like, “He’s totally right.” And these are just the choices that a master filmmaker makes in the moment that you have to give credit where credit is due and not take the obvious choice. People that I’ve spoken to do appreciate that aspect of the Bob character, that being a father at the end of this movie is his heroism, just the mere act of moving forward, the mere act of trying his best. It’s very humanizing, being there for his daughter. And if anything, his heroic moment is putting his arm around her in that car as they’re weeping together, driving away from this horrific carnage.

The real positive of you not playing the superhero is that it leaves oxygen for Chase Infiniti, who’s making her movie debut, and for Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor, who comes shot out of a cannon and makes the most of her 40 minutes or so of screen time.  

Teyana and Regina are so pivotal in this movie, and Chase really, she is in a lot of ways the heart of this film. We met a lot of different actresses. I don’t want to say it’s her innocence, but when you meet this young lady in person, you want to do everything you can to make sure she’s OK. That projected on screen in such a dynamic way. You knew the audience is completely OK with the idea, we’re going to stop at nothing to make sure this young lady isn’t a sacrificial lamb to Bob’s past, or [his ex] Perfidia’s past, in the movie we’re stopping at nothing to save her. And she just encapsulates not only that, but the ferocity and the fighting spirit of her mom. She had the combination of both that really makes this movie cook and work, and she did such an incredible breakout performance in this film. I’m so proud of her.

Your character falls off a roof. He dives out of a moving car. Was there a part of you that thought, “Y’know what? I’m going to Tom Cruise this shit and do it myself.”

[Smiles]. There were some stunts that I did and some stunts I didn’t. If I would’ve fallen off of that roof, we wouldn’t have been able to continue production. Even the stunt guy had to do it on cables. There’s no way I would’ve pulled that off. Other things, I did what I could, or rather I did what Bob could do, like his inability to catch up with those [skateboard] guys right out of the gate. You think you’re going to go on the traditional espionage thriller, and then as soon as they’re on the rooftop, 10 seconds later, he’s fallen down two stories and then he gets tasered.

It sounds like when it comes to those kinds of stunts, it’s best to hand over the bathrobe to the stuntman.

Well put.

Were you ever going to be part of the spinoff David Fincher is making about Brad Pitt’s character from Once Upon a Time…?

There were some talks about it early on. Ultimately, I cannot wait to see the Cliff Booth story, but I’m not in it. I think David Fincher’s the perfect man for the job. Quentin is a huge fan of his work, I’m a huge fan of his work, and there’s nobody better to carry on that lineage and tell that story. I think it’s the next phase of Cliff Booth’s life. I’m excited to see it.

Before anyone saw a frame of One Battle After Another, the press narrative was harsh, focusing on this being a huge gamble. It put Warner Bros. production chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy on their heels. The movie came out and reviews were rhapsodic. What do you think when you see these kinds of negative articles about your upcoming projects?  

I try not to pay attention to it. Every time you see stuff about what the budget of the movie was, it becomes a narrative about how much it’s going to make theatrically. We haven’t even counted on what it’s going to do, into next year. It remains to be seen. But back to what we were saying earlier, yeah, there is a distinct microscope on whether artistic original films garner or deserve the theatrical experience. And what can you say? I think that’s left up to audiences, and cinema-lovers. And I think that these films are still going to be made. It’s just in what context we’re going to be able to watch them, and how we’re going to experience them is going to be the difference.

We’re not falling short of an inundation of material and production. I think, going into the future, we’re going to see tons of original ideas, tons of movies being made, and limited series. The work is out there. It’s just the challenge of whether they’re going to be seen in theaters and how much is going to be taken over by AI and what movies are going to look like in the future. I don’t have a crystal ball, but as long as the people in our industry are going to be able to continue to work — and hopefully they are — it’s the way of the future. [He smiles at using the Howard Hughes line.] And with anything… when television started, or the advent of radio or DVDs or MP3s or whatever, it’s all going to change. But hopefully people still want to see movies. That’s all I can hope for.

You told a story in one of our past interviews that when you were a teen, you turned down Hocus Pocus — the most money in your life you would have been paid up to then. Instead, you took a comparative pittance for the indie film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. That film helped get you to the next level. What would you say to an up-and-coming actor who’s seeing scripts that maybe are so-so but might be commercial hits and good paydays?

The thing that I could say more than anything is that if you love this profession, if you love being an actor, you have to realize that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And that’s not to say, “Oh, these are all pivotal choices. Don’t try something commercial. Don’t do this too early.” It’s about the idea of looking at your career 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, and putting those building blocks together to last. And maybe overexposure could be damaging. I think, if anything, I had somewhat of an instinct early on about overexposure. Granted, it was a different time. It was a time where I watched actors that kind of disappeared their personal life, and you didn’t know much about them. It’s much different now with social media. But I didn’t get to know much about them except what I saw on screen.

Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Oscar Preview magazine here.

I got to see them build a body of great work over time, I wasn’t inundated with a massive explosion of too many films by them in one or two years. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t take the work when it’s given to you, but it’s the idea of doling it out, or maybe just taking those films that have great supporting characters that are interesting and making your mark in the industry. I was very fortunate and very lucky, very early on. And like I said with Titanic, that was the real changing point, when I got to choose my own films. But until then, I did a lot of independent movies. I just went for the character that I thought was most interesting, and something that I could sink my teeth into.

It’s about the part. And sometimes even being in a movie that is massively successful — that isn’t about the focus on the humanity of these characters, or about making people understand something about the human condition — you don’t even get credit for. It becomes about the subject matter of the movie being successful. There are times when you can reap the rewards of that and times when you can’t. But like I said, I think for young actors it is about saying, “I want to be here for a long time. I don’t want to be overexposed.”

https://deadline.com/2025/12/leonardo-dicaprio-one-battle-after-another-interview-1236630686/

Great day, I'am excited!

18 minutes ago, BarbieErin said:

Great day, I'am excited!

Me too!!

Another win for Leo and OBAA