Читать книгу Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography - Douglas Wight - Страница 13

After Leonardo had finished filming This Boy’s Life but before any buzz about his performance started to circulate, he found himself auditioning for another potentially challenging role.

Like the Caton-Jones project he’d just completed, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape already had a star name on board. Johnny Depp had been signed up to play the lead character before a screenplay was even written. Depp, who had recently made Hollywood sit up and take notice of his acting talents with a haunting turn as Edward Scissorhands, was taken by the idea that Peter Hedges’ 1991 novel was like a modern-day Catcher in the Rye.

As with This Boy’s Life, Leonardo faced stiff competition and a real test of his acting skills as he read for the part of Gilbert Grape’s mentally retarded brother Arnie. Initially, Swedish director Lasse Hallström wanted an actor ‘who wasn’t good-looking’ for the part but after seeing Leonardo’s impressive audition, he was willing to change his mind.

Still, a large group of hopefuls remained in the running and Hallström tried to whittle them down by setting a challenge. Each actor was given the same tape of a retarded boy and asked to mimic his movements.

‘I watched the kid move his eyes and body, and just tried to get into his mind,’ Leonardo recalls. ‘It was interesting because he was completely unpredictable, so I could improvise pretty much whenever I felt it was right during the scene. I took a lot of his mannerisms and made them more like my own.’

His interpretation did the trick. Hallström was impressed by what he saw. ‘Of all the actors who auditioned for the role of Arnie,’ he said, ‘Leonardo was the most observant.’

As Hedges put the finishing touches to his screenplay, Leonardo was installed as Arnie and the rest of the impressive cast assembled. Juliette Lewis, who’d burst onto the scene opposite Robert De Niro in the remake of the thriller Cape Fear and who that year had replaced British star Emily Lloyd in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992), was to play Gilbert’s love interest, Becky, while Mary Steenburgen appeared as a housewife who lusted after Gilbert. But the most surprising addition to the cast was unknown Darlene Cates, who was to play the boys’ mother.

Gilbert Grape author and screenwriter Hedges saw Cates on US chat show The Sally Jessy Raphael Show discussing how she became housebound when her weight ballooned to over 550lb. He spoke to Cates and offered her the part, feeling that someone who lived that life for real was more convincing than an actress told to fatten up for the part. It was a brave move and one that added to the independent feel of the picture. Her performance was key to the story, a subtle, moving drama about a family burdened by her immobilised frame.

To prepare for the part of Arnie, Leonardo conducted further research and gave an early indication of the seriousness with which he would approach his roles: he went into homes, studied similarly impaired children and tried to get inside their minds. He was fascinated to discover that, far from being crazy, these kids were spontaneous and unpredictable.

‘I had to really research and get into the mind of somebody with a disability like that,’ he says. ‘So I spent a few days at a home for mentally retarded teens. We just talked and I watched their mannerisms. People have these expectations that mentally retarded children are really crazy, but it’s not so. It’s refreshing to see them because everything’s so new to them.’

The more Leonardo found out for himself about the role he was about to play, the greater freedom he was afforded by Hallström and he was left pretty much to his own devices. He compiled a list of ‘a couple of hundred little attributes’ but when he approached the director to go through the ones he wanted to try, the Swede essentially waved him off.

‘Lasse didn’t really tell me anything about actually what he thought I should do,’ explains Leo. ‘He just said, “Do what you think.” It was the most freedom I had ever had with anything I’d ever done.’

Where Leo was concerned, director Hallström believed it was all in his eyes. ‘His two eyes are different,’ explains Hallström. ‘The left eye is very soft and empathetic; the right eye is more analysing. One eye oozes warmth, while the other is more penetrating. One eye is psyche, the other is intellect.’

Commenting on the character of Arnie, Leonardo said: ‘He’s a person who does specifically whatever he feels at a singular moment. He’ll go off and climb the water tower, or scream or burp, or whatever. He’s a real instinctual character. I had a great time playing him for that reason, because I was free to pretty much do whatever I wanted with him. It was really a lot of fun. I’ve never played a character in my life that had that much freedom.’

And he added: ‘Johnny and Juliette were really cool for letting me go off and do my thing with that. They were calming me down because I was very hyper.’

Indeed, the freedom afforded to all of the leading actors helped create a relaxed atmosphere on set and Johnny and Leonardo developed a big brother-little brother relationship. Depp playfully teased his young co-star by getting him to sniff smelly food such as pickled eggs so that he could laugh at Leo’s reaction. Eventually the demands to see Leo’s facial expressions grew so ridiculous, the teenager began charging Depp $500 a pop for the pleasure. In return, Leonardo used his more experienced buddy to supply him with cigarettes.

Johnny was impressed by DiCaprio’s assured performance and recognised a rising star in the making. ‘Good fun,’ he remarked, when asked what it was like working with the teenage Leo. ‘He was really a kid, you know, so he was like a pain in the ass. He was always, “Johnny, give me a cigarette. My mom’s not looking, give me a cigarette!” But he was a good kid.’

Both actors were unfaltering in their praise for Cates, who revelled in her role.

Leonardo said: ‘To come into a movie for the first time and do the job that she’s done and to feel so loving and so comfortable towards everybody on set, including me and Johnny [is something]. To me, playing Arnie, I went in and I was able to be this character, and at the end of the three months, I was done with. She has to live that life – she did a terrific job.’

Depp added: ‘Darlene is for me the shock of the film. She is one of the most incredible people I have ever known. To be so brave as to allow herself to unravel emotionally, she’s incredible – she should be applauded.’

When the movie was released in December 1993, it took over $2 million on the opening weekend and went on to make a respectable $10 million. What was undeniable, however, was the universal praise for Leo’s performance. The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin gushed, ‘the film’s real show-stopping turn comes from Mr. DiCaprio, who makes Arnie’s many tics so startling and vivid that at first he is difficult to watch. The performance has a sharp, desperate intensity from beginning to end,’ while Film Review praised ‘a performance of astonishing innocence and spontaneity’, bringing ‘a touching credibility to a very difficult part.’

On viewing the movie, many industry giants, including Martin Scorsese, found it hard to believe that Leo wasn’t really mentally challenged but his performance was far more than a really good imitation of a retarded boy. Any moviegoers witnessing Arnie’s heartbreaking realisation that his mother was not about to wake up from her nap would realise that here was an actor with extraordinary range and vulnerability – and a face every bit as handsome as Depp’s.

And his performance also amazed one of Leo’s kinder critics. His grandmother Helene was overjoyed to see him pull off such a difficult role with style. ‘He was so convincing,’ she said, proudly. ‘Many people who saw it thought he was really handicapped because he acted so well. I’m astounded what he manages to do without any acting lessons, he really has talent.’

As the praise snowballed, the award nominations began to come Leonardo’s way. He won the National Board of Review Award and the New Generation Award again. Then the whispers started about an Oscar nomination. A Golden Globe nod for Best Supporting Actor was considered a pointer for a similar nomination in the Oscars. Leonardo tried to put the buzz to the back of his mind but when the nomination was eventually confirmed, he was delighted. Publicly, he played it cool by claiming he went back to sleep after his agent called him.

For a 19-year-old, attending his first Academy Award ceremony as a nominee was an incredible achievement in itself. On the night he was accompanied by Irmelin, George and Peggy. It was a nerve-shredding experience. He was up against some tough competition: Tommy Lee Jones for his scene-stealing stint in The Fugitive, John Malkovich as Clint Eastwood’s nemesis (In the Line of Fire), Pete Postlethwaite for his gripping portrayal of Guiseppe Conlon (In the Name of the Father) and Ralph Fiennes’ psychotic Nazi (Schindler’s List).

Leonardo said of the night: ‘I was dreading winning. I didn’t even plan a speech – I was worried that I would slip up or do something terrible. I was shaking in my seat, putting on a posed smile. Inside, I was petrified.’

In the end, the speech wouldn’t have been needed anyway. The Oscar went to Tommy Lee Jones, who added it to the Golden Globe he’d picked up a month earlier.

Leonardo might have missed out on Academy Award glory but in the media that made no difference. Magazines started putting him on their covers. Suddenly, he was being dubbed the next Brando and DiCaprio started to believe it, too.

‘As soon as enough people give you enough compliments, and you’re wielding more power than you’ve ever had in your life, it’s not that you become an arrogant little prick, or become rude to people but you get a false sense of your own importance and what you’ve accomplished,’ he said. ‘You actually think you’ve altered the course of history.’

And if he’d been surprised at the impact his films were having on female fans after This Boy’s Life, this was nothing compared to the reaction to Gilbert Grape.

‘After I did Gilbert Grape, teenage girls became hysterical. What they do is shocking, climbing over walls and stuff. Mind you, I’ve had more fun being famous than I would have done otherwise.’

Another big difference was that, rather than having to attend endless auditions, he was now a sought-after commodity. The temptation would have been to leap into a big blockbuster – something to put backsides on seats and confirm his reputation as a bankable star. Indeed he was offered many high-profile roles, including Robin to Val Kilmer’s superhero in Batman Forever.

‘I just don’t want to be big box-office yet,’ he said at the time, showing a maturity beyond his years. ‘The more you stay low-key at a young age, the more you have room for that stuff in the future, and as long as I can maintain doing films that I want to do, then I’d rather not blow my load on the work. It seems to me that a lot of people who try to do that just disappear.

‘Before I started, I had this view that I was only going to do one film a year and that it was only going to be a really fantastic film,’ he continued. ‘I still think that I want to limit myself to not working all the time, ’cause that’s not good for me and not good for my career, but mainly I’m just trying to be selective and to cut through the bullshit hype about scripts, and what everyone else is telling me to do. It’s a really hard thing to learn, and I haven’t mastered it yet, but I just want to keep on doing stuff that hasn’t been done before.’

Rather than jump into something he would later regret – as Chris O’Donnell discovered to his cost when he took on the role of Robin in two Batman films – Leonardo waited nearly a year before agreeing to a movie after What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Of course this was a risk that might have backfired but so confident was he in his own ability – and of the moviemakers not to find a new kid on the block – that he felt able to take his time.

And there might have been another telling reason why Leonardo felt it important to slow things down. In October 1993, five months before the excitement of the Oscars ceremony, DiCaprio had been at a party when he bumped into another actor who once had the world at his feet.

He explained: ‘I was at a Halloween party two years ago at the house of these twin actors and I remember it was really dark and everyone was drunk, and I was passing through these crowds of people so thick it was almost two lanes of traffic, when I glanced at a guy in a mask and suddenly knew it was River Phoenix.

‘I wanted to reach out and say hello because he was this great mystery and we’d never met, and I thought he probably wouldn’t blow me off because I’d done stuff by then that was maybe worth watching. But then I got caught in a lane of traffic and slid right past him. The next thing I knew, River had died, that same night.’

Tragically, Phoenix collapsed from drug-induced heart failure and died on the pavement outside the West Hollywood nightclub, The Viper Room – owned, coincidentally, by Johnny Depp. The young actor’s death on 31 October 1993 stunned Hollywood and brought home the pressures on the industry’s fledgling stars to live fast.

Leonardo DiCaprio was entering the most crucial phase of his short career and how he handled his next move would have a bearing on whether it would prove to be a lengthy one.