Leonardo DiCaprio recently showed what he can do in ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’. In the historical gangster epic, he plays a terribly banal villain who allows himself to be made into the plaything of the evil Robert DeNiro, crossing all boundaries of moral decency. Once again, Leo was able to show how versatile he is as an actor and how driven he is to achieve top performances under the guidance of master director Martin Scorsese. The two have a long-term collaboration that has now resulted in six feature films. For Leo, the collaboration meant saving his career.
DiCaprio has worked with many great directors. Besides Scorsese, there was Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Baz Luhrmann and Christopher Nolan – just to name the biggest! For ‘The Revenant’ he finally received the long-awaited Oscar for Best Actor. He has now proven that he can handle almost any genre: from comedy to western, from thriller to character drama. But it wasn’t always clear that this would happen.
Leonardo DiCaprio: “He saved me”
Starring in films such as “Romeo + Juliet” or “Titanic” had its positive and dark sides for DiCaprio. On the one hand, these roles helped him gain great popularity – scenes from both works are deeply etched in the memory of pop culture, and Leo was able to prove that he was able to attract a large audience. On the other hand, there was a risk of being reduced to the image of a ‘pretty boy’. A concern that many actors suffer from: Especially as a young, passionate actor, you don’t just want to be the point of contact for a specific typecasting!
Martin Scorsese would have helped. By casting the young actor for the first time in ‘Gangs Of New York’ in 2002, he gave his career a new direction. In an interview with DesertNews DiCaprio even goes so far as to call him his savior: “He saved me. I was on my way to becoming a certain kind of actor and he helped me become another. The one I wanted to be.” We’re also beyond happy that DiCaprio has become who he is today!
There’s something almost fateful about the meeting of the two film greats if you listen to what DiCaprio said in the interview Collider talks about his first points of contact with the director. The attempt to gain as much film knowledge as possible brought him to Scorsese: “I tried to get a film education quickly. I watched three or four movies a day for a year. All actors of my generation were influenced by the 1970s. And the films that stood out the most for us were Scorsese’s films (…) I remember saying to myself: one day I want to do something just as good. I want to be in a scene from his films.” Luckily it became much more than just a scene!