Leonardo DiCaprio looks handsomely dapper as the cover boy of GQ magazine's October 2011 edition.
On if he has any interest in directing... “Yeah, I do. And if I did direct, I would try to have the same no-bulls— approach to it as [Clint Eastwood] and his crew have. Seriously, there are no frills on his set. It’s a small, tight-knit crew.”
His idea of what the film industry is all about..."Throughout my career, I never knew which movies of mine made money and which didn't. When Titanic came out, people would say, 'Do you realize what a success this is?' And I'd say, 'Yeah, yeah, it's a hit.' The [money] stuff never mattered to me until I was into my thirties and got interested in producing, and people would show me charts explaining what finances a movie, what you'll make from foreign, what you'll make from domestic, what you need to make an R-rated film that's a comedy versus a drama. But even now I say that unless you want to prove that you can carry a film with your name, continuously trying to achieve box-office success is a dead end."
On which movie he’s proud of... “The Aviator. I’d wanted to play Howard Hughes for 10 years and was around for multiple rewrites. Michael Mann was on it at one point. And finally [Martin] Scorsese got involved. I was very proud of that movie. It was the first film where I felt inherently like a partner.”
On his forway into acting...""My introduction to acting in films was with De Niro in This Boy's Life. When I got the part I was 15, and somebody said, 'Do you realize who you're gonna work with?' I said, 'Yeah, I guess.' And they said, 'No, no, no. Go watch all of his films, and then go see these people's films.' So I obsessively watched films on VHS, and I remember feeling so overwhelmed by what had been done in cinema already. Watching a young Brando or James Dean or Montgomery Clift, I was like, Oh, my God, how can anyone ever hope to achieve that type of greatness?"
On a movie he originally passed on, then changed his mind... “My father has always been a huge force with me. I had passed on a script about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud [Total Eclipse]. He explained to me that Rimbaud was the James Dean of his time … I did the movie, and I loved playing him. If I just waited for moments of ‘I have to do this,’ I would do a movie only every four or five years.”
Scoot over to GQ.com for the entire featured article!
Leo biography.
