The forgotten movie Leonardo DiCaprio called a “huge adrenaline rush”
Having grown up in the industry before evolving into one of its marquee actors, Leonardo DiCaprio has developed a keen understanding of which scripts are worth making, and his selective nature has allowed him to amass a filmography that’s becoming increasingly impeccable.
Since 2002, DiCaprio has appeared in 17 movies, and only three of them haven’t been nominated for any Academy Awards. One of them was Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which was a major box office success as well as an intensely atmospheric and widely acclaimed psychological thriller.
The second was Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, which still earned him a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Drama’, so it wasn’t an entirely lost cause. However, the third stands out as being a rare DiCaprio film that underperformed at the box office, left critics feeling cold, and quickly slipped out of the cultural conversation in no time at all.
It was particularly surprising given that 2008’s Body of Lies, an action-packed thriller directed by Ridley Scott, featured Russell Crowe and portrayed them as government operatives devising a risky plan to capture a notorious terrorist.
It should have been much better than it turned out to be, and compared to the rest of the credits he’s been gathering ever since Titanic turned him into a global superstar more than a quarter of a century ago, a solid case can be made that it’s the single most forgettable feature he’s made in the last 20 years.
Sure, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up split opinion down the middle and bordered on the self-indulgent, but don’t forget it was a ‘Best Picture’ nominee. As DiCaprio explained to The Guardian, going all-in on a Scott movie was an experience unlike anything he’d ever encountered before.
“I had a very hard shoot, very rough. I’ve done a lot of action sequences before, but this is a Ridley Scott movie,” he admitted. “You are always moving locations at lightning speed. At any given second Ridley would come in and say, ‘I want a helicopter to come in and shoot two missiles and I want that to be on camera and I want to have a surveillance camera 2,000ft in the air shooting on top of your head’. At some points you really don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The Oscar-winning favourite described Body of Lies as “a huge adrenaline rush” for a performer because he had to “be prepared dramatically to have any given scene changed at any moment”. That’s always been a hallmark of Scott’s work, with the filmmaker’s fondness for switching it up on the fly instilling DiCaprio with the belief to “trust your instincts more”.
As a result, Scott “likes to keep up the pace of a film unlike any director I’ve met”, even if the end product wasn’t exactly reflective of the exciting spontaneity that defined Body of Lies during the shoot.
