The movie character Steven Spielberg called “the same thing” as Leonardo DiCaprio
As one of the greatest movie directors of all time, it’s only right that Steven Spielberg has worked with some of the most outstanding film actors to grace the screen. We know Spielberg’s collaborations with the likes of Tom Hanks, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Harrison Ford, and in 2002, the Ohio-born filmmaker was granted the chance to feature Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his movies.
The film was the biographical comedy-drama Catch Me If You Can, also starring Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen. At the time, DiCaprio was on one hell of a run, having starred in Titanic and The Beach in the last five years. He was also on the verge of starring in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
Catch Me If You Can, therefore, served as yet another marker of DiCaprio’s meteoric rise to fame and saw the actor play the former fraud felon Frank Abagnale Jr, a man who claimed that even before his 19th birthday, he had committed a series of successful cons by posing in a number of guises, including a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia medical profession and a Louisiana prosecutor.
With that in mind, there are perhaps some similarities between Abagnale Jr and DiCaprio himself, seeing as they are both figures who have pretended to be other people for their own gain. This is also something that Spielberg was keen to point out when he spoke about Catch Me If You Can in an interview with the BBC.
“I think what Frank did in real life and what Leo does in portraying him are the same thing,” Spielberg said. “They both use social camouflage. Basically, that’s changing and switching occupations. I think Frank, like Leo, has a dazzling IQ. You understand in just meeting Frank how he could just pull the wool over your eyes, and there’s something of that in Leo.”
Indeed, there’s something special about the acting profession in that the best actors seem to be able to convince an audience of genuinely being someone else. In Catch Me If You Can, we really assume that Leonardo DiCaprio is Frank Abagnale Jr, just as we believe he is Romeo Montague in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.
DiCaprio seemed to cherish his role in Catch Me If You Can and had gone to great lengths to better understand his character. In fact, after learning about Abagnale Jr’s casual relationship with the call girl Cheryl Ann, played in the film by Jennifer Garner, DiCaprio asked Spielberg to upgrade the scene with her involvement to be more prominent.
“I learned about this episode from Frank’s life in preparation for the role. It is mentioned in his autobiography and audio seminars,” had once explained. “You know, it was kind of like a book on film in which he told stories from his real life. To be honest, this case made me laugh almost to tears. You have no idea. After all, it was actually incredibly unique, bright, and, I would even say, a grand segment from Frank’s life.”
“I called Steven and begged him to include it in the script,” the actor added. “And he did; he listened to me. The episode ended up safely in the movie, not on the floor of the editing room, which I’m unspeakably glad.” So there was a deep likeness between the actor and the character in the way they had been so adamant about so many facets of their “professional” lives.
