The one script change Leonardo DiCaprio requested for ‘Titanic’: “You’re not ready for this”
There are some casting choices that seem inevitable in retrospect. Audrey Hepburn is the only conceivable actor who could have played Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example, even though Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Bruce Willis playing John McClane in Die Hard, even though pretty much every other actor in Hollywood was offered the role first.
Another such example of seemingly inevitable casting is Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron’s Titanic. His boyish charm was the perfect fit for the role of Jack Dawson, a young artist who falls for an engaged teenage heiress played by Kate Winslet. However, according to Cameron, he almost blew his chances when he refused to audition.
At the time, he was only 21 years old but already had an impressive CV. He’d acted alongside Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life, been hand-selected by Sharon Stone for The Quick and the Dead, and earned an Oscar nomination for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. He knew he was a hot commodity in Hollywood, and he wasn’t willing to lower himself to a screen test.
Even after he relented and got the role, however, he had a few demands. He told Cameron that he and his dad had read the script and felt that Jack needed a little more backstory. He wanted the character to have, as Cameron remembered in an interview with GQ, “some affliction or some problem or some traumatic thing from the past.” It was in keeping with his filmography. At that stage, DiCaprio had played a victim of child abuse, a developmentally disabled teenager, and a young basketball player addicted to heroin.
Cameron wasn’t impressed with all that, and he was even less enthused about DiCaprio’s desire to bring a similar type of drama to the role of Jack. “Look, you’ve done all of these great characters that all have a problem,” he told the young actor, “[Y]ou’ve gotta learn how to hold the centre and not have all that stuff.” He then opted for a bit of reverse psychology. “When you can do what Jimmy Stewart did or what Gregory Peck did – they just fucking stood there,” he said. “They didn’t have a limp or a lisp or whatever. Then you’ll be ready for this, but I’m thinking you’re not ready because what I’m talking about is actually much harder.”
He hit the mark. Cameron had clocked that DiCaprio was a wildly ambitious young talent who took acting seriously. By questioning his maturity as an actor, Cameron cut right to the heart of his insecurities. “The second I said that, it clicked for him that this was a really hard, challenging film for him,” the director said. All DiCaprio had been looking for was to be stretched as a performer, and when Cameron laid it out to him in those terms, he was all in.
The director was ahead of his time in this regard. That year, Jack Nicholson won the Oscar for portraying a writer with obsessive-compulsive disorder in As Good as It Gets. The year before that, Geoffrey Rush won for playing a concert pianist who spent years in mental institutions after suffering a breakdown in Shine. And the year before that, Nicolas Cage took home the award for playing a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas. Being able to mesmerise an audience without the dramatic crutch of trauma or a medical condition is the best benchmark for acting skill, but the Academy sure hadn’t found that out yet.
