The only movie Leonardo DiCaprio has introduced to Martin Scorsese
One of Martin Scorsese’s favourite directing techniques doesn’t take place on set or over a script; it takes place in a screening room. In order to help his actors find their characters, he shows them movies made by other directors that he hopes will inspire them. They aren’t necessarily one-to-one comparisons, but they bear some elements that he hopes will resonate.
For example, before making Shutter Island, he had Leonardo DiCaprio watch three film noirs to get a sense of the downbeat, wounded, emotionally detached detective. Before filming the dinner table scene in The Aviator, when DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes meets Katharine Hepburn’s family, he showed him the classic romantic comedy His Girl Friday to give him a sense of the rapid-fire dialogue he wanted.
Over their years of collaboration, Scorsese has shown DiCaprio a vast array of masterpieces. Some are more obscure gems, such as Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, which he wanted the actor to see for his role as a morally conflicted cop in The Departed. Others are much more high-profile, such as Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, which he believed encapsulates the feel of the period in the way he wanted to capture for Gangs of New York.
In all their time together, however, DiCaprio has only ever introduced Scorsese to one film. This is somewhat surprising. The director has such an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema that it’s hard to believe there’s a single film he doesn’t know about. During a conversation for Letterboxd in which the two discussed their years-long collaboration, the actor revealed which film it was that the director had never seen.
“I was asked which films I’ve introduced to you but considering you’ve seen every film ever made up until 1980, it’s pretty hard to say,” DiCaprio said, “Other than maybe Spirited Away and [Hayao] Miyazaki’s films and maybe Princess Mononoke.”
Scorsese interjected that it was only Spirited Away that the actor had introduced him to, suggesting, perhaps, that he discovered Princess Mononoke on his own. DiCaprio, for his part, has been a fan of anime since he was a teenager, hanging on every moment of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. He’s even been trying to make a live-action version of the film for more than a decade.
His love for Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli runs deep, but while his favourite of the anime master’s works might be Princess Mononoke, it makes sense that he would opt for Spirited Away when introducing Scorsese to the genre. Released in 2001, Miyazaki’s landmark fantasy film is a gateway into the world of anime for many viewers. It touches on ageless, universal themes of resilience, respect for the natural world, and kindness, and is chock-full of astonishing visuals. The film went on to win ‘Best Animated Feature’ at the Academy Awards, making it the first hand-drawn, Japanese anime and non-English-language animated film to do so.
Although Scorsese and DiCaprio did not go into any detail about what the director thought of the film or whether it influenced any of their films together (you never know), it’s easy to imagine that the director would be just as swept away by the magical, immersive world that Miyazaki created as everyone else. Perhaps DiCaprio was secretly hoping that he might offer to direct that unrealised Akira project.
