In his latest film, The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes - a man who was never given the chance to grow up. Donald Clarke asks him whether that sounds familiar.
Since I have been going to the cinema I can only remember two scenes which caused substantial numbers of my fellow audience members to scream out loud. The first was that bit in Jaws where the decapitated head bobs into view. The second involved nothing more terrifying than a costume change. About a third of the way through Titanic - four or five hours before the ice-berg arrives - Leonardo DiCaprio, his bespoke rags cast aside, his hair slicked back, stands at the head of the ship's huge staircase wearing a beautifully tailored tuxedo. If they had each been jammed in the backside with a compass, a hundred teenage girls could not have made such a hysterical racket. For the rest of the film, Savoy One was alive with juvenile wheezing, sighing and weeping. So it is a surprise to discover quite how ordinary DiCaprio now looks.
He is certainly an attractive fellow. But, wearing a round-necked grey jumper, his chin slightly bum-fluffed, he doesn't exactly dazzle you with gorgeousness. It must be a difficult business being a heart-faced 30-year-old when you made your name as a triangle-faced boy.
Martin Scorsese makes interesting use of Leo's complicated relationship with ageing in his stirring new film, The Aviator. Focusing on the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes's interests in movie-making and aviation, the picture presents us with a man of whom an awful lot was asked at a young age. The heir to a massive fortune, Hughes, whose love affairs were related in great detail by the entertainment tabloids, never quite got the chance to grow up. A number of parallels with DiCaprio's life suggest themselves.
"I get asked that question a lot and I have a hard time answering it," he says. "The man was fundamentally different to me. He had a real compulsive need to do everything right, and he did so much. I don't really have that many things on my plate right now: trying to be a good actor, trying to be an environmentalist, trying to be a decent person. He took on an empire and turned Hollywood and aviation upside down. He had 20 girlfriends stashed away and still managed to revolutionise aviation. But I could certainly relate to his problems with fame."
It is clear that Leo is having his own problems with celebrity. Apparently one of today's interviewers was just plain difficult. "It's funny when you meet somebody who has such a specific intent," he says, smiling wryly. "It is clear from the get-go that however you present yourself they are going to write what they want to write." He says this with the resigned tone of somebody who is well used to being ill-served by the fourth estate.
The son of a German mother and an Italian-American father, DiCaprio grew up in Los Angeles and remembers always being something of a show-off. "I loved the feeling of performing in front of other people," he says. "But I always thought that you had to be part of this elite Masonic bloodline to become an actor. Ironically, I lived in Hollywood, but I didn't know you could just get an agent and test your luck. When I did realise that was an option, I knew that's what I wanted to do."
His parents, who split up a year after his birth, sound like fairly laid-back sorts - indeed his father, still a valued adviser, once made a living dealing in comic books - so I can't imagine they expressed much shock when he announced that he was going into show business. "Well my mother always told me I said I should be a lawyer because I was good at arguing," he laughs. "But I was the one that was persistent. I certainly didn't have stage parents." The teenage Leo secured a few jobs in commercials and then, just when he was getting into a stride, the work dried up again. Eventually a part in the TV version of the film Parenthood came along, and then an audition opposite Robert De Niro for Michael Caton-Jones's 1993 drama This Boy's Life.
"I was 16 years old and I had been a great fan of movies, but I had only seen a couple of De Niro movies," he says. "All my peers were wildly intimidated by his presence. I wasn't. And that is ultimately why I got the job. I did a couple of things that got me hired and I probably wouldn't have done those if I had been intimidated by his fame."
This Boy's Life and the same year's What's Eating Gilbert Grape got people talking. The terrible fragility and openness that he brought to these two roles suggested the arrival of an eccentric new talent. Confident but vulnerable, DiCaprio carried about him the potential to grow into a less worrying Montgomery Clift.
He did good work playing the writer Jim Carroll (not this newspaper's pop correspondent) in The Basketball Diaries and the dangerous poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. But the water around him really began to bubble when he was cast opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet. The fact that so many teenage girls wanted to comfort him during his character's moments of distress guaranteed his bankability.
In a recent interview, he expressed some ambivalence about his decision to do Titanic. DiCaprio was, at this stage, in the enviable position of being highly respected by the critics and highly desired by a large fan-base. Musing on the media kerfuffle, he suggested that he might have been better advised to accept Paul Thomas Anderson's offer to appear in Boogie Nights.
"Well that was taken out of context," he sighs. "I was asked a question: was there any movie you wished you had done? And I said I wished I had done Boogie Nights, but I never said 'instead of Titanic'. The truth is, you want to be part of movies that last forever. A film like Titanic isn't going to die off in two weeks. If you are a painter you want your paintings to live on after you. I am very proud of Titanic."
Nonetheless, Titanic's success must have had its frightening side. The papers were full of stories of him running through airports with weeping 14-year-olds coiled tightly about his ankles.
"There is always going to be a new fresh face, and I appreciated that it happened to be me. But it was a superficial experience being that famous. I don't want to say it was empty or depressing or any of those things. I hate to sound like I am complaining. After all, it has given me the opportunity to do so many things, to steer my own career."
At any rate, after a leading role in an awful remake of The Man in the Iron Mask and a good supporting part in Woody Allen's Celebrity, DiCaprio took two years off to get his head together.
"I wanted to let the ashes settle a little," he says. "I know what it is like when I am infiltrated with someone's image. I really need a breather from them. Number one, I really didn't find anything that I was that into doing. But number two, I was just infiltrated with my own image."
So he had actually become sick of looking at himself on screen? "Pretty much," he laughs. "It is just a weird feeling to have stories made up about you and to then appear on the front of magazines who you never did a photoshoot for. I honestly did no press after Titanic, but from the magazines it seemed as if I was running around the world doing constant press junkets."
Much of the tabloid attention focused on the alleged bacchanalian excesses of Leonardo's celebrity "posse". If we are to believe them, the millennial years were spent chasing models - Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, others - getting into fisticuffs with rival film stars and falling into storm drains. Screenwriter and actor Roger Wilson filed a $45 million suit against DiCaprio for inciting the "posse" to beat him up, following an argument over the plaintiff's then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Berkley. The case was thrown out of court. We do know for certain that Leo has been maintaining some sort of relationship with the Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen for the past few years, though the status of their on-off relationship seems to change daily.
It was perhaps inevitable that when DiCaprio finally returned to the screen, the critics would have their pencils sharpened. And, as it happened, 2000's The Beach was a bit of a stinker. Leo could probably live with criticisms of the film's unhinged plotting. More serious were the suggestions that the star was not looking comfortable in an adult's body. The word lightweight was used more than once.
It was a fortuitous time for Scorsese to enter DiCaprio's life. Scorsese had been trying for years to get the epic Gangs of New York off the ground, and when the actor expressed an interest, the money finally fell into place. The distinguished director's patronage helped restore some of DiCaprio's lost credibility. Has Scorsese become his mentor? "I guess you could say that," he says cautiously. "He clarified how important cinema is as an art form for me and how it compares seriously with painting or literature."
After a production every bit as troubled as Titanic's, Gangs of New York was finally released, more than a year after shooting finished, in late 2002.
Though just as long, The Aviator is a slicker, less ungainly business than Gangs. Shot largely in a gorgeous imitation of early Technicolor, the film drags Hughes through a series of relationships - notably with Cate Blanchett's agreeably batty Katherine Hepburn - and propels him towards his well-documented decline into obsessive-compulsive disorder.
If Gangs of New York was Scorsese's pet project, then The Aviator is DiCaprio's. He first became engaged with Hughes's story when he read a biography of the millionaire a decade ago. "He seemed to be living and fulfilling his dreams very positively," he says. "And also he was like a test case for what happens when you give somebody everything too soon in life." Had we decided to believe the "posse" stories, then this description might suggest Leonardo DiCaprio again. But the most striking parallels announce themselves in the opening half-hour. The film begins by telling the story of Hughes's adventures directing the absurdly expensive first World War flying drama Hell's Angels. The production ran on for year after year and drove the accountants bananas, yet ended up being a notable success. It sounds rather like Titanic.
"Yeah, certainly. Well the difference was that Howard got to finance the movie on his own dollar. All that stuff is true; it was the first million-dollar movie and then ended up costing four. I have been in situations where the studio is bearing down on directors, so I do identify with that a little."
DiCaprio seems all right to me. He is, as you might expect, cautious about saying anything that might be used out of context. But he is friendly and well-mannered to a fault. He also seems to be making a genuine attempt to do good work. He has, to an even greater extent than Johnny Depp, avoided idiotic genre pictures that might bolster his economic viability. Does he never worry that, by shunning all things Grisham and Clancy, he might eventually jeopardise his career?
"Well I don't worry about it all ending tomorrow," he says. "But there are all kinds of unseen forces. You never know. I am in a great position now and I am really grateful for it. There are ebbs and flows, ups and downs in anyone's career and there may come a point when I am not able to finance certain movies with my name. Then I will hopefully continue to do smaller and smaller movies. Anything to stay in this business."
The Aviator is showing at cinemas countrywide