Why Leonardo DiCaprio never watched Titanic

Many actors hate looking at their own work. Adam Driver walked out of an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross after airing clips of his performance in “Marriage Story,” and this is just one particularly dramatic example; hearing famous artists say they can barely stand to watch themselves on screen seems incredibly common at this point. Which is why, ultimately, none of us should be surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t revisited “Titanic” in years.

During a “Actors on Actors” discussion with Variety which paired DiCaprio with fellow Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence — with whom he starred in Adam McKay’s 2021 satire “Don’t Look Up” — Lawrence, who starred in the dark motherhood drama “Die My Love” this year, asked DiCaprio if he had re-watched “Titanic” recently. “No, I’ve never seen it before,” DiCaprio admitted. Lawrence, of course, had a typically funny response: “Oh, you should. I bet you could watch it now, it’s so good.”

DiCaprio said he didn’t really watch any of her films and asked Lawrence if she did, getting another classic Lawrence response from her: “No. I’ve never done anything like ‘Titanic,’ if I did I’d watch it. Once I was really drunk, I put on ‘American Hustle.’ I was like, ‘I wonder if I’m good at playing the role?’ answer.” Lawrence aside, she’s right; “Titanic” is good, actually, and DiCaprio is good if he can bring himself to watch it again.

As a reminder, writer-director James Cameron’s historical epic stars DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, a starry-eyed young man who meets and falls in love with wealthy Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) while they are both aboard the doomed Titanic. Apparently, DiCaprio almost lost the role.

In a GQ Career Retrospective Ahead of the 2022 release of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” James Cameron was pretty transparent about the fact that while Leonardo DiCaprio was absolutely perfect for the role of Jack Dawson, he nailed it. not making it easy for the director to keep him or even hire him in the first place. As Cameron tells it, the first problem was that DiCaprio had passed his audition but didn’t want to read with Kate Winslet. “He comes in and he feels like every ounce of his whole being is so negative, until I said action, and then he turned into Jack and Kate lit up and they got into it all and acted out the scene,” Cameron recalls.

SOwhen DiCaprio started suggesting to Cameron that Jack had some sort of traumatic history, Cameron had to really lay down the law.

“I said, ‘You’ve created all these great characters who all have a problem, whether it’s addiction or whatever, I said you have to learn to hold the center and not have all that stuff,'” Cameron said, citing movie legends like Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck who, as he said, “‘f**king just stood there.'” Ultimately, Cameron completely figured out how to get down to DiCaprio’s level. “These things are easier, they’re props, they’re crutches, what I’m talking about is a lot harder and you’re probably not quite ready for that,” the filmmaker recalls. The second I said that, he knew that this was a really difficult and challenging film for him, and that was my mistake: I hadn’t exposed the challenge to him enough. ” That did it – and DiCaprio continued to look for challenges.

Since the release of “Titanic” in 1997, Leonardo DiCaprio’s name has become synonymous with excellence as an actor. Although it took DiCaprio a bewildering number of attempts to win his first Oscar — which he got for the 2015 survival drama “The Revenant,” although I’ll go to my grave saying he actually deserved it for his bravery and bonkers performance in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 comedy-drama “The Wolf of Wall Street” — he’s turned in a ton of absolutely incredible performances over the years. The guy can play a daring con artist (“Catch Me If You Can”), a horrible slave owner (“Django Unchained”), a fading movie star (“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”), an evil idiot (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), an American literary icon (the title role in “The Great Gatsby”) and a man desperate to find his way back to his family (“Inception”), to name just one. little of his roles. However, over the past few years, DiCaprio has lived through what I’ve affectionately dubbed his “Era of Losers” and frankly, he’s rarely been better.

DiCaprio plays a few schlubs in “Don’t Look Up” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but his revolutionary became grating old stoner Bob Ferguson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s modern masterpiece “One Battle After Another” is one of his best turns in years. DiCaprio is funny, heartbreaking, lived-in and more serious than he has been in a while as Bob, a man who will stop at nothing to find his missing daughter even though he has a hard time functioning because he’s so excited. I’m sorry that James Cameron had a difficult time with DiCaprio early on on “Titanic” and that DiCaprio couldn’t watch the movie, but without it we might never have had Bob Ferguson.