Leonardo DiCaprio’s tribute to activist Jane Goodall at funeral
Leonardo DiCaprio spoke at Jane Goodall’s funeral in Washington, D.C., about their friendship and shared activism.
The director behind “Titanic” is revealing how he got a reluctant Leonardo DiCaprio to sign on for the role.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, James Cameron, who helped shepherd the 1997 classic to success, said DiCaprio “didn’t want to do it” but agreed once he realized what a challenge the film would be.
“He knew he should, everybody told him he should do it,” Cameron, 71, told the outlet. “It took me five weeks working with him, probably, to drill down to what he didn’t like about it.
“The answer was very simple,” the director said. “He didn’t think it was challenging enough.”
“He didn’t want to just be ‘handsome young Leo,'” Cameron continued. “I said it’s not about you being ‘handsome young Leo,’ even though you’re handsome and you’re young. I said, ‘It’s about holding the center when you don’t have all those props.’
“The hard path is to do what a Jimmy Stewart would do, which is be the handsome guy in the center and hold the audience’s riveted attention the entire time without all that stuff,” he told Vanity Fair of his conversations with DiCaprio.
“You know when he signed to do the movie? When I told him he wasn’t ready to do it,” Cameron revealed. “I said, ‘You’re not ready to do this film.’ Now I’m going way out on a limb, because I knew I really wanted him right? But that’s when he did it, when he realized how difficult it was. And it was.”
He continued: “Then he leaned in and he brought everything that he gives to a film and he was amazing. He was incandescent.”
DiCaprio played poor artist Jack, opposite Kate Winslet’s moneyed Rose, in a love story now considered a classic of American cinema. The movie, which drew inspiration from the real-life sinking of the Titanic ocean liner, was nominated for several Academy Awards and launched both DiCaprio and Winslet into a new echelon of fame.