{"id":34071,"date":"2025-09-21T06:27:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T06:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/34071\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T06:27:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T06:27:18","slug":"leonardo-dicaprio-talks-endlessly-during-prep-but-once-shooting-starts-hes-all-in-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/34071\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Leonardo DiCaprio talks endlessly during prep, but once shooting starts he\u2019s all in\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon really appear as an extra in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s screen adaptation<\/a> of his novel Inherent Vice? <\/p>\n

The American auteur<\/a>, a longtime Pynchon fan, has always been coy about their collaboration, describing the writer as a spiritual adviser for the film rather than a hands-on collaborator. We know they\u2019ve chatted. And we know that Jackson Pynchon, the novelist\u2019s only son, was credited as an intern on Anderson\u2019s The Master<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The mystery deepens with One Battle After Another, his new film, a transported take on Pynchon<\/a>\u2019s novel Vineland. Anderson perfectly preserves the relationships at the heart of the book, notably the two competing father figures and a plucky teenage daughter. But the names have been changed, the setting is now the 21st century and the politics are less charged than in Pynchon\u2019s alternately uproarious and melancholic contemplation of ways the 1960s counterculture failed.<\/p>\n

Pynchon\u2019s Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie trying to care for his wannabe groupie daughter, Prairie, is now Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a>\u2019s Bob Ferguson, a sometime dynamiter with a defunct revolutionary group known as the French 75. His adversary Brock Vond becomes Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn<\/a>), a fascistic military man obsessed with Bob\u2019s estranged wife, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and their 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about taking something and turning it into something else,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cWith Inherent Vice it was a more faithful adaptation \u2013 moving things around, condensing, making it cinematic. But with this I was a bit more \u2018disrespectful\u2019 to the source material.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have huge respect for the book and the author. But to tell the story I wanted in my head, I had to steal what I needed and move things where it made sense for the film. The emotional-core triangle was preserved, but some characters and dynamics shifted to fit the story I was telling.\u201d<\/p>\n

That story reflects Anderson\u2019s ongoing deconstruction of Americana. Save for the British-set Phantom Thread<\/a>, Anderson\u2019s films explore and explode classic and distinctly American characters, industries and myths.<\/p>\n

Boogie Nights, his breakthrough, from 1997, first glamorises and then demonises the 1970s pornography industry, reflecting on the darkest aspects of fame and excess in southern California. Magnolia captures the emotional and geographical sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, with its chatshows, self-help gurus and familial discord. There Will Be Blood, featuring a famous central performance by Daniel Day-Lewis<\/a>, reimagines the myth of the American dream through the pitiless rise of an oil baron. The Master delves into the uncertainty of the postwar United States\u2019s cultism and spiritual promiscuity, while Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza<\/a> both embrace the disillusionment and hazy nostalgia of the 1970s west coast.<\/p>\n

In this spirit, One Battle After Another is an action comedy powered along by such all-American movie signifiers as bank robberies, a high-school dance and border-crossing flashpoints.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, you just make it up as you go along,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cYou focus on the plot \u2013 the essential building blocks, like \u2018My past is coming to get me … there\u2019s a guy looking for my daughter,\u2019 and \u2018how do I find her?\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cThat logic is your best friend and worst enemy. Sometimes you embrace \u2018movie logic\u2019, skipping ahead or bending time for pacing. The structure helped balance action and humour. The first act is this chaotic wreck. Then the next two acts deal with the aftermath, which allowed momentum, humour and character to emerge naturally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OneOne Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson on set with Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro. Photograph: Warner Bros <\/p>\n

Anderson began making short films as a teenager, including The Dirk Diggler Story, a mockumentary from 1988 that laid the groundwork for Boogie Nights. Largely self-taught, he briefly attended Emerson College and New York University; he dropped out after two days, using his tuition refund to pay for Cigarettes & Coffee, a Sundance-selected short from 1993 that he turned into his first feature, Hard Eight.<\/p>\n

From the start, Anderson has favoured big-swing, character-driven ensemble storytelling. And, from the start, he keeps returning to the same text. Anderson has spent more than two decades gradually shaping his adaptation of Vineland. <\/p>\n

Although he had once intended a straight adaptation, Anderson ultimately pulled only the emotional and thematic threads that resonated with him: ruined revolutionaries, haunted pasts and generational reckoning.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously nurturing a long-standing desire to make a car-chase action film and develop a story about a woman revolutionary, he spent years weaving these elements together. He has lived with the characters for a long time and admits to a degree of Stockholm syndrome, even when it comes to the thuggish colonel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like everyone,\u201d the director says. \u201cI probably should dislike Lockjaw more, but I feel for his broken heart. He\u2019s erratic and behaves badly, but it\u2019s sad. Perfidia\u2019s story breaks my heart, too: someone with good intentions who loses sight of her values, caught up in vanity and postpartum depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a line she says that sums it up: \u2018Every revolution fights tyranny but usually ends up eating itself.\u2019 That theme runs through the work we\u2019re adapting \u2013 and is, sadly, true.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Anderson\u2019s films, driving scenes and car chases are a state of mind. In Boogie Nights, cruising through the San Fernando Valley is inextricably linked to the characters\u2019 fortunes and failings: cars become mobile stages for egotism and disconnection. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler\u2019s character, Barry, chaotically skittles around the freeway, the journeys mirroring his internal instability and desire to escape the emotional repression of his many-sistered family. Inherent Vice similarly features near-aimless cruising that echoes the hazy, drug-addled paranoia of Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s protagonist, with driving often used to blur time, memory and plot.<\/p>\n

\"OneOne Battle After Another: Leonardo DiCaprio. Photograph: Warner Bros <\/p>\n

One Battle After Another ups the ante and takes to the hills \u2013 many hills: perhaps no film has embraced the car chase more enthusiastically since the French Connection series.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m from California, so I practically live in my car,\u201d Anderson jokes. \u201cCars are life where I\u2019m from. I haven\u2019t had many opportunities to indulge in that love before. This was a jackpot, a dream come true. I\u2019m a big fan of car chases and car films like The Sugarland Express, Vanishing Point, Mad Max.\u201d<\/p>\n

While preparing for his Oscar-winning turn as the frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant, DiCaprio famously slept in animal carcasses, ate raw bison liver and endured freezing conditions. For his performance in Dead Man Walking, Sean Penn stayed in character and met death-row inmates. <\/p>\n

These seasoned players, and a third Oscar-winner in Benicio Del Toro<\/a>, are joined here by the newcomer Chase Infiniti. Anderson was briefly concerned that his young star might be intimidated. He laughs at that idea now.<\/p>\n

\u201cActing styles are never that different. It\u2019s more about different people and approaches,\u201d he says. \u201cSean\u2019s minimal, just wants to get to work. Leonardo loves to talk endlessly during prep, but once shooting starts he\u2019s all in. Benicio is a mix: says he has no ideas, then comes up with hundreds of mostly amazing ideas \u2013 maybe 199 great ideas and one bad one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Chase I was worried she\u2019d be nervous, but I was being condescending in my thinking. She\u2019s amazing and confident. On set you have to be sensitive to how people are feeling, especially with physically demanding roles. Chase spent months rolling around in handcuffs and zip ties. That all takes a toll. Seeing her finally take charge of her character was magical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OneOne Battle After Another: Chase Infiniti with Regina Hall. Photograph: Warner Bros <\/p>\n

Anderson was born into show business. His father, Ernie Anderson, was a well-known voiceover artist and, as \u201cGhoulardi\u201d, the host of late-night horror films on a TV station in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s; in the 1970s and 1980s he was the voice of the ABC network.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Los Angeles, with direct access to the entertainment industry, the younger Anderson was exposed early to the mechanics and mythology of Hollywood. This proximity shaped both his fascination with image-making and his scepticism toward the entertainment machine. <\/p>\n

He has a story about returning to Cleveland with his dad after the family had relocated to California and realising that Ernie Anderson \u2013 or, rather, Ghoulardi \u2013 was a celebrity. Does he have his own Ghoulardi, a film or character that follows him around?<\/p>\n

\u201cI get asked about different movies wherever I go,\u201d he says. \u201cI think the most magical moments are unexpected \u2013 like in El Paso, when we were shooting One Battle After Another, a young Latino kid came up to me and said Inherent Vice was the best movie he\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never know who your films reach or how they reach them. But moments like that make it all worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

One Battle After Another is in cinemas from Friday, September 26th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon really appear as an extra in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s screen adaptation of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26768,93,61,60,10495,11724,11198,26767],"class_list":["post-34071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-benicio-del-toro","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-leonardo-dicaprio","tag-paul-thomas-anderson","tag-sean-penn","tag-thomas-pynchon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}