Looking for the real Leo

DAVID COHEN

There is an old definition of a movie star: women want to sleep with him, men want to be him. By that definition,
the ultimate movie star for the under-30 generation is Leonardo DiCaprio.

Certainly he qualifies on the first score. As Jack Dawson in Titanic, DiCaprio became a walking dream for millions of
women around the world. He could hardly show his face in public without being mobbed.

That, in turn, helped him become an icon to men as well. Leonardo DiCaprio, actor, became Leo, no last name
required. His every move was tabloid fodder. He seemed to be at every club or party, with a model on his arm and
his "posse" of friends and bodyguards at his back.

Stories swirled of discarded lovers and bar fights and at least one lawsuit, but that only added to the Leo
mystique. For twenty-somethings with dreams of show business glory, being Leo looked like the ultimate high.

"I chose to sort of face it head-on, which could have been a smart or a stupid decision, but I didn't want to run
away from it," says DiCaprio of the Leo craze. "I didn't want to become a hermit from the success of Titanic and
the exposure that I had. I wanted to just lead my life."

In fact, DiCaprio's life may be calming down. He is in Maui to promote The Beach, his first film since Titanic, and is
able to move around in public. He is even spotted eating sushi with some of his posse, apparently undisturbed by
fans, with no disguise but a baseball cap and a budding Hollywood-hipster goatee.

The irony of all this is that before Titanic, DiCaprio was far from a heart-throb. He had carved out a niche as a
gifted young actor, but he had done so with dark, complex roles. Nothing in his past would have predicted that he
would become a sex symbol, the obsession of millions.

As a result, he has found himself caught between wanting to dive into the experience and the need to pull back.

"After Titanic came out, I couldn't go to a bookstore and find a book on how to deal with life in a situation like
that. But at the same time I realise I'm a lucky person. It's given me the opportunities more so than ever before to
do what I love, and that's act."

That kind of ambivalence colours everything about The Beach.

The thriller follows Richard, a bored American backpacker (DiCaprio) to a Bangkok flophouse, where a madman
named Daffy (Robert Carlyle) gives him a map to a "perfect" beach utopia on a mysterious island - then kills
himself. Richard, smitten with a young French woman (Virginie Ledoyen), invites her and her boyfriend to follow the
map to the beach with him.

Eventually, they find a dazzling lagoon hidden from the outside world. They also find a commune of pleasure
seekers who have abandoned the outside world for endless days of sun and games.

But while the beach is perfect, the people are not. Outside are jittery, heavily armed Thai dope farmers. Inside are
seduction and betrayal. Everywhere is nature, beautiful but dangerous. It is only a matter of time before Richard
and The Beach slide into madness and brutality.

Adapted from the novel by Alex Garland by the film-makers of Trainspotting - director Danny Boyle, writer John
Hodge and producer Andrew McDonald - much of The Beach explores ambivalence and disconnection. Perhaps that
is why every aspect of the film seems to have a "but" attached.

The Beach will succeed or fail at the box office as "the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie", but creatively, it is very
much "the new Danny Boyle movie". DiCaprio returns to a dark, complex role, but he does so as the film's headliner
and main drawing card. He is in almost every scene, but Richard is a flawed and often unlikeable character.

It is a far cry from the romantic simplicity of Titanic, and Leo fans may be shocked by what they see. As the
impossibly perfect Jack Dawson, he was androgynous and unthreatening. In The Beach, he seems more dangerous;
at 25, he has put on muscle and he shows an angry edge.

"[Richard] is neither a hero nor a villain but he's searching for something," DiCaprio says.

"He's selfish in a lot of ways and he likes to torture himself. He's very human in that way, and also in the respect
that he gets what he wants and he dismisses it and he tries to get something better each and every time. I think
that's very closely connected to who we all are."

The Beach marks DiCaprio's deliberate decision to return to his acting roots. He was used to real collaboration
before Titanic, and wanted that experience again.

"[Danny] really wanted to bring me on as a partner, more so on this than on a film like Titanic. Not to say that
that film didn't concentrate on the characters, but there're thousands of other elements to concentrate on at the
same time."

He is being diplomatic, and does not repeat what is widely rumoured in Hollywood, that Titanic's director, James
Cameron, is an autocrat with a quick and abusive temper. It is probably no coincidence that both DiCaprio and
Kate Winslet followed up Titanic with smaller, character-oriented films. They seem to have fled from the Titanic
experience as far and as fast as possible.

But The Beach was filmed during the height of the Leo craze, and there was no escaping it, even in Thailand. The
set was mobbed by fans. Young women hid in his hotel room. And, of course, there was the "Leo posse".

"You know, people ask me a lot about why I have a big group of people when I go on location," he says. "I think it
has to do with who I am as an actor. Once they say 'cut' I'm not still engrossed with my character. I can go off
and do whatever and be me again.

"And also the simple fact that if they're going to give me plane tickets in my contract, I'm going to invite my
friends over. Why not? It'd be a waste of plane tickets."

The Leo posse has become part of his mystique, though. Even in Maui, they are in evidence; his actor pal Tobey
Maguire was spotted at the same hotel while DiCaprio was sitting through television interviews.

"I'm sure a lot of my friends would resent being called my posse because, believe it or not, they actually are
individuals," says DiCaprio evenly. "But, you know, my family and my friends have kept me grounded. They have
helped me laugh about all of this. We joke around constantly about this sort of image which is me which I'm
completely detached from. It has taken on its own life and in a lot of ways I have separated myself from it."

His future plans are clearly about being Leonardo DiCaprio, actor, again. He will next make Gangs Of New York for
director Martin Scorsese, and he has acquired the rights to a biography of Howard Hughes, which he hopes to do
with director Michael Mann.

Most of all, he hopes to make peace with that larger-than-life icon. "You get to a point where you say, 'Look, the
only thing that I can be, that can represent who I am, is the work that I do, what I put into it, performances that
I give and my art form'. Not that other stuff that is out of your control, because you really have no control and no
say in who people want to label you as."

The Beach opens in Hong Kong on February 3.

"Paradise Found ... and Lost" (2nd SCMP article)

In The Beach, director Danny Boyle set out to do the impossible - or something close to it: he would film on a lovely, unspoiled tropical island but give the scenes there an "urban consciousness".

"It's the intensity really," Boyle explains.
"The kind of pressure of urban living, which we're all familiar with. You start to bring that in, even to what you've thought of as a rural paradise.
"You start to build. The sensuality that you feel at first, which relaxes you, eventually begins to actually oppress you. You're under a crazy kind of pressure which has to give, explode in some way."

Boyle and company are experts at turning up the pressure on-screen. The films Shallow Grave and Trainspotting explored tension and betrayal among friends. The Beach adds to that list.

Yet while Boyle and his team like to explore suspicion in their films, they cultivate a family atmosphere off-screen. Their scripts are collaborations, and they encourage their lead actors to add ideas along the way.

For The Beach, star Leonardo DiCaprio was able to pitch in on the last six of the screenplay's 18 drafts. "We'd all have good ideas and we all have bad ideas," Boyle says, "and the great thing about doing it as a family is you sift it out yourself. Leo knows when something is a bad idea and when something is a good idea, and likewise us."

One of DiCaprio's good ideas came from the feeling that his character's disconnection rose in pat from having nothing to fight for. "He doesn't know what Vietnam is like, but he knows how to play the video game," says DiCaprio, so he suggested a scene where he would actually appear as a video game character. The scene made it into the film's final cut.

"Danny Boyle would be one of the few directors who would be open to hearing something like that," DiCaprio says. "You can probably count on one hand how many directors would be open to that kind of surreal idea within a film. That's why he's one of my favourite directors."

Boyle has he detractors, though. Environmentalists protested the shoot, which altered the landscape of a Thai national park (temporarily, the film-makers insist) to make it look more like a Western notion of a tropical paradise. In short, he tampered with nature to make a film that indicts human insensitivity to the natural world.

The irony is not lost on him. "I can't deny it," he says. "I think making a film is a kind of act of imperialism.
"You can't defend it as being a liberal act of goodness which is just spreading munificence around to everyone. It's a selfish act and film crews damage wherever they go. "One of the themes of the film is that you can't just waltz into nature because it does bit back, and nature got back at us." "He points to the pad weather and delays in shooting. "You think you'll be able to dominate nature and it teaches you that you're very, very small indeed."

Also unhappy with Boyle, at least for now, is Ewan McGregor, who starred in Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. McGregor was originally to play the lead in The Beach as well but was dropped in favour of DiCaprio. Boyle defended the decision to McGregor, but McGregor was upset by the change. "I'm sure we'll be friends again and work together again soon," Boyle says.

But then, perhaps thinking of McGregor's shooting schedule as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi, he muses that "well, I mean, he probably won't be available ever but..."