Lost in Paradise, by Mark Salisbury..from Premiere Magazine, February, 2000...

Leonardo DiCaprio emerges from the warm turquoise-blue waters of the Andaman Sea like a later-day Robinson Crusoe, staggering onto this particular desert island dressed in faded burgundy T-shirt and shorts, a bright blue plastic bag tied tight around his waist. Feet dragging through soft white sand, legs like lead, heart pounding, he's barely able to muster the energy to move ten yards ashore before the Herculean effort involved in swimming here from a neighboring island takes its toll and he collapses, face first, onto the beach.

"That was a great fall," Danny Boyle says, his voice soft and encouraging. Only not great enough. The 43-year-old British director of Trainspotting and a Life Less Ordinary isn't happy with the way his star's face filled the frame as he fell, inches in front of the camera's lens. "As you land," Boyle instructs, "show more of your face.". With his hair cut short and a physique that bears witness to vigorous workouts, the 25 year old DiCaprio looks much older than he has on film. Lying in the sand, he turns his bronzed face square to the camera, anxious to please but concerned that he can't. "I don't know if I can fall like this," he says.

Before they can try again, the storm clouds that have been sitting ominously on the horizon since lunch move in swiftly overhead. It is April, and the monsoon season has come several weeks early to Thailand, where The Beach is in the final days of a three-and-a half month shoot. The crew (a mix of Brits and Thais, some of the latter veterans of The Deer Hunter) makes a dash for any scrap of shelter. DiCaprio, meanwhile, has a better idea: Along with costars Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet, he dives back into the sea, splashing through the crashing surf until the deluge blows over.

It's not the first storm, meteorological or otherwise, that the production has had to weather since arriving in Thailand. Nor will it be the last. Persistent concerns about the production's impact on the environment, along with the subsequent media frenzy, have put The Beach on the world map for all of the wrong reasons; Leo-centric tabloid reports have been a constant; and two days from now, a potentially life-threatening accident at sea will rock the cast and crew. Yet through all these tempests, Boyle has remained a quiet center. Dressed in cargo pants, T-shirt, and boots, his spiky hair covered by a floppy hat and his eyes behind thick glasses (giving him a slight Mr. Magoo air), he's a composed, concentrated presence, forever conferring with the actors between takes. He visits the monitor rarely, and then only to check the positions of his actors rather than the playback.

"He's open to every suggestion," DiCaprio says. "There's an inherent kindness within him as a man and a genuine sensitivity toward actors. I don't know if that makes a great director or not, but it's refreshing to not work with somebody who's an arrogant prick."

"He's a really delicate director, always taking care of people," the 23-year-old Ledoyen says. "It is a pleasure to come into his universe. He has this good balance between a very dark universe and a very hopeful one, because this movie is also really cruel, but he has something inside him that makes it luminous."

"You might not get all directors to admit this, but you get most of your best ideas from other people," Boyle says. "You steal ideas constantly; it's just sifting them. you have to have actors feeding you like that. If they don't, it's desperate."

It was an actor friend of Boyle's---"whom I'd tried to cast in this," the director says, "but the fucker went off and made a Sylvester Stallone movie instead"---who brought the novel by Alex Garland to his attention in the first place. After reading The Beach during postproduction on A Life Less Ordinary, Boyle passed it on to his producer, Andrew Macdonald, who in turn gave it to screenwriter John Hodge. (The three have been a team since they first collaborated on 1994's Shallow Grave, and together they form the nucleus of London-based Figment Films.) Having directed movies about homicidal flatmates, heroin addicts, and pistol-packing angels, Boyle was drawn to Garland's depiction of an international community of travelers living in harmony with paradise. Then there was the book's allusions to Vietnam War movies, in particular Apocalyse Now ("my favorite movie of all time," Boyle says) and a lead character who descends into a dangerous fantasy world inspired by those films, a world that collides head-on with reality---with devastating consequences.

This was in the autumn of 1997, before The Beach became a best-seller in Britain and before A Life Less Ordinary opened to lukewarm critical and commercial reception, which, after the twin triumphants of Shallow grave and Trainspotting, tarnished the trio's reputation as the saviors of British cinema. (It wasn't very nice at the time," Macdonald admits, "but it's good to be brought back down to earth. It takes the pressure off. Of course, you pump it up by having the biggest movie star in the world.") Garland had already received come inquiries about the film rights, but once Boyle's interest became known, every studio wanted the book. Figment made it clear that if they didn't own the rights, they wouldn't make the film for anyone else; eventually Fox, which cofinanced A Life Less Ordinary, came on board with them. Garland was jubilant. "Before they approached me, I wanted to sell it to [Figment]," he says. "But it was a bit like 'I'd sell it to Steven Spielberg'--- it was a bit pipe dreamy."

As Hodge began to work on the script, the filmmakers turned to the next task; finding the right actor to play Richard, the book's British narrator, whose quest for paradise turns to personal hell. The obvious choice seemed to be Ewan McGregor, star of Figment's first three films, whose success had been inextricably linked to theirs. McGregor thought so too. "He was our first idea; first CHOICE is not the right word," Macdonald says. "We discussed it with him, just like we discussed it with Leonardo." Casting is never a foregone conclusion, he stresses; the same process occurred in Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary. "Danny wants to consider everything, and that's what happened: He started considering other things." For starters, Boyle believed the commercial appeal would be enhanced by making Richard an American. "The novel and the experience of going out to Thailand felt peculiarly British," says Boyle, who together with Hodge and Macdonald spent two weeks backpacking around Thailand in preparation for the film. "And we didn't want to make it a Britsh film as such. We wanted it to be relevant all over the world." Besides, he says with a grin, "the idea of sending back into Southeast Asia an American who causes havoc is irresistible in a way."
Exit McGregor; enter DiCaprio. "There was definite anger from Ewan," Macdonald says. "But I understand it; he wanted to do it."

DiCaprio and Boyle met at the 1996 Cannes film festival, where DiCaprio was promoting Basketball Diaries, and Boyle, Trainspotting. "I thought it was one of the most ballsy films I'd seen," DiCaprio says of Boyle's breakout hit. "I completely related to it on a deep level." The pair talked about working together, though they had no specific project in mind. By early 1998, Titanic had made DiCaprio king of the world and everybody wanted him. His name was linked to several projects, among them an adaptation of the grisly serial-killer novel American Psycho ("I wasn't committed," the star says now about those negotiations. "I was discussing it") The willingness of that movie's backers to drop both their director and her choice for the lead, Christian Bale, to obtain DiCaprio's services prompted an eruption of anti-Leo press. An image was emerging of DiCaprio as a party boy clubbing with models and idly toying with movie offers. In fact, he was taking his time deciding.

"I had been searching for something to do for more than 15 months," DiCaprio explains, sitting in a Los Angeles hotel suite seven months after wrapping The Beach. As he speaks, he unzips the cuffs of his trousers and rolls the legs up to his knees and back down again. "I wanted to find something I connected with. It's a complicated decision process, what makes you trust that a film is going to be unique or interesting. Each film had its own reason why I didn't do it. The misconception was that I was slacking off, but I was trying to find something I really loved.." Garland's book was perfect for a number of reasons, not least because, DiCaprio says,"without speaking for my generation, it really symbolized a lot of what young people are going through in the modern age. Everything is so computerized and digitized, so influenced by media and television and and movies, and this character goes off in search of some real, tangible emotion. I identified with that."

But DiCaprio still had to commit. "We kept thinking, This is what all British filmmakers end up doing---waiting for some fucking star to say yes, and then they don't," chuckles Macdonald, who insists that they were ready to make the film with or without DiCaprio; only the size of the budget would be dependent on the outcome. (The budget would eventually more than double from the filmmakers' initial estimate, to $50 million---more than 30 times the Trainspotting budget, with DiCaprio's fee a hefty $20 million.)

Joining DiCaprio were Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle, as a disillusioned Scottish traveller named Daffy, who, just before committing suicide, passes Richard a map to a Thai-island Eden so off the beaten track that nobody knows it's there; Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet, as the French couple who journey with Richard to Daffy's beach; and Tilda Swinton (Orlando) as Sal, the leader of the colony that they find living there in harmony. All is sweetness, utopia, and a good deal of pot-smoking until Richard's Vietnam fixations and loosening grip on reality, coupled with disruptive outside influences, turn it into a paradise lost.." Although we all have it in our psyches and we need it to aim for, paradise is actually a false premise and excluding process," Boyle says, elaborating on one of the story's themes. "They don't want everybody there. They don't want the trash." The book culminates in a bloody bout of primitivism that Boyle was keen to avoid in his adaption. (I didn't believe it." he says. "The ideas are more about tourism and paradise than a return to Lord of the Flies.) Instead, the film version sets up a seductive first half that trades on our romantic preconceptions of both paradise and DiCaprio himself , before dragging us into the heart of darkness.

Boyle's films have consistently subverted their genre conventions, and The beach is no exception. "You take the great romantic hero of America and you fuck about with him," Boyle explains. "It will be very interesting and terrifying to see how much of that they'll take. It's amazing that he's prepared to do that, and wants to. That was why he was involved in some stage with American Psycho---he was thinking of burning it out completely. I think it's better to exploit that appeal rather than, whooosh, cut if off dead at the throat."

Richard is DiCaprio's most extreme character to date: naive, selfish, delusional, self destructive. All of which, the actor says, was the point. He shifts in his seat when asked how his many (predominantly young, predominantly female fans are going to react to such a radical departure, but denies there was any risk involved in taking the role. "Not for me," he says. "Maybe for other people's perceptions of who they think I am. If anything, I want to even go further with that. I was really into the dark aspects of the movie. I want to take chances."

As important as the right actor was the right beach. The filmmakers settled on Maya Bay on Phi Phi Leh, a small island on the Andaman Sea that had been used in Cutthroat Island. Although it is part of a Thai national park,Maya---a popular spot for snorkeling and daytrippers---was far from perfect. "It was literally a wreck," DiCaprio says. "We came in and improved it." Prior to filming, they removed rubbish from the beach (three tons of it, the filmmakers say). Yet for all of Maya's natural beauty, it was not paradisiacal enough, an irony not lost on Boyle. The filmmakers took out vegetation they deemed unsightly, shipped in 60 palm trees, and lowered a sand dune by almost five feet in two places. For all of this, they obtained permission from the Thai government and the Royal Forestry Department, and paid a fee of four million bahts(about $105,000) plus a $5 million bond, refundable once they returned the island to its original condition (minus the rubbish)---a commitment that continues to this day, with regular trips back to monitor the beach. "We've spent a lot of Rupert Murdoch's money," Macdonald says.

Yet from the word go, the filmmakers' plans became the subject of intense opposition in the Thai press from a small band of environmentalists, who objected to the production being given permission to alter the landscape of a national park, accused the filmmakers of disrupting the island's delicate eco-balance, and held DiCaprio personally responsible. Prior to filming, a group of fewer than a dozen protesters turned up on Phi Phi Leh and according to Macdonald, "were persuaded to leave by the local people, who wanted us there." Demonstraters also picketed Fox's Bangkok offices wearing masks of DiCaprio, onto which they'd daubed fangs and blood, and got worldwide coverage. "It was all about Hollywood, Murdoch, Leo wrecks the beach," says a dispirited Macdonald, who threatened to sue one newspaper for claiming he had "hired paramilitary thugs" (a story the paper later retracted). Throughout, his stance has been simple: Go see the beach. See what we've done for yourselves before judging the situation. Yet Macdonald says few if any follow-up stories appeared. "The only story here is Leo."

In fact, the issues pertaining to Maya have always been more political than environmental. While details are complex, what's clear is that the production became involved in an internal dispute in Thailand over who runs the national park.

"Every film has an effect upon its environment," Boyle relfects. "We knew that, and set out to make as little impact as possible. There was a line at the end of the film: 'I used to believe in paradise, but now I realize it's not some place you can go, because places---we destroy them.' That's one of the themes of the film---it's part of the West's inheritance, [and] our baggage. On that level you can't wash your hands of it completely. But we have been misrepresented; we have behaved in a way we're proud of. Not just to the environment but to people as well."

"To this day I hear people talking about how we ruined that environment," DiCaprio says. "I tried to be intricately involved in the process of pressuring Fox all the time---because it was my image that was involved---making sure they were under every restrictable guideline. Unfortunatley, that news doesn't come out."

The Thai government, specifically the forestry department, is currently involved in a lawsuit in Thailand (in which Fox is also a defendant) over whether it had the right to grant the production permission to film on Maya in the first place. And now, ironically, the Thai tourist board in Britain has approached Fox about using the film to promote travel to the the country.

"It's very hard for us to deny things and have anybody believe us," says Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Bill Mechanic, who visited Thailand during filming, "Because you always believe the big bad studio are the culprits. You can only do what you can do, then have independent agencies verify that you're not lying."

On the morning of April 16, a group of cast and crew members set out in two boats to shoot a scene between DiCaprio and Swinton, whose characters are venturing off the island to buy rice. They were about a quarter of a mile off the coast at around 1 p.m, getting ready to shoot another setup, when the wind came up and the tide turned in a way they weren't expecting; eight-foot waves soon began washing over their boats. The actors and about 15 crew members, including Boyle and director of photography Darius Khondji(Seven), were in the larger boat, a 35-footer, and the camera operator, and one safety diver were in a 20-foot-long, arrow-thin longtail boat moored to it. Both vessels were being carried farther out to sea. The longtail capsized; the larger boat started taking on water and its motor cut out, after which the order was given to abandon ship. (Everyone was wearing a lifejacket.) For the next 10 to 15 minutes, cast and crew were tossed around in the choppy water, waiting for four speedboats to pick them up--a rescue that was somewhat hampered by the rising swell. "I can swim, and I was pretty frightened," Boyle recalls. "You're swimming in all this wreckage, which was your makeup boxes and your camera, and which now have become lethal weapons. When we got back to the shore, there were grown men crying, grips and gaffers, really heavy guys. We were lucky that nobody died."
"I didn't necessarily fear for my life," DiCaprio says warily, conscious of the potential headlines inherent in his every word. "I knew I could get out of the situation."

Boyle found the manner in which the incident was reported almost as disturbing as the incident itself. Later on Boyle says: "You see it portrayed as HERO LEO SAVES THAI-TANIC, and that was horrible. Leo's a good swimmer, and the good swimmers helped the people who weren't. He did help, but it was portrayed in a way that made it a flippant event. To the people there, it was very frightening."

After filming in Maya and a few other locations, the production moved back to its base on Phuket, Thailand's largest island and a tourist magnet. Renowned for its excellent diving (which DiCaprio and Macdonald, among others, took advantage of) and friendly people, it's the kind of place where a jaywalking elephant is an everyday occurrence, and the death defying locals sometimes pile as many as five people, including infants, onto one moped.

Inside a studio completely created from a defunct footwear factory in Phuket, the humidity is so high it's like being in a sauna. Up in the rafters, fake cat heads set with sparkling eyes lie in wait to scare off the nesting birds, which have been giving the sound department headaches. The monsoon beats a tattoo on a metal roof, causing many interruptions in the night scene being shot between Ledoyen, Canet and DiCaprio on a beach set. It's the day after the boat accident, and the atmosphere among the crew is more subdued and sober than usual. A production assistant, armed with a clipboard, compiles a list of equipment lost at sea. "Part of the culture of a film crew is to laugh it off," Boyle says, "but they didn't laugh that one off. Also, you know you've got to go back and film that scene again. That's the brutal reality of it." Only a fraction of the scene remains in the finished film. "I think Leo thinks that scene should be back in. Not for any sentimental reasons."

From the beginning, Boyle envisaged The Beach as a "difficult mainstream movie." Although he changed the novel's savage denouement into more of a moral discussion (plus a brief game of Russian roulette, a Nam style favorite) that among other things portrays the Thais in a more sympathetic light, there was no way to dilute Richard's character and remain faithful to the book. As Richard goes farther "in country"--literally becoming a character in his own imaginary video game, scurrying around the island undergrowth wearing a bandanna--events culminate in a shocking moment of brutal realization. Boyle calls the second half of the film "horrible, very dark," but says that Fox was completely supportive of the movie he wanted to make. "It's a story of paradise gone bad, and that's what the movie had to be, says Mechanic, who recently has been down this road with the very dark Fight Club. "If you don't have the integrity to follow that through, you should not make the movie."

But a couple of scenes stand out as offering potential Fight Club-style headaches. One features DiCaprio holing a Kalashnikov submarine. Another has Richard imagining that he and Daffy are gunning down the people they consider to be parasites of paradise: tourists. Given that The Basketball Diaries was slammed in the wake of the Columbine massacre for its dream sequence in which DiCaprio's character shoots his classmates, was the star worried that people will use these images as further examples of youthful corruption? "You can't sacrifice your art for things like that," responds DiCaprio, who says he "didn't take it extremely personally" when The Basketball Diaries was singled out. "You can't worry about the ignorant who would take a particular incident from a film or a song and blow that up. You can't not have a violent scene in a movie just to make them happy and have a completely whitewashed world. Are we never going to see images like that? It's ridiculous."

Boyle doesn't believe a similiar situation will arise here--"All we can do is say that we're not going to extract those moments and put them in a pop video"---and says neither he nor DiCaprio had concerns about either scene, "because [they were] integral to this guy's descent."
"It's the same problem we got accused of in Trainspotting," he adds. "You occupy a world so intensely that if you do it well, there's something almost attractive about it."

"It's a hot topic," DiCaprio says about the issue of violence in movies. "It poses the question of what kind of statement I want to make about violence. But it IS a reality; we are inherently a violent culture in a lot of ways. As far as it relates to to [this] film, it poses a question about Richard that's the interesting thing about the character. He is so saturated with all of these violent images. It's the ultimate experience."

Boyle believes filmmakers should be responsible for their actions ("cinema DOES affect people; that why I do it"), but feels that The Beach, like his other films, is ultimately a moral movie. Mechanic says, "I'm completely supportive of what they did. I've seen it with an audience and an audience likes it, and that's all you ask for."

"It does grip a mainstream audience," Boyle says. "They may not like it, they may not recommend it to their friends---which is the terror for the studio---but when they're in there, they're absolutely gripped. We've never wanted to exclude anybody from our films. But we wanted to make them as difficult as possible at the same time. It's having your cake and eating it."