In Pursuit of Paradise

“We’re coming down the hallway now,” a serious voice squawks from the speaker end of a walkie-talkie. “We’re rounding the corner.” The scratchy sound of movement, footsteps. “We can see the door,” the voice continues. Static. Suspense builds. The woman from 20th Century Fox and I wait in silence. Then, suddenly, “OK, we’re here.”

It’s like a scene from one of those movies about the president in peril, with Secret Service agents tracking the chief executive’s every move inside the White House. Only it’s not the president being tracked here, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio.

The door swings open, the walkie-talkies meet, and in comes Leo, as the world has come to know him in the two years since “Titanic” became a titanic success and his tender countenance an international emblem of undying love. At his side is a gray-haired political consultant named Ken Sunshine, who used to advise former New York Mayor David Dinkins. He’s working on Leo’s campaign now.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Where do you want to sit?” I ask.

The negotiations to get an interview with Leo have been so arduous and politically charged, it’s surprising we haven’t yet talked about the shape of the table and the size of the chairs. Not that, it would appear, Leo could care in the least. He’s just the fresh-faced star whose talent and good fortune to have been on director James Cameron’s short list of young leading men when the big ship went down again have turned him into a $20-million, name-above-the-title player and media phenomenon--a 25-year-old who needs bodyguards and Ken Sunshine.

As it turns out, we’re in a large, empty conference room in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the island of Maui, itself a suitably paradisiacal setting to talk about a movie called “The Beach,” which involves a search for paradise. Evidently the Fox people thought so because they invited the media here to help launch it.

Directed by Danny Boyle of “Trainspotting” fame, “The Beach” is DiCaprio’s first major movie since “Titanic,” in 1997, and he is in almost every scene, playing a callow young American tourist named Richard who ventures alone to Thailand in an effort to escape the prepackaged media culture he has grown up with in America. The film opens Feb. 11.

“We’re so constantly influenced by this media information that it’s hard to have a real experience, something that’s really tangible,” DiCaprio says when he has taken a seat, his media advisor not far away. He is dressed in a blue silk shirt, charcoal slacks, white socks and black loafers, his brown hair brushed up from his forehead and the fuzzy beginnings of a goatee on his chin. He is handsome, certainly, taller than you might think and gangly in a boyish way.

He knows firsthand about the media culture. Stories have tailed him about loutish behavior at clubs in New York and egotistical shenanigans fit for the Hollywood sheik he parodied briefly in Woody Allen’s “Celebrity,” but today he seems quiet, humble and sincere, someone not connected to the subject of those stories.

“In the last year it’s unbelievable what a lack of respect there’s been for reporting facts,” he says. “People just don’t care about what’s actually the truth, you know what I mean? But I’ve adapted to it; I have a great amount of acceptance for it now. It’s not something I laugh off, nor is it something I get overwhelmingly upset about. It’s just something that’s a part of what I do now.”

In Thailand, for example, during the filming of “The Beach,” he read that he had made his co-star, French actress Virginie Ledoyen, pregnant. Then local environmentalists protesting the film company’s use of a national park as a location wore DiCaprio masks with fangs dripping blood.

“Unfortunately, they used me as the figurehead,” he says, still smarting from the protests he says were misguided. “In reality, the production team completely cleaned that beach up and took off three tons of garbage that was there when they arrived.”

This is how fast the fast track can be. It was only a few years ago (well, 1993) that DiCaprio was a little-known teenager with an unlikely name getting great reviews for his role as Johnny Depp’s autistic brother in the small film “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” after debuting opposite Robert De Niro as an abused son in “This Boy’s Life.”

“He doesn’t like to do interviews,” Sunshine told me, offering suggested topics. “It tends to go best if he can talk about his art and the movie. He doesn’t want to talk about Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn’t want to talk about being a celebrity.”

“Most famous people,” DiCaprio says, “put way too much emphasis on letting the real them come out: ‘This is really me, this is who I am.’ Whereas I feel that stuff speaks through the work, period. If you’re an entertainer, that shows up on screen, or in the work that you do.”

The warp speed of his ascent, the money (so much that he’s starting his own philanthropic foundation), the comparisons to Brando and Dean, the whole way in which he has become not so much an actor as an enterprise do make you wonder how anyone could handle it at 25 without help. Does he feel he’s even in control of his life at this point?

“There are definitely people in my life who tell me what they think, but you know, more so than ever I feel in control,” he says. “The position I’m in now is one of the greatest I’ve been in in my career, as far as systematically thinking out what direction I want to go in as an actor.

“And it’s been interesting becoming an adult, too, because now it’s really on my shoulders. During my teenage years as an actor, I could always sort of say, ‘OK, the director messed up or it was somebody else’s fault, I’m only a teenager.’ Now I have the responsibility and I enjoy that challenge.”

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Born in Hollywood the year Nixon resigned from office, DiCaprio grew up the son of anti-establishment parents--his father was an underground comics artist, his mother a German World War II refugee and social worker; the couple separated before Leo’s first birthday. He discovered he liked acting as early as grade school but never studied it and to this day has not set foot in an acting class.

“That’s cruel and tough, isn’t it?” says Danny Boyle, talking about DiCaprio and contrasting him to the thousands of actors who go to class every other day in Los Angeles and never get to make a commercial, let alone a movie.

“He’s probably not in control of it himself,” the director says, meaning his talent. “What’s extraordinary about him is his contact: There’s an immediacy in him for an audience. It’s funny, this is a film about happiness, and I never saw Leo happier than when he’s in front of a camera. He’s shy, but in front of a camera he has no inhibitions.”

His co-stars in “The Beach” include Tilda Swinton (“Orlando”) and Robert Carlyle (“Trainspotting,” “The Full Monty,” “Angela’s Ashes”), graduates of prestigious acting schools in Britain and Scotland. DiCaprio didn’t even go to college.

But working with such classically trained actors hasn’t turned his head or shaken his view of himself. “It is just a different way,” he says. “I have never been to any formal schooling. But it has worked for me to be able to just examine things with a clear slate and make my decisions with no hindrance of rules about how to act. I’ve always felt comfortable doing it that way.

“I’ve found that when I do that sort of stuff, it makes things more formulaic and takes away the natural charisma that a human being has, you know what I mean? And sometimes, when things are too technical, they may come across as realistic but they don’t always hit you in the gut as much, is my view on it. If that makes any sense.”

His role as Richard plays off his charisma and his sense of both vulnerability and potential for ruthlessness.

Notes Boyle: “The first time I saw ‘Gilbert Grape’ I thought, ‘Who is that guy?’ That was a keynote performance. Then, when I met him, he was delightful and he’s much the same now. . . . Not much gets hidden from you in a four- or five-month intense period like we had making this film, and there was no b.s. from him. I think someone who comes off something like ‘Titanic’ and agreed to come to Thailand and be away from home for four months speaks volumes about him. He could have said, ‘Let’s shoot the film in L.A.’ ”

Boyle needed DiCaprio not just for his marquee value but also to add a certain warmth to the story’s main character, a self-centered young American willing to do almost anything to find his way back to a Garden of Eden he has learned about from a mysterious stranger in Bangkok. With a crude map in hand, he sets off to find the remote island paradise, accompanied by a handsome young French couple (Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) he has met at his hotel.

Reaching the island at some personal risk, they discover a utopian community of blissed-out European expatriates coexisting uneasily with an armed gang of Thai marijuana farmers. Complications, some tragic, ensue.

Critics will no doubt compare “The Beach,” based on a novel by British author Alex Garland, to other stories of atavism on parade, including “Lord of the Flies” and “Apocalypse Now” (scenes of which are even shown on screen for reference). DiCaprio says, “It was the first script I’d read after ‘Titanic’ that really said something, you know? Had some sort of comment on where we are going as a society in the world or something like that. It really had a lot to do with my generation.”

Much has been made of how difficult the making of “Titanic” was, with DiCaprio and Kate Winslet being hurled around by walls of freezing water under the martial rule of Cameron. When asked how the filming of “The Beach” compared, DiCaprio laughs. “Well, there’s definitely more military feel to the style of ‘Titanic’ filmmaking, but I’ve said many times it takes that kind of commanding personality to do that type of film.

“With Danny Boyle, he’s just an inherently really sweet, genuine, nice person. It was a much calmer atmosphere.”

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The story, retold in the biography available on his official Web site, is that in the summer of 1974, while his mother, Irmelin, was visiting Italy and in a museum looking at a painting by Da Vinci, she felt the first kick of her pregnancy and decided right there on the name Leonardo.

His parents first lived in New York but moved to Los Angeles before Leo was born. He grew up not in the movie industry but in its midst and says, “Acting was a part of me ever since I can remember. I just didn’t realize till I was a teenager that, wow, people actually earn a living and do this as a career. When I realized that, I said, ‘Get me out there, let me do it.’ ”

He went to Seeds University Elementary School at UCLA and later to John Marshall High School in Los Feliz. He did his first commercial at 14 and was soon acting on television in the sitcom “Growing Pains” and the soap opera “Santa Barbara.”

He lived in Los Feliz until recently, but fled the neighborhood’s growing trendiness, reportedly buying a house in the Hollywood Hills. “I wanted to find a place to live there [Los Feliz], but it’s become like SoHo and will be commercialized soon, just like SoHo. And all the artists will move to Silver Lake, and then Silver Lake will get overrun and commercialized. That’s the theme of the movie.”

But, like Randy Newman, he still loves L.A.

“Say what you may about it, but I was born in Hollywood, you now what I mean?” he says. “This has been my world since I was a young man. I’ve got a great group of people that have a really different outlook on life, and I think I wouldn’t be able to find that anywhere else. I think Los Angeles attracts like a magnetic force--so many creative, different people.”

Indeed, DiCaprio does not seem to lack friends. The popular perception is that he is seldom alone or just with a date but prefers to travel in a pack whenever possible. True?

“Um, no,” he says. “I think a lot of things are distortions about me. But I don’t care to comment on them.”

Nevertheless, he did come to Maui with an entourage that includes actor Tobey Maguire, the rising star of such current films as “The Cider House Rules” and the upcoming “Wonder Boys.” The two have been pals since meeting at an audition more than 10 years ago.

“Awesome,” DiCaprio says about Maguire’s performance in “Cider House.” “I’m so honestly proud and happy for him. By the way, he refuses to talk about me.”

Others step forward. “He’s in the Brando, Nicholson legacy,” says Boyle. “So you hope he will do a lot of different things. His taste is peculiar. But the star system has got him now.”

He goes to work next for Martin Scorsese in the upcoming “The Gangs of New York,” to be shot partly in Italy. For an actor who has chosen mostly non-blockbuster assignments, it is ironic that his most enduring image may prove to be the one forever fixed to the sound of Celine Dion belting “My Heart Will Go On,” the love theme from “Titanic.”

Not that he’s worrying about that now. Maybe Fox, the studio releasing “The Beach,” is worrying about it; maybe Danny Boyle or Ken Sunshine are worrying about it. But Leo? “Nothing,” he says, “compares to how to just become a happy person who leads an interesting life. That’s the most important thing to me.”