Leonardo DiCaprio will only work with directors who are "changing cinema".
The 41-year-old actor is aware that when he lends his name to a movie, it immediately gets financed and wants to use the "incredible gift" to champion "important" films.
He admits: "I get unhappy doing things that I’m not passionate about. Because I feel like I’m squandering this incredible gift I’ve been given to finance films.
"As soon as my name alone was enough to make this happen, I vowed to myself that I was going to work with directors who were changing cinema, doing something important, you know? This goes back to when I was a teenager, feverishly watching movies like ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ and saying to myself, someday, I’m going to be a part of films like this."
And Leonardo felt similarly about ‘The Revenant’, admitting it was "pretty revolutionary".
He told The Telegraph magazine: "We all knew that we were a part of something pretty revolutionary. From the outset, Alejandro [González Iñárritu] had an extraordinary vision: to create a film the likes of which audiences had never seen before. You don’t get those sort of results without going above and beyond the call of duty …
"He [Alejandro] would be like, ‘No, no, we’re not going to shoot until the raindrops on that section of the bear fur match that section … No, no, there’s a patch of ground there that doesn’t look quite right.’ That’s what it was like. Every day. Like a master painter painting a landscape."
Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘incredible gift’
