Leo: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist

(2 of 3)

On his doorstep are large piles of the choicest Hollywood scripts, most of which he sees before any other leading man under 40. (He could have been Spider-Man and Anakin Skywalker, but neither role passed his passion test.) DiCaprio reads "almost all of them" but believes that "92%, to give you a precise number, are pure crap." Money matters--"If they're not able to get close to what you feel you deserve, you wonder who's financing it and backing it"--but is seldom a deal breaker. "Usually when I want to do something," he says, "I know immediately, and then I do it."

What turns him on is not particularly surprising. In Catch Me If You Can, he played someone with access to millions of dollars who can get away with anything but chooses not to. Howard Hughes is an older, crazier version of the type. "The guy had everything in the world, was at the forefront of all these really exciting things in our country and quite the swashbuckler too," says DiCaprio. "Yet still he was unable to be a happy person. For somebody like myself who's been very fortunate in life, to see that as an example — I don't want to say it's a moral thing, but it's interesting."

DiCaprio knew he wanted to play Hughes when he read a biography of the mogul in 1995, and started developing The Aviator in earnest in 2000, first with director Michael Mann and then, when Mann bowed out, with Scorsese.

As executive producer, DiCaprio led Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Any Given Sunday) through 15 script revisions over two years, mostly in an effort to make Hughes' obsessive-compulsive disorder meaningful but not maudlin. "I loved those meetings," says DiCaprio. "Just talking about ideas with people, giving the movie time to breathe — that's like complete heaven for me." He spent plenty of time preparing to play Hughes. "I don't know what he's talking about with this 10 seconds of focus stuff," says Scorsese, and laughs. "Don't let him kid you — he's incredibly thorough." DiCaprio read thousands of pages of Hughes biographies, watched old newsreel footage and spent days with obsessive-compulsive-disorder expert Dr. Jeffrey Schwarz, but is so conditioned to tamp down interest in himself that he is reluctant to discuss it. "Trust me, dawg," he says dismissively, "you don't want to hear about it."