Leonardo DiCaprio slips into Inception dream world

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Leonardo DiCaprio slips into Inception dream world
July 8,2010
By Ian Caddell
straight.com

LOS ANGELES—A full thirteen years after Titanic made him a movie star at the tender age of 23, Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t let fame get in the way of sensible choices. A native Californian, he understands that he’s living the dream while most of the actors he grew up with are still wandering in the wilderness. He says that he is not going to waste his success on making bad career selections.

“I am a very fortunate person,” he says in a hotel room in his hometown. “I get to choose the movies that I want to do, and I have a lot of friends in this industry that don’t get to do that. I grew up in L.A., and a lot of my friends are actors, so I realize every day how lucky I am to have this opportunity. While I’m here, I’m going to try to do exactly what I want.”

He lives the dream in a more literal way in his latest film, Inception, which opens next Friday (July 16). He plays Dom Cobb, a skilled thief with the ability to enter dreams in order to steal secrets of the subconscious. His personal goals, though, are less complicated. He wants to do a final job, in this case for Saito (Ken Watanabe), the one man who can grant his wish to return home to the U.S.

The film follows closely on the heels of DiCaprio’s most recent movie, Shutter Island, which contained some of the same elements as Inception: both characters are searching for normalcy in a world that keeps turning sideways on them. DiCaprio agrees that there are similarities in the themes but says the films were different enough that he wasn’t concerned about repeating himself.

“I think it was something I was aware of, as far as both of them being locked in this dream world and going on some cathartic journey. That’s where the similarities ended. This film couldn’t have been more vastly different than the other in its execution. So I felt safe and completely aware of trying my best to not repeat any of those themes.”

His latest movie is also his first attempt at science fiction. He says that both he and director Christopher Nolan had avoided science fiction because they were concerned about working in a world that was so far removed from reality. “One of the earliest conversations I had with Chris was about how both of us have a hard time with science fiction. We have a little bit of an aversion to it because it’s hard for us to emotionally invest in worlds that are too far detached from what we know. That’s what’s interesting about Chris Nolan’s science-fiction worlds. They’re deeply rooted visually in things that we’ve seen before. There are cultural references, and it feels like a world that we could jump into and it’s not too much of a leap of faith.”