Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with Martin Scorsese on Wednesday night for a wide-ranging conversation about the pair’s longtime working relationship, as well as the star’s team-up with Paul Thomas Anderson on One Battle After Another.
Taking part in the “A Year in Time” event in NYC, DiCaprio — who was named Time’s 2025 Entertainer of the Year — noted how much Anderson has been influenced by Scorsese’s films, and remembered “meeting Paul very early on in my career, when I was about to go do Titanic but we were talking about doing Boogie Nights. I was in my mother’s living room and I’ll never forget, I was on the couch and he brought a LaserDisc of Raging Bull and a video cassette of pornography. And he said, ‘I want to do the Raging Bull of pornography.’”
“Oh wow, that’s interesting,” responded Scorsese, who directed the 1980 sports drama. DiCaprio — who has called passing on Boogie Nights the biggest regret of his career — continued, “And I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that’s going to be pretty difficult.’ But you’ve been close to him over the years and there’s so much commonality in the way both of you work.”
Scorsese and DiCaprio are currently in pre-production on their seventh film together — teasing that they start shooting in February — as the actor explained that their process is “to almost have a debate for months before; lots of questions and lots of playing devil’s advocate about a way to approach things that may not be the most obvious direction. We’re doing that on the new film that we’re doing now.”
Collaborating on 2004’s Aviator in that way “was kind of a rebirth of the enjoyment of creating something in cinema,” the filmmaker said, “so we just kept working together,” as he praised DiCaprio’s constant curiosity.
DiCaprio did express one regret about their working relationship, though, in that “I’ve been so focused on what I’ve been doing as an actor; you make these decisions and you play these characters, you try to get into the depths of their soul as much as you possibly can, and I would have loved to be much more of a voyeur if I could have been to watch what you do behind the camera.”
“People have asked me if I want to direct; I’m like, I would never want to direct, I could never do anything close to what Martin Scorsese does. Why would I do that?” he added. “But if I look back on anything, I would have loved to observe that process behind the camera a lot more.”
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