DiCaprio, Scorsese reunite for fourth time in 'Shutter Island'

by Karen, February 05, 2010 12:00am Martin Scorsese is barely settled into his chair at a secluded hotel bar when he hears the doors to the entrance creak open.

Leonardo DiCaprio peeks his head through and scans the room, not sure where to find the director.
He knows now. Scorsese is up and out of the leather chair, his 5-foot-4 frame closing in on the star.

"How are you, my boy?" Scorsese asks, pulling him aside from onlookers at the bar. The way Scorsese asks the question — inches from DiCaprio, a hand cupped behind the actor's head — he seems to genuinely want an answer.

"It's been too long," Scorsese continues. "What has it been? Months?"

From another director, the exchange could sound hollow. Actors and filmmakers routinely work for months together on a film, become close and part ways forever.

But Scorsese is nothing if not loyal to the handful of stars he allows into his closest circle, a practice that leads actors to glom on to him as if he were the last life preserver on the Titanic.

Which, for DiCaprio, he was.

"He saved me," DiCaprio says without a hint of snark or sentiment. "I was headed down a path of being one kind of actor, and he helped me become another one. The one I wanted to be."

The pairing has become one of the most productive in Hollywood, and it has been career-altering for both men. For DiCaprio, Scorsese's sets are safe harbors, a place he can swear up a storm, practice East Coast accents, handle real guns and not worry about being only a film's pretty boy or romantic interest.

For Scorsese, mentoring the 35-year-old actor is a return to the kind of relationships he forged in the 1970s, when he was writing bitter serenades to New York with movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. As he did with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, Scorsese, 67, takes a paternal interest in DiCaprio, suggesting roles, demanding dozens of takes and watching the actor mature.

It's new ground for DiCaprio. Not Scorsese. "Sometimes, you relate to an actor in ways you can't explain," Scorsese says. "I felt it with Harvey, I felt it with Robert, I feel it now. Over the course of years, you develop a rhythm that's hard to find in this business. But if you do find it, you don't let it go."

A successful collaboration

Since Scorsese got to know DiCaprio (at the urging of De Niro), the director has cast him in every feature film he has done since: Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006). Together, the movies have taken in more than $300 million domestically (a fortune for R-rated Scorsese films) and tallied 26 Oscar nominations and wins — including Scorsese's long-awaited best-director statuette for The Departed.

They pair again for Shutter Island, a mystery thriller that marks new territory for both men. The film, which opens Feb. 19, is as close as Scorsese has come to a horror film since Cape Fear , his 1991 remake with De Niro. In Shutter Island, DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal in 1954 who investigates the disappearance of a murderess from a hospital for the criminally insane.

Ask Scorsese why he's teaming for the fourth time in eight years with DiCaprio, and his answer is pretty straightforward: "I love seeing an actor at this stage in his life. When he can try new, braver things. I thought this was something new and brave for him."

DiCaprio's answer is simpler.

"I trust him."

The lure of Scorsese, says longtime friend Jodie Foster, is his seemingly endless energy to talk about anything from film to pasta. He looks like your favorite uncle with that quick laugh, caterpillar eyebrows and bottle-bottom glasses.

But his true role, Foster says, is as juggling parent for the stars on set. She recalls, as a 12-year-old making her big-screen debut in Taxi Driver, watching Scorsese wear different hats. He was the gentle patriarch with Foster, explaining that the violent scenes (particularly the gruesome finale) were all just pretend.

For De Niro, though, Scorsese was more like a parent who knew how to talk to his teenager. "He just has the right balance," she says. "He let (De Niro) play and take chances on screen. But if you weren't on set and ready to work at 8:30 a.m., you heard about it. It makes an impression."

Shutter co-star Emily Mortimer can vouch for that. "Of all the geniuses I've met," she says, "he is the least-scary-looking one."