I really enjoyed One Battle After Another, and I enjoyed all of the actors within the film. Sean Penn stole every scene he was in, and it gives me no pleasure to write that. Teyana Taylor was magnificent. Chase Infiniti was adorable. And Leonardo DiCaprio was legitimately great. I think the legend of Leo has grown to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to see or acknowledge the stellar character work he does. I remember watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and thinking, “wait, Leo is doing amazing work here.” Killers of the Flower Moon had script issues and editing issues, but Leo was great in it. What do we even call this phase of his career? The midlife excellence phase? Something like that. In any case, Leo is Time’s Entertainer of the Year. Good. Some highlights from his Time interview:

On James Dean in East of Eden: “Performances like that, that’s what’s intriguing to me. Showing that or exploring that, and not having that hardened shell.”

He cares deeply about One Battle After Another. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how often there have been truly original story ideas like this, with no link to anything historical, no past characters, no genre, no vampires, no ghosts, no anything. It was somewhat risky for the studio to take this on, and what they’re banking on, I think, is the appeal of Paul’s storytelling and the sort of fierce originality of his process.”

He researched playing a father: He spoke to Paul Thomas Anderson about his “fear of the future for his children, what it’s like for him to be a father in the world that we live in, and what humanity and politics in the world are going to be like for his offspring.” He loved working with Chase Infiniti, he says; she made it easy for him to slip into the role. “You go, ‘Oh yeah, I’d stand in front of anything for this person.’ She’s just so incredibly good-hearted and sweet you want to protect her.”

He loves that OBAA is being discussed so much: “I just love that it’s such a conversation piece. In my community, people like talking about it, and that’s one of the reasons you make movies. At the end of the day it’s like, ‘Wow, this maybe had a little effect on people.’”

Becoming a huge star: “It’s been a balance I’ve been managing my whole adult life and still I’m not an expert. I think my simple philosophy is only get out there and do something when you have something to say, or you have something to show for it. Otherwise, just disappear as much as you possibly can.” He admits that even though the early success of Titanic bought him freedom, he also found the attention intense and overwhelming; he was sure people were sick of him. And he began to think about how to survive in a line of work he loves. “I was like, OK, how do I have a long career? Because I love what I do, and I feel like the best way to have a long career is to get out of people’s face.”

On the rise of AI: Humanity is something DiCaprio thinks a lot about. He acknowledges the role AI might play in the future of movies, and while he mourns the fact that talented and experienced people could lose their jobs because of it, he isn’t ready to write off the possibilities just yet. “It could be an enhancement tool for a young filmmaker to do something we’ve never seen before,” he says, though it’s clear the word enhancement is critical. “I think anything that is going to be authentically thought of as art has to come from the human being. Otherwise—haven’t you heard these songs that are mashups that are just absolutely brilliant and you go, ‘Oh my God, this is Michael Jackson doing the Weeknd,’ or ‘This is funk from the A Tribe Called Quest song “Bonita Applebum,” done in, you know, a sort of Al Green soul-song voice, and it’s brilliant.’ And you go, ‘Cool.’ But then it gets its 15 minutes of fame and it just dissipates into the ether of other internet junk. There’s no anchoring to it. There’s no humanity to it, as brilliant as it is.”

He loved Diane Keaton: “She had the most incredible laugh. It would echo through the entire set, and she made you feel like the funniest person in the world. I mean, burst-out-loud laughing. I’ll never forget it. I kind of lived to make her laugh every day on set, because it was so infectious. She was incredible.”

[From Time]

I wonder if Leo is really going to campaign for OBAA. He’s obviously proud of the film, as he was with KOTFM, but with Flower Moon, he used all of his energy to support Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese. OBAA feels a bit different, although I’m sure Leo will try to put more attention on Paul Thomas Anderson, Benicio del Toro and Chase Infiniti. But yeah… he should really campaign for this movie. OBAA is the favorite, right now, for all of the big awards.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, cover courtesy of Time.