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Talk Magazine

The Beach is a story about how the human animal is predisposed to trample paradise. To me the island is extremely symbolic of man's relationship with earth, and how we've been put on this paradise, and we don't know what to do with it.... When Richard finds paradise, he realizes that he is still dissatisfied... As a result, he destroys paradise.
-Leo's notebook

Pain distorts the boyish face of Leonardo DiCaprio. It is the same contorted expression that he wore when he was freezing to death in the Titanic. But now he isn't acting.

"My stomach's killing me," he grimaces. "I have to go to the bathroom real quick." Leonardo runs out of the room, down a short hallway, into the men's room, and throws up.

What's wrong? Maybe he's been working too hard; he's been putting in 14-hour days. Or maybe he's been playing too hard; that is his reputation, after all. Or probably both. For Leo is never one thing, always two. Perhaps he owes it to his parents: His mom Irmelin,a German refugee, and his dad George, whose grandfather immigrated from Italy in a wooden boat. During the day Leo is the hardworking son of his hard-working German mother, who has spent her life as a legal secretary. At night he is the fun-loving son of his devil-may-care, hippie Italian father who for years wrote and distributed underground comix.

"His two eyes are different," says Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Leo in what may be his best movie, What's Eating Gilbert Grape. "The left eye is very soft and empathetic. The right eye is more analyzing. One eye oozes warmth, while the other is more penetrating. One eye is psyche, the other is intellect."

The day started with Leo DiCaprio worried. He showed up for work at London's Goldcrest postproduction studios at 10 o'clock in teh morning wearing a white T-shirt and big running shoes. He is taller (six feet) and more muscular (175 pounds)than I imagined. He wears his jeans low and his boxer shorts high: black, pin-striped Calvin Kleins. And he wears a concerned expression.

Leo has come to London to do some additional dialogue recording (ADR)for his new movie, The Beach, which is set on an almost deserted island in Thailand. On the ADR stage, an actor can rerecord dialogue that somehow got screwed up during the original filming. Maybe the insects were too noisy, or the leaves too loud, or the crew's footsteps too heavy.

Sometimes line readings can be improved, but rarely. Even more rarely, the actual content of a scene can be changed through ADR sleight of hand. Which is exactly what a troubled Leo intends to try to do. The so-called "tent scene" has been worrying him more and more. In this scene Leo feels that his character ducks responsibility rather than shouldering it the way he should. And recently Leo himself has begun to care more and more about being responsible. Responsible for the way he conducts himself. Responsible for the kinds of movies he makes. And he wants the characters he plays to be responsible, too. But can he pull off this transformation? Can he turn the tent scene around? The director has already assured him that it is impossible, but directors can be wrong. Unfortunately, such ADR derring-do requires time, which is just what is running out fast. They have just three days to finish looping the whole film, and the tent scene is at the end of the movie. Leo will just have to hurry. Because if he can do this it will affect the meaning of the entire film.

At 25, Leonardo DiCaprio is the most famous member of his generation. And he has achieved this distinction without talking to reporters. Since Titanic , this is his first interview. He is being paid $20 million for his work on The Beach, which makes him..along with Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Arnold Schwarzenegger--among the highest paid actors in the world. And he is branching out, starting to create a small world he can control. There's Leofest, his own film festival, open to anybody with a movie 15 minutes or shorter and a $35 entrance fee--sort of a starter Sundance. He also controls his own "official" website: leonardodicaprio.com. There are also countless unofficial sites, as well as a few like one headed, "You cannot deny it. Leonardo DiCaprio sucks." There are people in the world who have seen Titanic several hundred times. Some of them follow leo around New York and Los Angeles: Leomaniacs. Amid all this, it is not always easy to feel like yourself. But then again, this is what he's always wanted.

Looking back at the beginning--This Boy's life--it seems somehow antediluvian. Leo was just 17 years old. "I think Michael(Caton-Jones, the director) liked me," he remembers. "Then I had the big meeting with De Niro. I read a scene with him. To make an impression, I yelled some of the lines in his face.

"I was a smart-ass in a lot of ways. Very overconfident."

"He was a little f---," confirms Caton-Jones. "He was a smart-mouthed little f---." One day Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin were doing a scene, while Leo cavorted about, distracting them.

Ellen started lecturing him: Don't do this. Don't do that, you've got to learn to behave--to be more like the two of us.

"Like the two of you," Leo shot right back. "Let's see, on the one hand, he did Raging Bull. On the other hand, you did Switch. And you're the one who is telling me what to do?"

"Shut up" yelled Caton-Jones."Who do you think you are?"

In spite of Leo's mouth, the director actually loved working with him. He liked the young actor from their very first meeting. When Leo read a scene--performing not just for the director but for a video camera--Caton-Jones was impressed. But he wasn't sure producer Art Linson would agree.

"I decided to load the dice," Caton-Jones recalls. "I asked Leo to come back on Saturday morning. We retaped the scene. We did several takes." Of course, no other actors were allowed multiple takes. And of course Caton-Jones was careful to sandwich Leo's audition between two of the worst he could find.

The producer looked at the tape and according to Caton-Jones, called back and said: "Michael, when I saw Leo I got chills. I got chills."

Caton-Jones believes that Leonardo DiCaprio is "the best of all the young actors working today. He is underestimated as an actor because he is a pretty boy. He has a wet-panty feel to him. But he is both: pretty and a good actor."

Another dual role. He seduces you with one eye while he impresses you with the other.

"Michael Caton-Jones was truly like my big brother." recalls leonardo, the only child. "He molded me in that movie."

Leo and I are sipping lemonade at the Chateau Marmont, a few blocks from where he grew up. "My parents knew ever since I was a young man that I always wanted to be an actor. They drove me to auditions. Helped me with my lines. Ever since I was 13 years old."

"I remember something that my dad said after I got rejected by an agent:'Someday, Leo--look at me. Someday, Leo, none of this is going to matter because you're going to do better than all those guys. It'll happen for you.'

"I of course didn't believe him. My parents have been nothing but supportive and noncontrolling--some of the biggest influences in my life.

"My mother was born in Germany right when World War II was hitting, and she came to America right after. She had a really messed-up life. She went to City College in New York. Met my father there."

Leo's mom and dad split up "soon after" his arrival. "I saw both my parents all the time, but I lived with my mother.

"My mother meant everything to me. The stability and honesty that she gave me. She brought me to Germany when I was a young man. To live wiht my with my grandparents for a while. To see what my German heritage was like. And then we traveled all around the world. She made me the together person that I am. We lived in a bad neighborhood, but she would drive an extra hour out of the way every day to pick me up from school because the bus wouldn't go to Beverly Hills. It was a magnet school that was part of UCLA."

Leo reamins close to his mother. In fact, both his mom and his grandmother appear in The Beach.

He smiles as he says: "My dad is a Buddha-like figure to me. He's like what I would like to be someday. I would like to have it so together like that. He was in the underground comic book world with R. Crumb and Robert Williams. That was the world he lived in. I grew up meeting those guys."

One of the guys he met was Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who always fawned over Leo whenever he dropped by.

"It must be strange to have such a beautiful son," Ginsberg would say.

George would just mumble, "Yeah, yeah, yeah" in response. "It was a conversation I would rather not get into," he says.

I met George DiCaprio ina third-world lunchroom called the Hollywood Hills Cafe. he wore shoulder-length black hair and black beard, and a Hawaiin shirt. He is still the hippie he was a generation ago. The question is often asked: Why has Leonardo chosen to do so many eccentric and daring, but marginal, movies? the answer: His father.

When George attended City College, it was "a cesspool of drugs, free love, and communism. I had a really good time."

In those days, George DiCaprio wrote and helped draw an underground comic titled baloney Moccasins and another called Greaser. When he met R. Crumb, the most famous of the underground cartoonists, he invited him to stay at his loft. crumb showed up with his entire band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders.

Then Crumb got George a job at an animation studio working on "The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat". Which meant a move to Hollywood.

"The first person I talked to when I landed in California was Robert Williams," remembers George DiCaprio. Soon he was meeting underground cartoonists and distributing their works.

"Leo was smack dab in the middle of it," says George. "Sleeping on cartons of underground comix."

When the marriage broke up, George moved into a crafman's cottage on one side of a vacant lot. Irmelin and Leo moved into a similar cottage on the other side. And George planted a garden on the land that separated the two small houses. So they all saw each other all the time.

"It was a very Polynesian arrangement," explains George, who continued to raise Leo with Irmelin "in a cooperative way."

When George decided to take a second wife, Peggy, the marriage ceremony was performed by LSD high priest Timothy Leary.

"How did your father's world affect you?" "It might sound contrary to something like Titanic, but the things I'm attracted to are away from the norm. It gave me a different outlook. It gave me a different take on reality. I collect artists like Robert Wiliams, Eric White, Mark Ryden. Deranged art."

Ryden paints a little girl praying to "Saint-Barbie." White draws an old man saying, 'please take a moment now to become conscious of the skeleton within your body.' Robert Williams does paintings that are part Dali' and part Dick Tracy. The Easter Bunny attacks an egg hunter and tears her clothes off.

"I'm attracted to it," Leo says, "because it goes along with the images I saw when I was young. My dad brought me to those guys."

Leo the pop star is also the underground man. The actor who made The Basketball Diaries doesn't think much of the actor who did Titanic. Unfortunately, they are the same actor.

There is also this theme of how this whole world is becoming Disneyfied. It's becoming one giant theme park. American movies have penetrated every culture around the world. The beach represents a pirate utopia to Richard, but he doesn't realize he and the others are actually invaders. They're the white man once again going around trying to create paradise in different places. --Leo's notebook.

"What was the hardest thing about The Beach?"

Well, Leo was badly stung by jellyfish during the water scenes. He tried wearing pantyhose to protect himself form the stings, but they didn't help much. Then there was the time the engine of the actors' boat cut out in a storm, and everybody had to abandon ship. they were rescued by speedboats. And Leo worked 70 days with only four days off. But according to him...

"Nothing was really that hard about The Beach. It was one of those really collaborative experiences with a director. It was the first film where I really wanted to take more responsibility for what I was doing as far as steering the story in the right direction. And Danny was unbelievably open to my doing that."

"Was that a problem?" I ask producer Andrew MacDonald. "Did you resent this kid wanting to be a part of everything?" "No," says Andrew. " After all, the kid had made more movies than we had."

"And what about Titanic?" I ask Leo. " What was the hardest thing about that?"

"Everything. Every day. The hardest thing I've ever had to do was make that movie."

"Physically? Emotionally?"

"Everything."

"Did you sometimes spend hours in (director James) Cameron's trailer talking thing out?"

"There were a couple of moments like that."

"There were moments when Leo and James might not see a line the same way," conceded John Landau, who produced Titanic. "There were moments when Leo felt certain things might be a little corny."

"Such as?"

"Well, there was the time leo shows kate kate (Winslet) his artwork for the first time. The actors didn't like the scene. Leo thought the dialogue was "corny" and wanted to change it, but it wasn't easy. ("Getting a change out of James Cameron was," according to George DiCaprio, "like pulling a tooth form a mastodon.") leo persevered and finally won the right to point at a young woman he had drawn and say ,"She was a one-legged prostitute." ("That was right out out of Henry Miller", according to George.)

Later in the film, Leo has dinner in first class. When dinner is over, he has to return to steerage. The script called for him to say, "It's time for my coach to turn back into a pumpkin." Again Leo thought the line was too cute, and a cliché besides. he finally persuaded Cameron to let him say, "Time for me to go row with the other slaves."

Leo, who loves collaboration, felt something like a slave himself. His harassed director's attitude was often, Just pull your oar and don't complain.

Later, Cameron was considering cutting the scene where Leo teaches Winslet how to spit. The actors talked him into not only keeping the scene but making it pay off later in the movie, In the script she is supposed to stick a hat pin into one of the villains. The actors convinced Cameron that Winslet should spit in his face--spit the way Leo had taught her to.

Leo waited until he had finished shooting the last scene in Titanic. Then he dumped a bucket of ice water over the head of Cameron, the King of the world. So ended a decidedly chilly relationship.

We've had no war. We've had nothing to believe in. Everything has been thrown at us. It's an exploring time for us. We can truly go find what we want to believe in. --Leo's notebook.

The night after Titani'c premiere in Tokyo, Leo went out with Justin Davis, a well-connected jewelry designer, and an actress named Shuko. He was 23 years old and about to become perhaps the most famous 23 year-old in the world. They went to a fashion show. Afterward, Davis, Leo, and Shuko went outside to smoke.

"Shuko, show him your nipless," Davis said.

Like many fashionable Tokyo women, she was wearing not a bra but something known in Japan as "nipless"--two flesh-colored patches that covered her nipples. She pulled up her blouse and showed Leo.

Leo studied these patches and then asked: "So are you trying to stop smoking?"

Later, Shuko asked Leo's friends to take some pictures of the two of them together. But when she got them developed, she found nothing but photos of her face and Leo's arm. His friends had been protecting him.

Leo probably doesn't need much protection, but he is currently trying to change his image. His movies--most of them--are proof that he works hard. But one movie, the low-budget Don's Plum, highlights the bad-boy party boy. Back in 1995, Leo and a group of friends decided to make a small, experimental art movie. They shot it over a couple of nights at a diner called Don's Plum in the San Fernando Valley and it evidently seemed like fun. Leo played an out-of-control jerk who isn't very nice to women. Of course, he was just playing a role, but some of the lines were ad-libbed. And the cast included members of his real-life party posse: Tobey Maguire, Kevin Connolly...

Leo sitting at a table with his posse and several girls, begins to taunt the: " Do you girls masturbate at all?...Do you do the old hand thing or is it a mental situation?...You rub yourself on a teddy bear?...How about I take my shoe and shove it in your mouth?...You f---in' squatty piece of shit...I'll throw a bottle in your face, you goddamned whore...I got my girlfriend off on a zucchini, and that got me off... You have four orgasmic spots in your asshole..."

Then he apologizes: "I was a little bit of an asshole," his characters says.

"He's a smart guy," says John Hodge, the screenwriter of The Beach. "In a post-modern sense he's living a young film star's life, and some of that press is expected of him. I can't speak for him, but I got the sense it's like,'Who's the joke on? If you want bad behavior then, okay, I can do that for you.' It's just like another role isn't it?"

"He gets in quite a lot of fistfights!" says Cheryl Rixon Davis, co-owner of the Playroom nightclub in Los Angeles. "But he's very friendly. Very sweet. People only mention it because it's him. He's a perky chap, a fiesty young man." Another dual role: the sweet brawler. " The fights are broken up quickly. No one wants to see Leo beaten up in their club. For him it's part of the entertainment. Part of his age.

"What about girls?"

"A different girl every half hour. He comes in with Carmen Electra. They 'make out' big- time to entertain the crowd. He's an exhibitionist like she is."

Leo occasionally visits the Playboy mansion, where the parties have been livelier since hugh Hefner started taking Viagra. At a recent Playboy Halloween party, Leo, who loves games, played volleyball. Boys against girls. On one side, Leo, Bill Maher, and Hef himself. On the other side, bunnies. The girls won.

My character is searching for something he will have an emotional response to, rather than this world of television, movies, and video games...He wants to find some sort of experience. Whether it be dangerous or not. Something real.
--Leo's notebook.

Leo's fame has left him wanting something real. Something authentic. Something pre-Titanic. "It was so unreal to me when it all happened," he says, slouching on a sofa in the Four Seasons hotel in New York. "It was almost like a joke." A part of him longs for a world untouched by movies. Especially his movies. In his new movie, Leo's character Richard doesn't want to see the beach overrun by tourists. In his new life as a megastar, Leo himself doesn't want to be overrun by fans. Richard attempts to hide the location of his island. Leo hides his identity by registering in hotels under false names, wearing caps pulled low, and staying inside a lot. But a part of him realizes that no matter how hard he tries, he will never get back to his Paradise Lost: his life before.

"People slag him off for Titanic," Boyle tells me. "But you have to try to separate him form the publicity, that crazy ballon."

"What's the nature of his appeal?"

"He has a feminine side that all great actors have access to. It's what makes women fancy him."

"There was a moment when I was at an airport somewhere," Leo tells me. " This girl grabbed my leg. It was like one of those things I had seen in a Beatles or Elvis documentary. There was this lost and vacant look in her eyes, like she was playing a role. She was this fanatical fan. I wanted to say to her, 'Look, it's just me. I'm really, truly a regular guy. You don't need to do this.' But there was nothing I could say. She wouldn't have listened anyway."

While we talked he packed his suitcase. Then our conversation was interrupted by a phone call form his dad. he seemed at ease. his only problem in the world seemed to be a cold. He took a sip of vitamin A from a wine glass. It was red, and he looked like he was drinking blood.

Otherwise he seemed neither happy nor sad. "Happiness is something that you can never control," he told me. "It's something that comes and goes. It comes in spurts. It comes however. You can never be truly, always happy." He paused."But I'm fortunate to have an interesting life."

I asked him if success was anything like the false paradise in the movie.

"You're referring to success as the island?" he asked.

"Yes."
"In some aspects it's certainly a false sense of paradise, because it doesn't answer all your problems. That's for sure. No way it does."

"What problems do you have?"

"What are my problems? Any other problem that anybody else has. Except on a much more hectic level. There's a lot of stuff. A lot of personal problems. I don't necessarily know if I want to let the world know."

Another young actor who was catapulted so high so fast was John Travolta. Both stars are surprisingly sweet (for lack of a better word). They broke through so quickly that they bypassed the constant rejections that embitter many others.

"When John Travolta suddenly discovered that he was the biggest star in the world," I said, "he went into his bedroom, shut the door, pulled down the curtains, turned off all the lights, and just sat there for a few days."

"My attitude about it was something different," Leo said fiercely. "I was not going to let it affect me. I was going to defy it. I was going to fight this. I was going to be who I was, and I was going to lead my normal life and do what I was going to do no matter what people say."

"How has that worked out?"

"The more you try to do something like that--well, the more you have to compromise."

"Have you done some growing up since Titanic" I asked.

"Certainly. There is obviously a whole adjustment process. I have learned to trust myself more. I think I take more responsibility for what I need to do. I really try to control a little more where I want things to go.
"But I would not want to become an adult in every sense of the word. Who the hell does?"

Leo has just bought a house in Hollywood, which suggests growing up. I told him about a scene a friend of mine once witnessed: Greta Garbo and Montgomery Clift having a loneliness contest. Garbo said, "I am so lonely that I only ever have one dish in my dishwasher." Clift said, "I'm so lonely that I only ever have paper plates."

Leo interjected immediately, "I'm so lonely that I don't have any dishes at all."

Lonely? Does that mean he doesn't have any girlfriend--"Nope!"--at the moment.

At 10 a.m. six of us gather outside a screening room where we are to see the current version of The Beach. I worry that if Leo doesn't show up they will cancel the screening. he arrives a few minutes late, wearing wraparound shades and carrying a huge plastic bag of vitamins, which he promptly opens.

The screening room darkens, and the rough cut of the movie begins. The opening scenes signal that this film will be dark. It is much more like The Basketball Diaries than Titanic. It is a return to his--and his father's--underground roots.

-----------minor spoilers about the movie--------

Romantic interests have been added that didn't exist in the book. Leo's character makes love to Sal (British actress Tilda Swinton) after which she tells him to shut up and go to sleep because he'll need the strength to do it again in the morning. He has a longer affair with Francoise (French actress Virginie Ledoyen). The movie has an appealing visual stream-of-consciousness look. A few frames of Apocalypse Now pop up. Later the movie screen becomes a Game Boy screen. Later still, there is Leo himself in the middle of a video game: E-spiders, and e-tigers pursue an e-Leo, who is running for his life. Clearly Leo/Richard, who fled the modern world to live ina atavistic paradise, has brought the modern world with him in his head. His mind is hard-wired modern, and he can't get away from these remembered images--even in Eden.

As he begins to realize that paradise isn't perfect, he changes. Richard begins to look, in Leo's phrase, "like a psychotic bat boy." Degenerating even more, he becomes a kind of animal. But in the last scenes of the movie, he grows up. For perhaps the first time on film, Leo looks like an adult.

--------end of spoilers about the movie---------

Watching the movie, Leo takes notes constantly. Much of the time he watches the film while folded over, leaning toward the screen, but he sits up straight when he sees a small red pup tent appear on the screen. Watching carefully, he is more convinced than ever that his character is getting off too easy. leo scribbles on his legal pad: "Tent scene--redo ADR."

After the screening I tell Leo I liked it very much.

"Really?" he asks.

He seems--for the first time--to lack confidence. He knows this movie, this career move, is risky. He realizes his character begins light and grows steadily darker. Will his Titanic fans like this very different Leo? Surely not all of them. But the movie works for me. It is about something. It says something. It is part of a line that goes from This Boy's life to Gilbert Grape to Basketball Diaries to Total Eclipse to Romeo and Juliet to The Beach. Titanic is the abberation.

"Really," I assure him. "But what was that you were writing?"

"I wanted more responsibility to be put on Richard," Leo tells me. "He is essentially the snake in the story of Adam and Eve."

In a funny way, war brings out the best in people, and paradise brings out the worst.
--Leo's notebook

Boyle announces that they have to loop the scene where Leo eats a caterpillar.

"Ugggh, that worm spun a little web in my mouth," says Leo. "I chewed it but I didn't swallow it. It took, like, eight takes."

Then a disturbing message appears on the ADR computer screen: A SERIOUS ERROR HAS OCCURRED.

"Do we have a problem? asks Leo.
"Houston has the problem this time," says the "War Office" a.k.a. Claudia Heine, the German ADR assistant.
"Mission control is down," says Mad Max.
"Maybe it's Leo's nap time," says the star. "I'll be out in the hall lying down. I'm beat"

He is exhausted from the previous night. he has been dragging around the ADR stage all day. You can hear the fatigue in his voice when he is relaxing between takes, but not when he is looping. How does he do that? Leo actually reminds me of Ronald Reagan, who could go from exhausted old man to President in a heartbeat when he needed to perform.

Leo goes out into the hall, lies down on a black leather couch, and immediately falls asleep.

Five minutes later, the ADR computer comes back to life.

"War Office, bitte sehr," says Mad Max, wake him up."

War Office (softly): "Leo...Leo...Leo..."

Leo doesn't sir.

Mad Max (slightly louder): "Leo...Leo...Leo..." He still doesn't move.

"Danny, you have to wake up Leo," says Mad Max. "He's taller than me, so I can't wake him. Get a bucket of water." Leo is almost a foot taller than Max.

Boyle goes over and and shakes Leo's leg. He wakes up.

"How long was I asleep?" asks Leo.
"Forty minutes," says Boyle.
"Really?" asks Leo.
Since he thinks he has had a good rest, he acts refreshed.

He doesn't know the truth about Vietnam, but he does know how to play the video game.
---Leo's notebook

At 8:30 p.m. they finally tackle the tent scene, which has been worrying Leo for so long. A doubting Boyle gives him room. They can alter the dialogue, because most of the speech is heard while Leo is off camera, so he doesn't have to lip-synch. But he does have to match the time that the original words took to say.

Inside the tent, Leo/Richard is trying to tell Francoise and Etienne, his two closest friends, that they must flee for their lives. But Etienne refuses to leave Christo, another member of their community, who is too sick to move.

"I think I should say something like, 'I'm afraid of what they're gonna do. I saw four people killed with my own eyes. I f---ed up really bad.'"

The part he really cares about are the last five words: his f---ed up mea culpa.

"We can't get all that in," says Boyle.

Leo does one take. Boyle is right.

9:00 p.m.: "I was horrible," says Leo. "But baby step, right?"

9:30 p.m.: "i should be more intense," says Boyle. "Remember the atmosphere inside that tent. it was fetid."

The atmosphere on the ADR stage is getting fetid too, as Leo wants to do take after take. Like many only children, he is a perfcionist.

"Brilliant, Leo," says Boyle

"Not really. In that last one he's vulnerable. I'll do a commanding one now.

10:30 p.m.: "Your voice is breaking," Boyle says. It fits the scene in a way. But is it acting, or is your throat giving out?"

"I'm on crack," says Leo.

11:00 p.m.: Boyle finally throws up his hands: We ain't gonna finish tonight.

10:00 a.m.: "Maybe it's better to just say one thing instead of three," Leo tells Boyle the next morning. "It would be interesting to have Richard say, 'Listen, I f---ed everything up reallly really bad.' I think we could take out, 'I saw them kill four people with my own eyes.'He would have already told them that."

"We'll try it," says Boyle. Leo reads the line that kept him awake last night.

Danny suggests: " Try saying, 'Listen, Etienne, I f---ed up. Four people are dead. I don't know what else they're going to do."

"Good idea," says Leo. "But maybe I should say, 'Listen, Etienne, you pussy, I can't go into details right now, but I really f---ed things up. I really, truly, completely, absolutely, surely did.' Think that'll fit?"

"Good idea," laughs Boyle. "Did you know that tonight there is going to be the first male ejaculation on British TV? It's part of a piece on porn. They showed the first erect penis a couple of weeks ago."

"News is so much better here," says Leo. Then he turns to the mike and does a perfect "Listen, Etienne, I f---ed up. Four people are dead. I don't know what else they're going to do."

"Briliant!" says Boyle.

Everybody is satisfied, even Leo. He has done it.

Mad Max says, "Thank You, Anthony."

The assistant Farr says, "Thank you, Sir Anthony."

Then the looping crew gives Leo a mock award that they call the Sir Anthony Leonardo Hopkins ADR Award. He makes a thank-you speech and acts the part of a choked-up Oscar winner. He is laughing and crying at the same time. A tear leaks from his left eye.

As I am saying my goodbyes in London, I tell Leo, "I think a lot of people are going to say you grew up in this movie."

"That was the idea," laughs producer Andrew MacDonald. "We just made this movie so the world could see Leo grow up."

THE END...