Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio On ‘One Battle After Another’

Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio took time out from their busy awards-season promotional schedule for a Q&A session at London’s BFI Southbank last night. Speaking to a packed house, the pair fielded soft-soap questions of the kind that voters expect for free, but don’t sit so well with a paying public audience. Nevertheless, there were some interesting snippets from behind the scenes of their recent collaboration, One Battle After Another, notably when DiCaprio traced the project’s surprisingly vague roots .

“One of the fundamentally great things about Paul is he puts a tremendous amount of thought into what he does,” DiCaprio recalled, “and I feel like he kind of stews over ideas, and obviously that later manifests itself on screen. But I remember [first] having a conversation with him years ago. He kind of casually came up to visit, me and my friend [actor] Lukas [Haas], at my place and we were just kind of talking. It wasn’t particularly about a project, but I could tell he was tuning his fork. There was a reference to maybe working together sometime in the distant future — like this ominous cloud — and I said to my friend Lukas, ‘Do you think we’re talking about a project? I have no idea.’”

DiCaprio went on to paint a vivid portrait of the process. “And then, conversations started to build,” he continued. “Paul notoriously lives in Tarzana, which if you don’t know, is kind of a section of Los Angeles that is within and without — it’s far away from Los Angeles, but it’s driving distance. So I went to visit him there, and I remember this strange restaurant that felt almost out of The Shining. Like, there were no customers, but a fully working staff, and the food was pretty decent. It seemed like it was kind of from the ’70s. And there was another conversation there, then it kind of melded its way into workshops, and then, finally, you hear that there’s a script.”

Anderson praised DiCaprio’s continued support over such a long period, thanking the actor for “ageing into the part” as a middle-aged dad and noting that his own experiences of fatherhood gave him the confidence to pursue it. “If you have a story that you work on for a long time, it can go past its shelf life or you can miss its moment or misjudge it,” he said. “But at its best, it cooks and the ingredients fall in. And I feel that way [about One Battle After Another]. I mean feels, the audiences have told us they feel that way too, but I felt that way in making this film. Like, ‘Holy shit, we really got lucky and got this one right,’ in terms of the people that came together to tell this story.”

DiCaprio picked up on Anderson’s theme of happy accidents, especially when asked to describe his process in terms of finding his character, a former radical now living underground. “I find it progressively more and more difficult to talk about an actor’s process because I do think it is a combination of so many different things,” he said, “and I do think it’s because the [long] pre-production process that we had the ability to go to these real locations, as well as the endless discussions that Paul and I had about who this character was, getting to go up to Northern California and experience what people describe as ‘a hip neck’, which is a hippie that’s a redneck, a combination of both political parties at the same time. I read a book called Days of Rage [by Bryan Burrough, 2016], which is all about revolutionaries and their assimilation into the real world and how broken they were and haunted by memories and guilt, all that stuff.”

“But at the end of the day,” DiCaprio decided, “I think it has a lot to do with being able to work with other actors that bring one singular idea, and I think we gave Paul a cacophony — a multitude — of different ideas to choose from, and one of his unique God-given gifts is his ability to zone in on that one great idea and expand it. There’s also an incredible family spirit that’s on his set, where there’s a comfort level to go to certain places as an actor that I think is incredibly important.”