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 Leonardo DiCaprio
Spotlight By: Andrea Tuccillo
Leonardo DiCaprio is already getting Oscar buzz for his turn as an undercover cop in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But with his new film, Blood Diamond, he’s getting buzz for a different reason: the social relevance of its subject matter. Blood Diamond is set in the 1990’s during a period of civil unrest in Sierra Leone and it explores the illicit diamond trade that was used to fund the war. DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a South African mercenary whose fate collides with a Mende fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) who’s on a quest to find his son. Both men team up to find a rare diamond that may change their lives. The story of the blood diamonds taken from recent history is not a story that many people know about, and even DiCaprio himself was unfamiliar with it until he began researching his part. “I had heard whispers of it but until I got there and read the script and started to do the research I didn’t really quite understand the immense impact that the diamonds had on certainly Sierra Leone and other places in Africa,” says DiCaprio. “I heard the Kanye West song, for example, and I heard bits of it in conversation, but it wasn’t until I got to Africa and heard the first hand accounts and started to read the books and learn about it that I really learned what really had happened.” DiCaprio is not stranger to social and political causes. He is a passionate advocate for environmental issues and has never been one to keep his political opinions to himself, however he says that he wasn’t specifically seeking out movies social message. Instead, it was the powerful character and storyline which initially drew him to Blood Diamond. “It has to have this entertainment value, it has to be a good movie, it has to convey a message without the audience feeling like they’re being preached to and I really felt strongly that this script accomplished that,” explains DiCaprio. “And to me it was very representative of a huge issue in the world today of corporate responsibility and what these corporations do. Certainly Africa’s been a prime target of it, all the way to gold, rubber, all kinds of other natural resources. And here was this character that really represented somebody that was exploiting people less fortunate than him, dealing in the black market and not really being conscious of the world he lived in and I just felt it was a really powerful character.” His character required a lot of intense research in order for DiCaprio to become fully immersed in the role. He spent a total of six months in Africa picking up on the culture and dialect. One integral piece of his character was an authentic South African accent and DiCaprio was careful to make sure it got it just right. “[I spent] a lot of time with the locals, drinking beers with them, hearing a lot of their stories,” ... |
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