DiCaprio Claims His Career Was Almost Ruined After Titanic, Scorsese Saved It
Scorsese gave the actor the career he had always dreamed of.
Despite all the fears and comparisons of the fate of James Cameron 's Titanic with the fate of the ship of the same name, the movie became a hit.
At a cost of $200 million, it grossed three times that amount in the US alone, bringing high-budget film projects back into fashion.
With an initial box office of $2.2 billion, the movie was the absolute record holder at the box office until another Cameron movie, Avatar, broke the record in 2009 with a box office of $2.9 billion.
Critics and the press put Titanic on a par with the Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind, arguing that nothing more significant had been filmed in the last 50 years.
One of main components of success was the chemistry of the acting duo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
However, the role of the romantic artist Jack Dawson played a cruel joke on DiCaprio. He started getting a lot of roles, but they were all of the same type – only romantic characters.
The actor wanted to develop his career in a completely different direction, so he refused them all and ended up literally without any work.
Salvation came from cult director Martin Scorsese. He invited DiCaprio for the role of Amsterdam Wallon in Gangs of New York. In an interview, the actor admitted that the director literally saved his career:
"He saved me. 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."
Working on Gangs of New York spawned a fruitful collaboration between DiCaprio and Scorsese – the actor also starred in the director's films The Departed, The Aviator, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street.
At the recent Cannes Film Festival, another of their collaborations, Killers of the Flower Moon, screened to critical acclaim, with viewers predicting another, second Oscar of DiCaprio's career.
The epic 3-hour real-life gangster western tells the story of a series of brutal murders of Native Americans organized in the 1920s on behalf of oil companies.
The movie will be released on October 6, 2023.
Source: Collider