Leonardo Dicaprio Has One Big Regret About Working With Martin Scorsese

Look, Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have made six movies together. They clearly have a good working relationship. I threw the word “regret” in the headline, but I don’t want ya to think they were at each other’s throats or something. There wasn’t a time when Leo almost walked off one of Marty’s sets (to my knowledge). The headline may have conjured an image of conflict in your mind, which was intentional on my part, but now that you’re here, how about a nicer story?

It’s still accurate! DiCaprio recently sat down for a conversation with his longtime collaborator, and they ended up reflecting on their work together. Scorsese noted that working with the accomplished actor on The Aviator “was kind of a rebirth of the enjoyment of creating something in cinema,” for the legendary director. That gave him all the inspiration he needed to keep working together, with Killers of the Flower Moon being their most recent work.

DiCaprio, for his part, took the opportunity to reveal a regret he’s had about working with ole’ Marty: he didn’t watch him make his magic enough. “I’ve been so focused on what I’ve been doing as an actor; you make these decisions and you play these characters, you try to get into the depths of their soul as much as you possibly can,” he explained. He continued, noting, “I would have loved to be much more of a voyeur if I could have been to watch what you do behind the camera.”

That doesn’t mean DiCaprio wants to rush out and get a custom director’s chair like the folks in Avengers: Doomsday. “People have asked me if I want to direct; I’m like, I would never want to direct, I could never do anything close to what Martin Scorsese does. Why would I do that?” he said at the event. “But if I look back on anything, I would have loved to observe that process behind the camera a lot more.” That’s pretty nice! Doing so may not have changed his desire to direct, but it is interesting to wonder.

And that’s it! See? A perfectly lovely story. It’s not like at some point during the chat, Leo noted that Paul Thomas Anderson pitched him Boogie Nights in a thoroughly bizarre manner— Wait… I’m actually seeing that… that is exactly what happened. DiCaprio has explained in the past that passing on Boogie Nights was an actual regret of his, but given how PTA pitched it to him, I’m not surprised he turned it down.

Leo explained that he remembered “meeting Paul very early on in my career, when I was about to go do Titanic but we were talking about doing Boogie Nights. I was in my mother’s living room and I’ll never forget, I was on the couch and he brought a LaserDisc of Raging Bull and a video cassette of pornography. And he said, ‘I want to do the Raging Bull of pornography.’” Man, no up-and-coming directors are going to my mother’s home with Raging Bull and pornography! Though that’s … probably for the best.

Still, my favorite part is that Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull, responded to the story in real time. “Oh wow, that’s interesting,” the Goodfellas director responded. Yeah, it is, Marty! Interesting indeed.