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Leonardo DiCaprio
Golden boy goes green

by Ellie Genower

Monday, March 17, 2008

Leonardo DiCaprio posing for photographers during the photocall for The 11th Hour during the 60th annual Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France.

Leonardo DiCaprio explains why he wanted to make his own environmental
documentary. In The 11th Hour, Leo, who narrates, appears in and produced the film, says we all must take personal responsibility for the planet.

You're a Hollywood heart-throb with the world at your feet, a model on your arm and Oscar nominations in your bag. So what on Earth do you have to be worried about? Well, the Earth actually.

Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio is turning his attention to ice that
melts and insists this is not about jumping on any trendy bandwagon.

"This documentary is something that I have been trying to do for many years," he says. "Ever since I started environmental work, I've wanted to do a documentary that really encompasses every major environmental issue in the world and speaks to all the greatest experts."

And The 11th Hour certainly goes some way to achieving that, talking to scientist Stephen Hawking and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, as it explores man's impact on the planet, and more importantly, what we can do to change it.

Leonardo DiCaprio while filming The 11th Hour

Going green - changing, not only the way we live, but what we buy and how we entertain ourselves - has been of increasing concern to Leo, one of the documentary's producers, as well as its narrator.

"I was tired of watching news programs and listening to
environmentalists or scientists that have devoted their lives to an
issue like global warming, having to sit there and get wrangled into
some sort of argument about whether this is really happening or not," says the 33-year-old star.

"We wanted to make a homemade movie where we got the greatest minds possible all speaking uninterrupted without any corporate backing or studio involvement from the onset."

Documentary film in Hollywood is on the rise, with the success of
Michael Moore films like Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko, and of course that of former president hopeful Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth hit the headlines two years ago - and had a profound impact on the already environmentally conscious Leo.

"There is tremendous capability in the world of documentary. I look at films like Fahrenheit 911 and numerous other films that have changed the political climate. There is a tremendous role to be played in that respect. The message has been put out there in a much more profound way specifically because of Al Gore's movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio while filming The 11th Hour

"If it weren't for An Inconvenient Truth and him having put the science of global warming and its impact on a global scale, a movie like this wouldn't be possible," he admits.

"This film has a broader spectrum in the sense that we talk about
personal responsibility, and about the role of governments and
corporations along with solutions as well. It really highlights the fact that we have solutions out there today that can reduce the human footprint by 90%.

"It's about implementing these things into our daily lives," he says.

So just how did The Departed actor become so climate conscious?

"About ten years ago, Al Gore explained to me what climate change and global warming was, the science behind that and the decades of research he'd done on the subject," adds Leo.

"It really propelled me to want to be more vocal about the issue,
because it seemed to me, that the change of weather that we'd been
having, the flooding, the hurricanes, all these things, there wasn't
enough of a connection being made in the mainstream media."

But it goes deeper than that, Leo confesses he became concerned about the world around him at a young age.

"I had a deep respect for nature, and I was a little biologist when I
was younger," he says, smiling.

Nowadays he drives a hybrid car, has solar panels on his house, uses
filtered water and buys organic produce. "I built my house green but
that isn't necessarily feasible for everyone out there", he concedes.

Leonardo DiCaprio while filming The 11th Hour

His passion for the environment is obviously a big part of his life, but
Leo insists he won't be joining Arnold Schwarzenegger in turning to politics: "I have no political aspirations whatsoever."

However, he realises it's his star appeal which will entice people into
cinemas to see a low budget movie about global warming.

"If I wasn't an actor, I don't think a film like this would be possible
in the same sense," he admits.

"I'm very committed to being an environmentalist, but one hand sort of feeds the other here. I know that with the amount of people that have seen past works of mine, the younger generation will possibly go to see this movie because I'm in it, and that's the role that I've played in this film.

"Ultimately I'm going to continue to be an actor and hopefully do more work like this."

And he's prepared to campaign on green issues for the long haul,
starting with his own, environmentally suspect, country.

"We need to be the ones to set an example for the rest of the world," he says. "We are the leading consumers, the biggest producers of waste around the world and unless we're the ones to set an example for less industrialised countries, how is the rest of the world going to follow? If you'd ask any environmentalist about George Bush's policies on the environment, he gets close to an F.

"It's interesting because, all this inevitably boils down to a publicity
game for the planet and what's good for the place we live in," he
continues.

Leonardo DiCaprio arrives for the European premiere of Blood Diamond at the Odeon Leicester Square in central London

"There's an important statement in the movie. Not only do we have to vote at the voting booth but we have to be very conscious about what we buy. We're voting every time we pay for something and we're advocating the way that company does business, whether they're good to the environment or whether they're not.

"It would be wonderful to live in a world where we wouldn't have to
think about these things but it's a market driven society."

However much he hopes his film will spur people on to change the way they live, Leo realises that he has no control over what audiences will like, whether it's a multi-million pound movie or a small independent environmental film.

"The more I've acted, I've realised that I have a) no control of, and b)
no way of really quite understanding how people react to anything I do, or any movie I do," he says.

"If every actor and every studio had that magic formula we'd all be
making critically acclaimed, multi-billion dollar hits every time we do a movie.

"There's so many intangible forces that come into play when making a film, I have no idea what the public will ultimately think of something that I do, let alone critics. It's something that continues to mystify all of us."

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