The One Battle After Another boys thrilled London fans Wednesday night at an exclusive in conversation event at BFI Southbank.
Paul Thomas Anderson and his star, Leonardo DiCaprio (a.k.a Bob Ferguson), were hosted by Scottish presenter Edith Bowman to talk about the wild reaction to their action thriller —the Warner Bros. feature has so far grossed over $200 million —and dive into how it was made. Among other topics, Anderson touched on how important it was finding Chase Infiniti in the search for Willa, and gushed about DiCaprio’s acting choices.
“The reaction has been incredible from people,” began the Titanic and Wolf of Wall Street star. “Not just from my friends and family, but people coming up to me and interacting with me about what the film meant to them. I don’t know. It’s been a really special moment making this film and seeing people’s feelings about what it meant to them.”
One moment in particular that had the audience chuckling was when Anderson revealed that production was paused to wait for their sensei, Benicio del Toro. “We had to call a timeout because Benicio had to go off and do Wes Anderson’s [The Phoenecian Scheme],” said the Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread director. “So we really had a decision to make there. Normally, in normal situations, you go, ‘Oh, shit, we lost Benicio.’ But we really said there’s no possible way we can do this without him. We’ll do something that we’re going to have to figure out how to do financially and creatively.”
“We took a break shooting for two and a half months, and picked back up again. And luckily, we were able to make that work, because everybody on the crew said, ‘Oh yeah, let’s wait for Benicio,” said Anderson. “I can’t imagine not waiting for Benicio.”
The anecdote came up when the filmmaker was asked what had changed that meant he finally felt it was the right time to make this movie. “Chase, first of all,” he also said. “Leo aging into the part, honestly. Me aging into being able to tell the story properly, being a father and having children… [And] just confidence to tell the story.”
The men took turns gushing about the film’s female leads, including Teyana Taylor, who Anderson described as “a stick of dynamite” but also “a real softy.” When they got onto antagonist Lockjaw, portrayed by Sean Penn, DiCaprio chimed in: “He really brought elements to it that a lot of other actors… wouldn’t have made that choice.”
“We talked a lot about who Lockjaw was going to be,” said DiCaprio. “And then when Paul decided on Sean, what was so amazing to see it up on film —because I hadn’t seen a lot of it, I was off doing my own stuff —was the fragility that he brought to what would otherwise be an obvious choice [from] maybe some other actors to make him purely menacing.”
DiCaprio continued about Penn’s interpretation of Lockjaw: “I just thought he was so incredibly pathetic and almost sympathetic at times. Sitting there, looking at his desk [and he’s] gone on this whole journey, and you have this generic IKEA desk, this window view of—is it Dallas? I don’t know. Sitting there and looking in that moment going, ‘I’ve arrived,’ as if he’s in the Shangri-La… How pathetic he was.”
Anderson concurred: “It’s a testament to Sean that from time to time, there would be weird subsets of the crew that would say: ‘I hate to admit this, but I’m Team Lockjaw!’”
After discussing the brilliance of Jonny Greenwood’s score, Anderson and DiCaprio were also asked by Bowman about the film’s thrilling car chase on the iconic, hilly stretch of desert road. “I remember seeing those roads, and I was awestruck,” said DiCaprio. “They made it feels like you’re on a roller coaster ride. I think Regina [King] put it best, she said, ‘I’ve never been more tense in a car chase scene with three cars chasing each other down a straight road,’” he laughed. “It was money.”
Anderson said, while a nightmare to film on, the road itself is a testament to “getting in the car and driving around looking for locations, rather than just looking at a book.” He added: “That stuff’s usually been shot before, and what you’re crossing your fingers’s will happen is something like coming across that river of hills. My imagination isn’t good enough to come up with something like that,” he said. “I would [have] just put everybody on flat roads and think, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to have a car chase.’ But you kind of hit the ceiling and it requires getting out into the world.”
One Battle After Another is already generating intense awards buzz, with Anderson and DiCaprio among the frontrunners on The Hollywood Reporter‘s Oscars predictions via the Feinberg Forecast here.