Leonardo DiCaprio may have started his career in television in 1979, but what made him an even more successful actor was his friendship and his frequent collaborations with film director Martin Scorsese.
Robert DiNiro urged the two to meet after working with DiCaprio on the film This Boy’s Life. He relayed to Scorsese via phone call one day that not only was Dicaprio really good, that Scorsese that he had to see DiCaprio’s work. Scorsese did just that. He watched a few of DiCaprio’s scenes from This Boy’s Life and saw his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert’s Grape?
The pair would meet later on the set of Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead, where they discussed the making of their first feature and the first of many collaborations together: Gangs of New York. Gangs of New York was followed by the creation of even more feature films, nine academy award wins, and a total of $1.3 billion from their first five features.
The duo will team up once again to make not just one, but three films! The first film will be a biopic about Teddy Roosevelt’s life. However, since the project is in the early stages of development, it’s not certain what parts of Roosevelt’s life this film will focus on. Maybe it will focus on Roosevelt becoming president after McKinley was killed, or maybe it will focus on him as a rough rider during the Spanish-American War. Who knows? But what we do know is Scott Bloom will write the drama, DiCaprio will star and produce, and Scorsese and Emma Tillinger Koskoff will direct.
The second film that the pair will reunite for is The Devil In the White City, a film that had been first put into development by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, but unfortunately for them, the option lapsed in 2004. In 2010, DiCaprio acquired the rights and joined this project because not only did he like the book by Erik Larson, but he was also interested in how it intertwined the true stories of Daniel H. Burnham, the architect behind the the 1893 World’s Fair and H. H. Holmes, the serial killer who would lure victims to their deaths in his murder castle. All that’s known about this film at the moment (it’s also in the early stages of development) is DiCaprio will play Holmes, who murdered between 27 and 200 people, most of them young single women.
Their third film will be another book adaptation and crime thriller called Killers of the Flower Moon. The film is about what happened to the members of the Osage Nation and how these murders became one of the FBI’s first major homicide investigations. Scorsese will once again direct and DicCaprio and DiNiro will star. Production is set to begin once Scorsese is finished filming The Irishman.
We look forward to seeing these next three collaborations and can’t wait to see what this duo will do next.