Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography. Douglas Wight
Stone was starring as Ellen, a woman who rides into Redemption to settle an old score. An expert shot, she soon finds herself pulled into the high-stakes shooting tournament staged by the town’s kingpin, Herod (Hackman), in which gunslingers put their lives on the line for money and fame.
It was a measure of Sharon Stone’s pulling power at the time that TriStar, who had installed her as co-producer on the project, allowed Stone to call the shots on the film’s director and co-stars.
‘They sent me an approved director list,’ Stone recalls. ‘I sent them back my list. It had one name – Sam Raimi – who at the time was still probably best known for The Evil Dead.’
Raimi was shocked when he got a message that Stone had called. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t believe it. I wanted to call her back and ask if she was sure she got the right guy. But I didn’t – I played along as if she did get the right guy.’
When he was ‘summoned’ to meet Stone at a hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, Raimi was terrified at the prospect of meeting the sex siren. ‘I felt like Dorothy going to meet the Wizard,’ he reveals. ‘I wasn’t sure what to dress like or whether to put on cologne, I just knew I wanted to act real smart.’
Stone was charmed, however. ‘He walked in with that Beatles’ suit and it was like he was 14 years old,’ she recalls. ‘But his immaturity is his gift – he makes everybody around him act like they’re 14.’
Describing the manic competitiveness dominating the film, Stone added: ‘It’s a comedy, it’s an action-thriller, it’s a cult movie. I call it Twilight Zone: The Western.’
Also joining the cast was an unknown Kiwi actor called Russell Crowe, who originally auditioned for a different role before Stone asked him to try for the lead male. ‘When I saw Romper Stomper [a low-budget Australian film], I thought Russell was not only charismatic, attractive and talented but also fearless,’ she said. ‘And I find fearlessness very attractive – I was convinced I wouldn’t scare him.’
Raimi also found Crowe to be ‘bold and challenging. He reminds me of what we imagine the American cowboy to have been like.’ For his part, Crowe remarked that Raimi was ‘sort of like the fourth Stooge.’
Regarding Leonardo, Crowe remained largely silent until years later, when he had the opportunity to appear once again alongside the actor in Body of Lies (2008). Recalling his previous work with the teenage Leo, Crowe – who by then had cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s bad boys – quipped: ‘The last time I worked with him was in a Western called The Quick and the Dead. I tell people he was 12, but actually, I think he was 18. Miss Sharon Stone was the big star, so people kept asking who we were.’
Back in 1994, Stone was indeed the star and her imprint was certainly all over this movie. Describing her work in packaging the film, she painted herself as a fast-draw producer: ‘Normally, I’m patient, but sometimes when time’s running short I get aggressive,’ she admitted. ‘I was aggressive in making sure we did our best to get Gene Hackman. They had me and they had to pay me, and they weren’t keen on paying anyone else.’
This was also true when it came to securing Leonardo’s services. Stone was adamant she wanted Hollywood’s hottest young talent but movie bosses were reluctant to fund her choice. Out of desperation she offered to pay half his salary from her own pocket.
‘I wanted him bad and we’d topped out financially,’ she explained before adding, ‘He’s so good, I would have carried the boy on my back to the set if that was necessary! He will be one of the finest actors we have seen in decades. His talent, his gift, is so extraordinary.’
Despite his playing-hard-to-get act, Leo was also apparently nervous about coming face-to-face with his blonde bombshell co-producer. He joined up with the cast and crew in Mescal, Arizona, where shooting was already taking place in the Western set built for Lee Marvin’s 1970 flick, Monte Walsh (and subsequently used in over 50 other films).
Pals of Leo’s reveal the flustered teenager fumbled his lines time and again when Stone first came on set. One said: ‘Leo admitted to me he’d been heavily attracted to her. He reckoned she played along with it by flirting with him whenever they were in a scene together.’
The star told his friend: ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was really weird because she was nearly old enough to be my mum. I think she’s really cool. She let me think we could be real good friends. She was brilliant.’
Publicly, though, he told a different story. ‘I expected her to be this big sex vixen, seducing everyone,’ he said. ‘But she was sweet.’
Kissing his co-star, however, was another matter. He revealed: ‘To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that great. She grabbed me by the back of my hair and pushed her lips on mine and then threw my head away. It didn’t feel like a real kiss.’
Indeed he was more enamoured with the guns that he got to use during filming for the producers provided him with antique Colt pistols. ‘It’s very bad,’ he noted, ‘very bad, if I drop one of them.’
Not all the cast were equipped with the original guns, though. Thell Reed was the man hired as gun coach and weapons master to the stars and worked with the cast through three months of training. He also had to age Crowe’s Colt 1851 Navy Revolver and the other guns used to make them look authentic and employed a rather basic trick. ‘I took them out by my swimming pool and dipped them in chlorine water to let them rust,’ he explained. ‘They looked rusty and old, but were brand new guns.’ Such detail, including the nickel plating and ivory handles on Ellen’s Colt Peacemakers, was accurate to the time period.
When Stone finally got to see the young Leonardo up close she was suitably impressed, describing him as ‘the most gifted young actor I have ever seen – richly, deeply, profoundly eloquent in his emotional accessibility and delivery.’
Sam Raimi was also quick to lavish praise on Leo’s shoulders. ‘He is the finest actor of his generation,’ he gushed.
One scene that did stretch Leonardo’s talents was his first death scene. The poignant moment came when he died at the hands of Hackman’s Herod – the one man whose approval he would do anything to win. Dying on screen was a new concept for DiCaprio but it was to become something for which he’d grow rather famous.
As filming went on, Stone had her more than enough troubles to deal with. Several times the production had to be halted because of bad weather. Then, from the very first showing of dailies – the raw, unedited footage – some TriStar executives expressed displeasure at seeing Stone in a man’s role. Instead they preferred her to dress in a traditional style, more befitting women of the age.
‘Some people who shall remain nameless wanted me to wear a dress to ride into town,’ Stone recalled. ‘I thought, “Oh yeah, the gunslinger’s gonna ride into town sidesaddle!”’ Though she might have joked later on, the suggestion made her ‘just so darn mad!’ And she added: ‘There were some people who shall also remain nameless, who were concerned that there really weren’t a lot of places for me to be naked in this movie. But there are a lot of ways to be sexy other than flouncing around in your birthday suit. This character’s not trying to run around in the nude so she can get control over somebody.’
As if that wasn’t bad enough, when filming finally wrapped she was hit with the news that TriStar had decided to delay its release from summer or autumn 1994 until the following year. The studio had concerns over the over-saturation of Westerns, as well as the overexposure of Stone and co-star Hackman. Certainly, there had been a glut of Westerns in the preceding years, including Tombstone, Bad Girls, Maverick and Wyatt Earp.
TriStar President Marc Platt said that a late September or early October release had only been tentatively planned at the beginning of the year, while his preference was to release it in the March. ‘It was the filmmakers who really wanted the film out in the summer,’ he explained.
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