Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography. Douglas Wight
all these reasons, his work has always had a cult following.
Kalvert described the book as a Catcher in the Rye but it’s the famous JD Salinger novel laced with William S. Burroughs. However described, this was an ambitious project for Kalvert’s first feature. Until that point he’d made a name for himself directing music videos for Will Smith, Cyndi Lauper and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. It was also the first screenplay to be optioned for the writer Bryan Goluboff. But that’s not the only thing that Kalvert and Goluboff had in common: both were self-confessed Carroll groupies.
‘I used to follow Jim around in the Village when I was 14 years old,’ recalled Goluboff, while Kalvert read the book at 18 and then ‘lent it to everyone I knew.’ Though Kalvert did not share Carroll’s love or talent for basketball, he confesses to dabbling in drugs, which may well have given him an insight into the writer’s psyche. Once he secured the backing for the $4 million project, his next task was to find the right actor to play Carroll.
Leonardo DiCaprio might have been just an average basketball player with only a passing resemblance to Carroll, but in many ways he was ideal for the part. By the time the funding was in place, he was the right age to play the junkie and had already built up a body of work to suggest he could perfectly capture this tortured soul.
Leo had always steered clear of drugs and hated the very idea of narcotics but when the role was put to him, it was the idea of Carroll that appealed. ‘The book was so hardcore,’ he explained, ‘and I loved the detail, how this guy made up his own world. That’s the kind of stuff I’ve been doing a lot. I like young guys who’ve really been in history, who’ve done really different stuff. Just to try to deal with this fellow who lived everything at once, you know, was so cool.’ Regarding any experimentation on his part, Leo, in an interview with freelance writer Rick Martin during the filming of Basketball Diaries, said: ‘Compared to this guy [Carroll], I’m so clean, man, it’s ridiculous. I swear I don’t do any of those drugs. It’s just acting for me. People said, “Why don’t you try it for the movie?” and that’s just so lame, you know? You do drugs like that and it gives you an excuse to do them again.’
When DiCaprio was confirmed in the leading role, Carroll was bemused. He said: ‘When they first told me it was gonna be Leo, I didn’t know who he was. If they’d said the kid from Growing Pains, I would have known because when I first saw that kid, I said, “This kid has a lot of presence.” I said, “That kid is very pretty, he’s gonna do well.”’ Aside from the shock that someone like Carroll was a regular watcher of Growing Pains, he put aside early doubts and warmed to Leo’s casting, counselling DiCaprio on how best to portray himself on film.
Carroll, who has been clean since 1975, told Leo about how he and his junkie friends used to use eyedroppers instead of syringes to take the heroin, how he never got nauseous but would sometimes sneeze for nine hours straight and even how when he was straight, he used to ‘trance out’ so much that they called him ‘Dazey’.
Remarkably, the drug addiction was not the most shocking aspect of Carroll’s diaries. Eventually he prostituted himself to feed his habit and a perverted coach preyed on the team, trying to molest them.
Playing the twisted coach (whose name was changed in the film to avoid a lawsuit) was veteran Bruno Kirby of This is Spinal Tap and City Slickers fame. Freelance writer Rick Marin caught up with Kirby when he was permitted access to the shoot in New York for The Los Angeles Times.
Asked how he felt about playing a paedophile, Kirby said: ‘I don’t really play villains, I play people with problems.’ It might of course be argued that ‘Swifty’ – the character’s name in the film – certainly has a serious problem.
Interviewing Leonardo about the pressures of playing Carroll, Marin asked if he had any qualms about portraying a heroin addict.
‘I’m just gonna do the films that I’m gonna do,’ Leonardo responded. ‘You can’t always think of public perception because if you get caught up in, “Oh, he’s a depressing actor, he just does dark films,” you get locked into one thing. You should just do everything, all types of different things.’
Asked if his research of the Jim Carroll experience has extended to his own experimentation with drugs (a persistent rumour before filming began), Leonardo said ‘no’, his voice rising in astonishment at the question.
Of course the inference surrounding Leonardo was that he’d indulged his curiosity to make his performance more real. And the accusation was poignant: it was a charge levelled at River Phoenix when researching his role in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Like The Basketball Diaries, Private Idaho was a low-budget biopic in which Phoenix played a teen hustler/heroin user. According to legend, this was his introduction to hard drugs.
Leonardo was sensitive to the constant comparisons with Phoenix. Indeed, the similarities were not hard to find. Both men had been raised by unconventional parents who’d taken full advantage of the liberated sixties, both caught the eye with their early roles, both took risks in the parts they took, and both had the boyish good looks to attract a much bigger fan-base than some of their movies might have merited. Additionally, the spectre of the tragic Phoenix loomed large over any young, sensitive actor in Hollywood.
Leonardo said: ‘People keep bringing up River with me. It’s really ridiculous to experiment with drugs for a movie. For a couple of months of work, you’re going to experiment with heroin and get hooked for life? With River, it’s sad, but I don’t know if it was the effects of the business or his life.’
Recalling the moment when he heard of Phoenix’s death, he said: ‘I was in bed when I heard. It didn’t seem real at first. I didn’t really know him, but I wanted to cry – and I still do. There are scripts that come to me, and they say, “two young guys”. In my mind, I see River and me.’
Predictably, the prostitution element of the film caused controversy. Sex and drugs permeate Carroll’s book and Scott Kalvert was keen to portray this aspect as accurately as possible. So much so that Karen Akers, a New York cabaret singer, turned down a cameo when she was told that her scene entailed whips, razor blades and cruelty to cats.
Mindful of censors, Kalvert insisted the worst had been toned down – the last thing anyone wanted in a film starring teen idols was a strong rating. Instead he insisted that, while moviegoers wouldn’t actually see Leonardo stick the needle in his vein, they would be left in no doubt as to its evil effects.
‘Toward the end of the movie, when you see some of the stuff that goes down – the prostitution, stealing from his mother – it’s not pretty. People aren’t gonna say, “Wow, I want to do drugs!” It’s sickening.’
As well as Carroll’s on-hand knowledge, the producers hired a former addict as a ‘drug consultant’ in preparation to further authenticity. In What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Leonardo had already proved he was a genius at mimicry but with the consultant’s assistance, was able to slip effortlessly into junkie mode.
He explained: ‘The voice – you go down an octave; even when you raise your voice, it’s like you got this frog in your throat. It’s not necessarily being tired and it’s not necessarily like being drunk, it’s sort of like your body becomes jelly and all your bones and everything become completely relaxed. You just feel at peace. Supposedly. I don’t know, I’ve never done it. Right?’
Playing Carroll’s friend Mickey was rapper Mark Wahlberg. If Carroll took a while to warm to DiCaprio in the lead role, he needed an age to get used to the idea of the singer known as Marky Mark now being an actor. Indeed he was said to have shuddered when told he was even reading for a part.
On set, however, Wahlberg wasn’t afraid to send up the naysayers about his presence in the movie. Impersonating Carroll perfectly, he quipped to Rick Marin: ‘The interesting thing with Mawky is he’s got such a name and I figure, wow, I can’t have him in this movie! But gettin’ back to the first time I smoked a bag, wow, I muthta been 13 years old. Leo’s great, Leo’s fabulous – he just plays bathketball a little differently.’