Yesterday we took you to the press conference for Director Martin Scorsese, now beyond the break you can read about what star Leonardo DiCaprio had to say about his role in Shutter Island, DreamWorks’ thriller arriving in theaters Friday. DiCaprio plays a U.S. marshal summoned to a remote and barren island off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from the island’s fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane.
“I was very intrigued by this screenplay,” DiCaprio told press adding that it had a Hitchcockian feel. “It was very much a throwback to the great detective films of the past, like VERTIGO. At first glance it was very much a thriller/genre piece, with twists and turns that worked on lots of different layers – but there was this discovery for us while making the movie. Once we started to unravel who this man was (the main character US Marshal Teddy Daniels) – his past, and what he had been through, and the nature of what was going on on Shutter Island – it took us, I think, to places that there was no way we could have foreseen. It got darker and darker. More emotionally intense, I think, than we ever expected. That was the real surprise for both of us (Scorsese and himself), making this movie. I think we were all surprised at the end of the day – surprised at the depth of the material.”

DiCaprio explains that SHUTTER ISLAND is more than your typical genre piece.

“This film is very much being publicized as, and is, a thriller – in a lot of ways, with you know, a surprise ending, with terrifying elements to it – very much a genre piece. But at the end of the day, it is what Martin Scorsese does best, and that is portraying something about humanity and human nature and who we are as people. That’s what makes it stand out and makes it different than just being a normal genre piece. To me, anyway.”

To keep things real, DiCaprio explains what they went through for authenticity.

“Its very difficult for me to publicize this film, because of the sheer nature of what goes on in the movie,” he explains. “In reference to shooting in a mental ward, on an island – obvious mental illness was thematic in this movie (laughs) – we were surrounded by it every day. We were around dilapidated walls of an old mental institution. We actually had somebody who was there guiding us through the history of mental institutions and the pathways of treating it, and the different forms of treatment. So, in doing that, there was a tremendous amount of research dome on the entrapments of mental illness. The suffering that people have to go through. It led me to watch a lot of different documentaries – to do a lot of research on mental illness.”

He continues, “As far as the emotional depth of my character – we both keep saying it (DiCaprio and Scorsese) – it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The more we started to peel back the onion of who this guy was, and what happened to him in the past, and try to truly understand the reason why he would be so obsessed with this specific case – once you start to uncover these things about him we realized to explain one set of circumstances, we needed to go in further with another set of circumstances. And for one thing to be believable we needed to push another storyline even further. It was really until we were on set that we discovered that.”

Lastly, DiCaprio exlains how they needed to push the boundries on set.

“If you read the screenplay, say, a specific set piece of a man doing something – of a man dealing with a traumatic incident – there’s only so much that can be written down on paper. When you actually have to go do it, and you’re there physically, we realized that we had to push certain boundaries that we didn’t think we needed to,” he explains. “There was a few weeks there that were, I have to say, some of the most hardcore filming experiences that Ive ever had. It was like reliving trauma, in a way. It was pretty intense. And I don’t say that stuff very often, because it always seems superficial when you’re talking about it in reference to movie making, because it is an art form, but – it really went to places, in unearthing who this man was, that I didn’t think it would get to.”