Leonardo DiCaprio sits in a room on the seventh floor of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel and picks up the phone.
“Hello,” he says, and then asks: “Is Kenny on the line?”
“I’m here, too,” answers a voice, presumably Kenny’s.
Kenny is Kenny Ausubel, a founder of Bioneers, an organization that brings together experts to focus on environmental issues.
“He’s been a huge adviser for us on this movie,” DiCaprio says by way of introduction. “He brought us into contact with many of the experts in the film.”
The film DiCaprio speaks of is the pro-green documentary “The 11th Hour,” written and directed by sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners.
DiCaprio produced the film, which opens Friday. The three-time Oscar nominee also acts as narrator, providing a measured voice-over, but also showing up onscreen to augment a film gladly given over to an intriguing mix of scientists, policymakers, ecological entrepreneurs and community activists. Among the movie’s more than 50 interviewees are cosmologist Stephen Hawking, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and Nobel Prize laureate Wangari Maathai.
It’s unusual to have an unplanned guest listen in on an interview. But this tag team – and DiCaprio’s willingness to do an interview – is another sign of just how seriously one of the world’s most famous actors takes his role of environmental activist.
No newcomer to environment
And if you’re thinking of discounting DiCaprio’s quiet zeal as that of a newbie, consider:
The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the environmental organization he founded, will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year. For years he has been actively involved with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Global Green. In 2000 he interviewed President Bill Clinton for an ABC Earth Day special. At this year’s Oscar telecast he stood on the podium with climate crisis crusader Al Gore. “So Mr. Gore,” he began, “is there anything you might want to announce?”
“I felt in general a disconnect between modern civilization and the planet,” DiCaprio says about his green sojourn. “Things were moving so fast that I wanted to become more proactive in the environmental movement.”
The Los Angeles-born DiCaprio traces this interest back to childhood, recalling “watching documentaries and seeing the clear-cutting of rain forests and the loss of habitats.”
Martin Scorsese once described the actor as being committed to “an unrelenting process of probing and asking questions and trying things out.”
And DiCaprio seems to be putting that same obsessive acting verve into his environmental work.
“I wanted to become more proactive, specifically on the issue of global warming,” he says. “And this led to the melding of two worlds for me. That’s why we ultimately made this documentary – to give people like Kenny, who’ve devoted their lives to an issue, the opportunity to speak openly and freely, uninterrupted, about issues.”
“The 11th Hour” is a compelling example of an actor speaking to and for his generation.
“We think that this generation is the one that has really been galvanized by this issue,” he says.
Much like the youths who propelled the civil rights and peace movements of the late ’50s into the ’60s, DiCaprio believes his is rising to the challenges of climate crisis.
“This is what we’re going to have to work on,” he says. “We’re the ones who’re going to inherit this world. And our children are the ones who are going to have to inherit the world.”
Fighting icebergs to saving them
There is fine irony in the notion that the guy who played Jack Dawson and inspired Leomania took the goodwill and the money that flowed after James Cameron’s epic and poured it into his activism. After all, “Titanic” tells the story of a catastrophic run-in between humans and nature. And, were the world merely a funny place – not one in crisis – we’d joke that our contribution to greenhouse gases is our revenge on those durn icebergs.
Of course, DiCaprio isn’t alone in responding to the call of protecting the wild.
Online, you’ll find a video clip featuring Matt Damon dressed as a gas pump. “Come on, Congress. Come on, big oil. Mandate cleaner cars and cleaner fuel,” he goads. “A little bit of corn and a pinch of can-do attitude is all it takes.” Ben Affleck has done a similar ethanol spot.
Queen Latifah lent her rich, urban inflections to “Arctic Tale,” Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson’s story of a polar bear cub and a walrus pup.
In pitch-meeting parlance, “The 11th Hour” could be characterized as “The Inconvenient Truth” meets “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.” Like that 1982 documentary about potential environmental catastrophe, this film juxtaposes footage to challenge and chastise, though, the filmmakers hope, not too much the latter.
“It always came down to the narrative and what was transformational for the audience and what wasn’t,” says DiCaprio, describing the process of distilling hundreds of hours of footage into a swift 90-minute work. “What’s going to make people feel like they want to change. What’s going to make them feel judged.”
DiCaprio is modest about his role as a big star in a modest documentary.
“My only hope is that I can bring a certain audience to this movie that otherwise wouldn’t give time to some of these people who have devoted their lives to this issue. It’s that plain and simple.”
He pauses. “And that comes from a good place at the end of the day.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or at lkennedy@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it cited an incorrect name for the organization with which actor Leonard DeCaprio is affiliated. The correct name is the Natural Resources Defense Council.
