DiCaprio enjoying role as Scorsese's new protégé

Shutter Island, a storm-tossed gothic noir set in a prison for the criminally insane, marks the fourth collaboration between Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese. That's well shy of the nine films Scorsese made with Robert De Niro through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but clearly DiCaprio and Scorsese have something going on - something that DiCaprio can, in fact, thank De Niro for.

"I met Marty at a party back when I was in my early 20s," remembers DiCaprio, who's 35 now and, well, yes, one of the biggest movie stars in the world. "And he actually knew who I was, that was the surprise to me. I couldn't believe it!"

Scorsese had heard of DiCaprio - who started off on TV, doing commercials (Matchbox cars was his first) and the family sitcom Growing Pains - because the director had been talking to De Niro about his experience on This Boy's Life. In the 1992 film, based on the Tobias Wolff memoir, De Niro played an abusive stepfather to DiCaprio's moody teen rebel. The Taxi Driver and Raging Bull star had glowing words to offer Scorsese about this kid. And Scorsese remembered.

And then, years later, Scorsese cast DiCaprio as an Irish-American upstart bent on vengeance in mid-19th century Manhattan in Gangs of New York. The film came out in 2002, and each of Scorsese's subsequent nondocumentary features - The Aviator, The Departed, and now Shutter Island - has boasted DiCaprio front and center.

And probably never more front and center than in Shutter Island, adapted from the pulp novel by Dennis Lehane. "Pull yourself together, Teddy," DiCaprio tells himself at one point in the roiling melodrama, gazing at his mirror image, in the role of a G-man looking for an escaped killer in an eerie house of detention. A house of detention that has a strange hold on his soul.

"There's a lot more to his journey than there first appears to be," DiCaprio says about federal marshal Teddy Daniels, understating the case considerably. "There's so much going on with Teddy, simultaneously, on so many levels, that it's difficult, very difficult, to talk about." Suffice to say that DiCaprio gets to run a gamut of emotions - from gumshoe cool to anguished hysteria - while Scorsese has a wild time referencing Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Tourneur classics, and getting tricky, double-edged performances out of a cast that includes Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, and Michelle Williams. Shutter Island opens in theaters on Friday.

DiCaprio, on the phone from Los Angeles the other day, reports that Scorsese screened several vintage films for cast and crew as examples of what the director was angling for, thematically, aesthetically.

"We looked at Vertigo," DiCaprio says, "because Jimmy Stewart does such an amazing job with playing this obsession that you think, at first glance, is specifically for the case - and then you find out that there's a whole set of other circumstances.

"And there are a few films that Scorsese actually screened for me, including Laura and Out of the Past, where he wanted me to really capture that period-detective sort of thing, a detective overly obsessed with the case. And the idea of two narratives working simultaneously, and how to capture that, because it was a balancing act throughout the whole course of this movie. We [shot] scenes multiple ways, and it was really up to him and [editor] Thelma Schoonmaker in the editing room, to determine to what degree they wanted to punch up Teddy's obsession with finding out who the killer was on the island."

DiCaprio says that having Scorsese as his own sort of personal film-studies professor was "absolutely cool."

He adds: "It's amazing not just as a learning experience, but to be able to watch an artist who's at the top of their game access films as if they were his own dreams. . . . Because what Marty does before he starts to envision the movie that he wants to create, is he has this backlog, this database of film history in his mind. . . . And he rewatches these movies, and he sometimes watches them with the cinematographer, or the art director, or the actors, and he says, 'You see! This is exactly what I'm talking about,' and he talks during the screenings, talks out loud during the screenings!

"He's accessing his own visions of cinema's past to paint his canvas. It's exciting."

For writer Lehane, who has now had three of his books - Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island - adapted for the screen, DiCaprio came across as earnest and serious, seeking clues to his character through the man who first dreamed up Teddy Daniels.

"We had a very similar conversation to the ones I used to have with Sean Penn on Mystic River," Lehane recalls about his talks with DiCaprio on a couple of visits two years ago to the Shutter Island set in Medfield, Mass. "Both men approach acting from the inside out. . . . They're all the way inside the character, and they're trying to flesh the guy out from the inside. And they want to know a lot in terms of thought processes that he might be going through, past history that doesn't show up in the book, things like that. And they're great questioners, Leo and Sean."

Lehane says that watching DiCaprio and Scorsese consult between takes was like watching a "private, intimate" exchange.

"Marty will go and he'll speak to Leo very closely," he says. "You get the feeling that this is a relationship of utmost patience and acceptance. There's a real warmth that comes out of it. I'm only speaking of that having observed it from a distance, but it was cool to watch."

Brad Fischer, the producer who first brought the Shutter Island property to Scorsese's attention, says there are similarities between the Scorsese-DiCaprio and Scorsese-De Niro relationships.

"There was an evolution that occurred over the course of De Niro's career through his films with Marty, and I think the same thing is taking place now with Leo," says Fischer, who was on set through most of Shutter Island's production. "I think he gets better and better every time I see him. . . . That work, the exploration of character and externalizing the internal, is an exercise that really takes place over the course of many films, and some of Leo's best work ever is in this movie. . . .

"But I think you find, when you talk about a collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor, that it's always evolving. I don't think it begins and ends with any one movie. We have a lot more to look forward to."

DiCaprio is busy with his own production company, Appian Way (projects include a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, a Robert Ludlum thriller, a biopic about 007 creator Ian Fleming, and an Enron drama). So any talk of future team-ups with Scorsese - among them Frank Sinatra and Teddy Roosevelt biopics - is just "an IMDB thing," as in the famously inaccurate Internet Movie Database.

"Right now there is no plan for a fifth [collaboration], but there are things in development," he offers. "It's always like this crapshoot, trying to find well-written material. That's the hardest part of developing movies, just getting a good script."

DiCaprio will next be seen in Inception, the sci-fi thriller from Memento and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, set for a July release. He plays a CEO caught up in potentially world-changing intrigue, opposite the likes of Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. DiCaprio says that "by the nature of the subject matter and the way Chris Nolan works, I've been very hush about it. But it is essentially a movie about accessing one's dreams, and a group of people that are able to infiltrate corporate entities and people's minds to recover information, and then manipulate their real life.

"And that's about the extent of what I can say, because there are multiple varying plots . . . not plots . . . but states of existence. It's going to be interesting."

DiCaprio has three Oscar nominations on his resumé - for supporting actor, as the mentally challenged kid in 1994's What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and for lead performances as Howard Hughes in The Aviator and as an Afrikaner adventurer in Blood Diamond. He says he doesn't harbor any disappointment that the little picture he starred in opposite Kate Winslet - 1997's Titanic - has now been knocked off its perch at the top of the box-office charts. Dislodged by the same director, James Cameron, and his immersive sci-fantasy epic, Avatar.

"The truth of the matter is that I thought Avatar was fantastic, and I hope they keep going and going and going," he says. "It's been cool watching this movie gain the momentum that it has. Godspeed to them. I want them to have all the success in the world."

And, anyway, Scorsese isn't nominated for anything this year.