I got involved in the Boston sub-culture and met some of the real people that were around during the late 1980s

I got involved in the Boston sub-culture and met some of the real people that were around during the late 1980s. It was important for me to meet some of the real South Boston characters, and get to know them and hear personal accounts."As well as having an obvious bond with Scorsese, the actor credits another director for helping him to this enviable career position - the man who gave the 16-year-old DiCaprio a starring role opposite Robert De Niro. "Michael Caton-Jones was probably the most influential person in my career because he was the first director I worked with - on This Boy's Life," he explains "I was completely unfamiliar with the level of commitment you need to have to make a movie and how serious it is. You don't come into this business with the attitude that it's a lot of work You come in saying 'Oh yeah I can act. I have that talent...' But Michael was the first one to instill in me that you have to have a work ethic when you do what you do, and then it changed my life."How his life has changed.

Now DiCaprio is very much in the know and in charge of his own production company, Appian Way. He will produce his next four projects, all based on literary works: Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; Michael Gladwell's bestseller Blink; Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript and Edmund Morris' Pulitzer Prize winner The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.But despite his production company, the actor confesses that he has no aspirations to direct. "Acting is a really singular kind of thing - it's constantly focusing on yourself and you only have one person to be responsible for, and that's you," DiCaprio explains. "I look at these directors, sitting in these chairs, operating 50 different departments And they're responsible for everything. I mean, you hire certain people who are good at their job and do quality work - but to put all these elements together and then factor in how an audience is going to interpret that is something that is so beyond me right now."Besides that, I feel like I have a lot more to prove to myself as an actor.

I want to keep acting for a while and maybe someday I'll think about directing, but it just seems entirely too stressful, to be honest."'The Departed' opens nationwide on 6 October. You never quite know what you're going to get from Oliver Stone, although you can usually guarantee it will be high in emotional temperature and low in restraint. His movies could be seen as a continuous and heavily skewed history of post-war America. In Salvador (1986) he was the scourge of US intervention in South America.