Find out how Guillaume Canet won Leonardo DiCaprio’s friendship on the set of Danny Boyle’s “The Beach”.
Guillaume Canet is not only the director of eight feature films, he is also an actor who has worked on an equal footing with Leonardo DiCaprio. This is the story of their friendship, won the hard way on the first day of filming The Beach, by Danny Boyle, in 1999.
In the show Nice gesture, Guillaume Canet returned to his meeting with the hero of The Wolf of Wall Street for the filming of The Beach, in which he had a supporting role with Virginie Ledoyen opposite a DiCaprio already star of Titanic and Roméo + Juliette. And their first contact was… rather cold:
“He does something rotten”
20th century Fox Canet/Ledoyen
“The day before filming, we do a drum rehearsal on the beach, everyone arrives and an assistant comes up to Danny Boyle and says, ‘Look out, DiCaprio is coming,’ so it’s all there: ‘He’s coming, he’s is going to happen’ and we are with guys from Stomp and we all do percussion tests. And it’s his turn, and he does something completely rotten.”
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“And everyone applauds: ‘That’s Great! That’s Amazing!’ And I watch that… well. And in the evening, I did a lot of boxing at the time, and I trained with an Italian actor who played in the film. And I see it happening [DiCaprio] with his two bodyguards to work out. He looks at me from afar, he saw that it hadn’t made me like it.”
Retaliation the next day
20th century Fox
With DiCaprio
And the next day, when DiCaprio arrives on the set, he comes to tease Guillaume Canet by reproducing his boxer gestures and gently tapping his shoulder, until a blow which suddenly hurts the French actor a little more:
And then I turn around, and BAM! I put one in the hollow of his shoulder, where it hurts a lot in the bone. [Il a mal, il se plie en deux] and there is a kind of silence on the set. The two bodyguards who look at me like: ‘No, he’s a complete idiot,’ (…) and there [DiCaprio] stands up, dying of laughter, and straight away it was: ‘Hey, don’t you want to come tonight, we’re playing Play with friends’ and we became friends at that moment.
The American filming of Guillaume Canet
20th century Fox
Leo DiCaprio
After The Beach, Guillaume Canet will no longer work with DiCaprio, but we see him at the same period in another English-language film, The Day the Ponies Come Back, in front of the camera of American director Jerry Schatzberg.
Canet returned to the United States in 2010 to shoot Last Night, with Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington and Eva Mendes, then in 2013 to direct Blood Ties, the American remake of Blood Ties, in which he played with François Cluzet.