Leonardo DiCaprio Will Never Direct — Here’s Why
Leonardo DiCaprio is staying out of the director’s chair. In a candid chat with Martin Scorsese at TIME’s A Year in TIME event, the Oscar winner said he’ll never step behind the camera—not from disinterest, but out of reverence for the craft.
If you were waiting for the Leonardo DiCaprio directing era, go ahead and put that dream back on the shelf. He says it is not happening, and not because he is uninterested. It is because he respects the craft too much to pretend he can do what his heroes do.
Leo, at 51, on the director question: still a no
At TIME's A Year in TIME event, Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with Martin Scorsese and said, plainly, that he has no plans to direct. The Oscar winner gets asked about this constantly, but his answer has stayed the same: he does not see himself matching what Scorsese does, and he has no desire to try. It is a choice rooted in reverence for movies and for the filmmakers he grew up idolizing, especially the one sitting next to him on stage.
The one thing he wishes he did more on set
Looking back, DiCaprio said that while he goes all-in on his characters, he sometimes wishes he had hovered behind the monitor more, just to watch Scorsese in action. Some reports muddled who said what in the moment, but the gist was Leo saying he wanted to observe the process more closely, not Marty.
"I would have loved to be more of a voyeur... to watch what you do behind the camera."
How the DiCaprio-Scorsese partnership actually works
This is where the film-nerd process talk kicks in. DiCaprio explained that their collaborations are months of back-and-forth: pitching ideas, arguing over scene choices, and stress-testing every instinct until they land on the version that is often the less obvious route. It is rigorous, and clearly it works, because they have now made six films together:
- Gangs of New York
- The Aviator
- The Departed
- Shutter Island
- The Wolf of Wall Street
- Killers of the Flower Moon
A kid who set his sights on Scorsese
DiCaprio also traced this whole thing back to childhood. He grew up watching Scorsese and Robert De Niro movies, and his dad was the one who put those films in front of him and basically said: if there is anyone to aim to work with, it is Scorsese. Mission accomplished.
So no, Leo is not chasing the director's chair. He would rather keep doing what he does best: disappear into characters while partnering with the directors he reveres, and keep sharpening the work through that kind of obsessive, collaborative grind.