Inside the Powerful Realism of ‘One Battle After Another’
Says star Leonardo DiCaprio, ‘It’s just a testament to how much meticulous thought Paul puts into everything’
This conversation between Ankler Media awards editor Katey Rich and One Battle After Another cast members Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, and casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, is presented by Warner Bros. Pictures.
When Paul Thomas Anderson first asks if you want to make a movie with him, “It’s sort of mystical,” says Leonardo DiCaprio. In his case, in particular, it involved meeting Anderson “in Tarzana at this strange sort of place, this restaurant that looked like it was out of The Shining.” More conversations followed months later, but all the while, DiCaprio was left thinking, “Is there an actual movie?”
The answer, of course, was yes, and the movie was One Battle After Another, now nominated for 13 Academy Awards. DiCaprio, a best actor nominee, recently joined Ankler Media awards editor Katey Rich for a conversation live at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Feb. 10, alongside his co-stars Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, as well as the film’s casting director Cassandra Kulukundis. During the wide-ranging interview (watch it above), the actors explained how the film found them and how they all came together to create the unconventional family at its center.
“Paul has been thinking about this project for almost 20 years, putting the pieces together,” DiCaprio continues. “Oftentimes with movies that I love that resonate — and especially a film like this that really is so pertinent to what’s going on in the world around us right now — you just appreciate the thought that’s put into these projects. This is a film with so many different characters, but each of them has an afterlife beyond the celluloid. You feel that they exist. It’s just a testament to how much meticulous thought Paul puts into everything.”
Kulukundis, who has cast every Anderson film since Magnolia and is always the first person to read his new scripts, spent years searching for a young actress who could play the daughter of DiCaprio and Taylor’s characters, a pair of revolutionaries who go their separate ways — and on the run — when their child is an infant. The 25-year-old Infiniti turned out to be the right choice, making her film debut in One Battle After Another following a months-long, unconventional audition process alongside DiCaprio. “Even before we started filming, I felt a strong sense of support from everybody who’s on the stage and who’s not on stage, the entire cast and crew,” Infiniti says. “I really took every opportunity to just observe, because I was like, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Taylor, meanwhile, approached playing the ferocious Perfidia Beverly Hills like someone going into battle. “When I sign on to do any project, I instantly become a warrior,” she says. “I instantly put on my jersey, and I understand that we’re all here to make a great project and a great movie. Most importantly, I love to make my peers proud. I love to make my family proud. I’m always just willing and ready to play ball.”
Kulukundis, now among the five casting directors nominated for the first-ever Oscar for casting, knew that Taylor and Infiniti could be a convincing mother and daughter, even though they never shared the screen together.
“I call myself almost a stalker,” Kulukundis says of her casting process. “If you’ve done anything, I’ve seen it, and I just have an instinct at some point.” In One Battle After Another, she points to an early scene between Taylor and DiCaprio and to Taylor’s silent reaction, similar to the one Infiniti later has in the film.
“I see the mother-daughter right there,” Kulukundis continues. “It’s like I’ve studied them so much that I knew that was going to cross over at some point. I mean, this is 100 percent believable genetics.”
The family at the center of One Battle After Another is key to the film’s deep emotional resonance, but the ensemble is also astonishingly vast — from Oscar nominees Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn in key supporting roles to dozens of actors with a single line or no lines at all, each of them contributing to the texture of Anderson’s world. Casting those roles, especially when filming in locations across California, was no simple process.
“We really did go for the best person for the role,” Kulukundis explains, noting that this is how she’s always worked with Anderson. “We started doing that really early on in our history. I feel like this time, for whatever reason, it all came together really, really nicely. I like to laugh — it took us 10 movies, but I think we’ve figured it out now.”
Even after decades as a movie star, DiCaprio says he found a unique thrill in working with many of the non-actors who rounded out the One Battle cast. “You kind of become a leader with them,” DiCaprio says. “You try to make them explain what the scene is, and it becomes clearer to you. We’re working with real corrections officers, real nurses. You start to understand what they would and wouldn’t do, most importantly, for their job. It just brings this almost docudrama sort of life to it that just feels real. Paul loves the idea of spontaneity and the fact that anything could happen in any given moment. He loves that energy, which is exciting and thrilling. It’s an adrenaline rush.”