Virginie Ledoyen as Françoise

For DiCaprio, the project fulfilled a yearning similar to that of the character he plays: to find a part sufficiently interesting to be a suitable follow-up to his career-defining role in Titanic. True, he has played a cameo in Woody Allen´s Celebrity since putting to sea in James Cameron´s juggernaut of a hit, and he has toyed with a couple of other movies in between. But The Beach was the first project to come along that met the requirement of taking him some place he´d never been before. And, just as much to the point, it spoke to him as someone brought up as a member of the digital generation, bombarded with a tidal wave of information little of which is acquired via direct social contact. For DiCaprio, the idea of a community in which people connected with one another was almost as important as the idea of The Beach.

“I wanted my next film to be something I felt strongly about,” he says, “and The Beach and the character of Richard were the first things I felt some kind of connection with. Because Richard has been saturated with digital information, he´s never had any need to feel real emotion. So he sets off on a journey to Thailand to find something real in life. Richard´s constantly looking for a much deeper sensation.”


“In the second half, there is a darkness that has to grow out of that sensuality: it has to ripen until it decays”
              Danny Boyle

It was Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald who originally sought out DiCaprio in New York, determined to increase the film´s international feel by casting an American in the lead, alongside the French couple and the Swedes, Finns, Croatians, Germans, Belgians, Austrians, South Africans and Dutch people - plus over a thousand Thai extras - who make up the beach´s multi-lingual community.

“Leo is an amazing actor - fresh, original and bursting with ideas,” says Boyle. “His taste, though he would vehemently deny this, is quite European, so the idea of playing an extremely flawed hero appealed to him. Richard himself becomes a secret, a mystery. He cuts himself off from home and eventually even from the island community, becoming totally self-reliant - an extreme form of The Beach itself, separating himself from humanity with all its imperfections.” As for the actress who plays the crucial role of Françoise - Virginie Ledoyen, a rising French star who first appeared on screen at the age of 13 and received the César (France´s Oscar) in 1995 for her role in Benoît Jacquot´s La fille seule - it was not so much word-of-mouth as serendipity that brought her her first major English-language role. Apparently Boyle´s way of preparing for a project is to put together a collage of photographs and images that suggest the film to him. In the process of doing this for The Beach, he picked an image of a French woman which he only later discovered to be Ledoyen.

But casting her proved that the actress was a lot more than just a Françoise lookalike. “Virginie and Guillaume [Canet, who plays Étienne] are two of France´s most outstanding young actors,” says the director. “I was amazed by their ability to work outside their own country using a different language and yet play huge emotional scenes accurately and movingly. They never wilted, even when forced to listen to my struggling, beginner´s-level French!”