Courtney Howard // Film Critic
At the heart of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER lies a funny, captivating and poignant tale about a bathrobe-bedecked burn-out and his responsible-yet-rebellious teenage daughter, occasionally butting heads and battling to reunite with each other. It’s a coming-of-age for both Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Willa Ferguson (Chase Infinity), who’ve been living off-the-grid for 16 years due to Bob’s checkered past as a part of the revolutionary group the French 75. Their tenuous turned tender bond comes courtesy of two actors in their prime – one as an Oscar-winner and the other as a newcomer delivering a revelatory, star-making performance.
DiCaprio has wanted to work with the auteur for decades when the role came across the actor’s path. It was the character’s humanity that instantly drew him to the part, he told press at the film’s recent press conference in Los Angeles.
“You have an incredibly flawed protagonist and the unexpected choices. I just love the premise of somebody that you think is going to be this hero, that’s able to resurrect and use the tools from his revolutionary past to become the ultimate hero. But his real heroism is the idea that he just keeps relentlessly moving forward to protect his daughter.”
He continued,
“I love the idea that you also expect that this character’s going to use massive espionage skills, but he cannot remember the password. It’s just a brilliant setup for what is ultimately a very flawed hero dynamic that [Paul Thomas Anderson] created.”
That relationship dynamic DiCaprio crafted with star-on-the-rise Infiniti begun with the script.
“I love this sort of slice of life where you find Bob and Willa at the beginning of this movie. It’s not this utopian happy villager set up. It’s a father disconnecting with his daughter. She’s of a different generation, he’s completely disconnected from her. He’s a disaster of a father, and then all of a sudden he’s put into this wild circumstance to try to save her. And it’s just a beautiful bit of writing.”
The idea of this was workshopped early on during DiCaprio’s chemistry read with Infiniti, he explained to me when asking about the key that unlocked their understanding.
“We knew that the central heart and the core of the film was Willa’s journey. This film kind of ride or dies on her performance. Needless to say, she did a phenomenal job, but there were these meetings and Paul doesn’t really do an audition process. You have dinner, he gives her a karate lesson. We sit around, we improvise.”
He elucidated further,
“This idea of this generational gap between the two characters in those chemistry reads really came to fruition. Here you have a guy that’s completely disconnected from the modern world in all respects, and of course we’re going to find him a third of the way through the story having an argument with his daughter. He doesn’t understand her, but they’re all they have.
Through these conversations in these meetings – these workshops – that we had, we secured who these people were. And I just love that Paul didn’t arrive in the film showing the sort of happy villagers in their little hut up north. They’re having a father-daughter disagreement. He went and got drunk last night, she’s become the mother figure. He doesn’t understand her. She secretly has a phone. All that stuff came from these workshops that we’re able to do together.”
Infiniti goes toe-to-toe – holding her own – with DiCaprio and the entire cast, turning in genuinely compelling work. She said of showing up to shoot her sequences,
“I was very nervous, especially going into my first day. But they all created a space where I felt comfortable to explore with them. I think more than anything, it just helped me focus in on the scene more, because I was really wanting to make sure that I was a great scene partner for Leonardo DiCaprio and Regina Hall and Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor and Benicio Del Toro. I wanted to make sure that I showed up for them in the scene more than anything. I was honing in on that energy as opposed to letting my nerves take advantage of me.”
Martial arts training also helped Infiniti grasp her character a bit more, as well as insightfully identifying Willa’s psychology.
“More than anything, what I wanted to do was hone in on her feeling of not fully knowing a bit of her story. Regardless in any relationship that she has with a character, any storyline thing, that really helped me drop into her, honing in on that and having those conversations with Paul to understand Willa from how he wrote her to bringing her to life.”
DiCaprio was thoroughly impressed by Anderson and Infiniti’s collaborative efforts.
“Just from a third party, being able to watch these two, it was almost like a coach and a boxer. They had a shorthand and I was watching off camera as these two, Paul would be like a little bit, ‘Do this a little…’ And she would… They had this sort of unspoken trust in one another that was magic to watch.”
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER opens in theaters internationally on September 24th and in the United States on September 26th.
