‘One Battle After Another’ Star Leonardo DiCaprio Calls Cinema “Our Most Definitive Art Form,” Movingly Thanks His Mom & Paul Thomas Anderson At NBR Gala

Leonardo DiCaprio’s first film in a theater at age four was the original King Kong. His dad took him to the historic Vista cinema four blocks from his house and he recalls “crying hysterically” at the end. Over the years, “As I kept on watching, something shifted in me,” he said at the National Board of Review gala in a passionate tribute to movie theaters.

“It was a place to escape my neighborhood. A place where something larger than my own life seemed possible. At some point, each of us sat in a movie theater, the lights went down, something on that screen rearranged how we saw the world and ourselves. As I became an adult, I began to understand that cinema is our most definitive art form. It expresses what it means to be human,” he said, accepting the Best Actor Award for One Thing After Another.

“Very few filmmakers consistently live up to that ideal. One of them is Paul Thomas Anderson,” whose film crime thriller from Warner Bros. swept the awards. Anderson took the stage for Best Director and Best Film. Benicio Del Toro won for Best Supporting Actor, Chase Infiniti for Breakthrough Performance. The century-old NBR, a group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics, announced the winners last month ahead of Wednesday’s gala at Cipriani 42^nd Street in NYC.

DiCaprio thanked the helmer. “I waited 25 years … to make a film like this. That is so topical. So pertinent. About extremism, about divisiveness. That says something about the world we live in. It was an absolute honor and a joyous experience.”

The actor got a big ovation thanking his mother (Irmelin Indenbirkin), who was in the audience. “She believed in me long before there was absolutely any reason to. Driving me to auditions every single day after school. Supporting the dream that started in the theaters … This moment only exists because of you.”