Leonardo DiCaprio says 'One Battle After Another' holds mirror up to divided society

Leonardo DiCaprio has opened up about his latest project, One Battle After Another, and shed light on what political “extremism does on both sides.”

For those unversed, One Battle After Another, which was released on September 26, 2025, revolves around a group of revolutionaries who join forces to help their friend Bob Ferguson, an unsuccessful, paranoid stoner, save his daughter from an old enemy.

The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who loosely used Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland as the film’s base, stated it was important to show this message without “lecturing” the audience.

DiCaprio, who plays the role of Bob in the film, said, "Paul keeps talking about the fact that if you're going to create a political espionage thriller like this, it's not about imposing your own ideology or your own political belief system on an audience — that's like taking medicine.”

The Academy winner added, "And you look back into the films that we admire, the Kubrick films like Dr. Strangelove, there's a comedy to it, a satire to it, which makes you able to sort of hold a mirror up to where we are as a society."

He went on to praise Anderson’s creative skills and how effortlessly he blends complex ideas into comedy that leave an indelible mark on the audience.

The Titanic hero remarked, "[Anderson] just creates these worlds, these characters, these people that have a conviction in their ideology, their belief system, and what extremism does on both sides. And I think he very fairly analyzes what that means. What is extremism? Why can't we communicate? Why don't we want to understand each other?”

“And I think at the core, we have these characters that have a greater deal of humanity to them, that have almost created a family together, and they realize that they're just trying to survive. That's the beauty of what this movie projects, I think,” Leonardo DiCaprio concluded.