Leonardo DiCaprio's Shutter Island Experience Hardcore

Leonardo DiCaprio

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Leonardo DiCaprio says making his new movie Shutter Island was like reliving a “trauma”.

The actor plays a US marshal investigating the escape of a murderess from a hospital for the criminally insane in the 1950s. He admits the script for the thriller was heavy going and left him emotionally drained once the cameras stopped rolling.

“There was a few weeks there which, I have to say, were some of the most hardcore film experiences I’ve ever had,” he said. “It was like reliving trauma in a way. It was pretty intense.”

To prepare for the movie, Leonardo did a significant amount of research into mental illness. The 35-year-old star confessed understanding how the condition was previously treated and shooting the movie in a 1950s-style psychiatric ward was a shock to his system.

“We were surrounded by it every day,” he said in an interview with the American edition of OK! magazine. “We were around dilapidated walls of an old mental institution – we had someone there guiding us through the history of mental illness – the past ways of treating it, the different forms of treatment – so in doing that, there was a tremendous amount of research done on the entrapments of mental illness and the suffering that people need to go through, so it led me to watch a lot of different documentaries, a lot of research on mental illness.”

Shutter Island is directed by Martin Scorsese and also stars Mark Ruffalo and Sir Ben Kingsley.