Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio Have Come a Long Way

"I was a little worried about him after 'Titanic,'" Crowe says. "The massive success of something like that, it's not always a positive, particularly when you're that young. (He was 23.) Suddenly you find yourself on lunchboxes and bedroom slippers. That can have a deteriorating effect on the inside."

DiCaprio, too, wondered whether success had changed Crowe.

"I think we were both a little skeptical whether we would be the same guys we were when we were starting out," he says. "Then you talk for five minutes, and you see the commitment is still there."

Commitment manifested itself in different ways for the stars. DiCaprio, as usual, immersed himself in study. He read Ignatius' other books. He consulted with a former CIA official to see how an agent would react under torture.

Crowe gained 50 pounds.

"Ridley called up and said 'Now, mate, would you mind putting on a significant amount of weight? I see him as an ex-athlete who has let himself go,' " Crowe recalls, breaking from his Australian accent to mimic Scott's British brogue. "And I trust him so much, I say yes first and rationalize pretentious artistic reason later."

Gaining the weight was easy, Crowe says. "At my age, I have to watch everything I eat," he says. "I have to be really disciplined. If you take off those disciplines, all hell breaks loose. And it happens pretty quickly."

What was DiCaprio's reaction when he first reunited with Crowe?

"I busted out laughing," he says, slapping Crowe on the back. "I couldn't stop."

For once, DiCaprio is the one making fun, while Crowe gets sheepish.

"Yeah, when I see my gut hanging between my legs, I don't know what I was thinking," says Crowe, who has already lost most of the weight. "I'm not sure I'd do that again. But I get what Ridley wanted to do. He doesn't put in any image that he hasn't thought out."

Political with an eye on reality

Those images will not go unnoticed by the public, at least on the Internet, where debate is brewing over whether Scott's portrait of a CIA detached from realities in the field will be a Hollywood polemic on the war.

Whether moviegoers care is another question. They have largely ignored films broaching conflict in the Middle East. "The Kingdom," "In the Valley of Elah" and "Saving Grace" were box-office duds.