MTV News' Chris Connelly met up with DiCaprio in the sunny climes of Hawaii for an exclusive sit-down about his new movie "The Beach," his Icon Status, and why he keeps buying the same CDs over and over again.

　　Now, let's get started!

＊　＊　＊

Chris Connelly: What are you listening to? I want to know what CDs you brought here.

Leonardo DiCaprio: I didn't bring any CDs here.

MTV: Nothing?

LD: I'm trying to think what's my latest. I buy CDs, and they always get scratched up and lost, and then you have to buy them over and over and over and over again. So I just bought, you know, Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder, which I have bought, like, 30 times. But like, nothing new, man.

MTV: ... So why this movie? You could have made any movie in the universe, practically. Why was this the story you wanted to tell right now?

the movie,The Beach RealVideo

LD: A lot of reasons. You know, it's something I really connected with in a weird way. I love the theme of the movie. I love what it was trying to say about society nowadays and how everything's sort of become Westernized, and we're so saturated with all this digital information and media, and we can't escape it. The whole world is completely Americanized, essentially, and this character goes off in a real courageous way. He wants to escape all that and really get in touch with some sort of real emotion or do something on a real level. Whether it be dangerous or not, he finds this tropical pirate-like Utopia, which seems to be the answer to everything he's ever dreamed. And I really identified with that.

MTV: This is like a classical male story, isn't it? Just this story of the guy going out in search of the great...

LD: A great adventurer.

MTV: Did it touch you in that way too? Is it fun to make a movie that had a lot of maleness to it?

LD: A lot of maleness to it. [Laughs] No, absolutely, man. I love that this was a truly modern character, in a lot of different ways. I mean, not to speak about my generation or the generation before me or anything like that, but he really is a modern character. He's a true human being. He's constantly contradicting himself, and throughout the course of the movie he changes. He transforms into many different things, which I thought was really interesting.