“It’s a fucking trilogy,” said Paul Thomas Anderson, writer and director of “One Battle After Another,” referring to the men who lead the cast in his latest film: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, all current Oscar nominees.
The recent DGA Award winner stepped out on Monday night to present his stars with the Hammond Cinema Vanguard Award at the 2026 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, in what DiCaprio, a Best Actor nominee, said marked the end of the press blitz, “one battle after another.”
While both the director and the three actors tend to be quite difficult, being very specific about their interviews (for example, Anderson is the only Best Director nominee missing from the festival’s Distinguished Directors Award committee’s list), they all relaxed on the Arlington stage alongside festival director Roger Durling and Deadline journalist Pete Hammond, who moderated the event as one of the names bearing the award (the other being his wife, event producer Madeleine Hammond).
Concluding the episode he began his speech with, treating the stage like a round of the “dating game,” Anderson ended his awards speech by saying, “If you like old-fashioned movie stars, with talent, some mystery, some class, and a little bit of unpredictable danger, here are three of a dying breed. So cherish them while they’re still here, because our supply of proper damn movie stars is getting a little dwindling.”
In similar fashion, Dorling, who has run SBIFF for more than two decades, began the event by noting that “this is the biggest night in the film festival’s history ever.” While each performer got their moment in the spotlight, the show route was an abbreviated version of the standard tribute that SBIFF is known for, with the three winners sitting on stage the entire time.
Both del Toro and Penn have expressed resistance to seeing their performances on screen, with the latter saying, “I don’t want to go to a film festival and watch a scene with Sean Penn. I can’t do that, but I can watch and listen to really good writing.” The two tracks he helped choose for himself were, wonderfully, from “Hurlyburly” and “All the King’s Men.”
DiCaprio had a lot to share about his previous projects, most notably crediting the late Adam Sumner, the first assistant director and executive producer of “One Battle After Another,” as the person who got Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” over the finish line. “It was very stressful shooting the whole movie,” he said. “Adam Sumner, who worked on our movie, came in and kind of saved the day. I think we were two-thirds of the way through shooting. We were in Alberta, Canada, and the cameras were freezing, and the crew was leaving.”
“It was all during the magic hour. So we had a full rehearsal all day and then we would shoot for one hour. So it was like a theater production every day. And I mean the scheduling couldn’t have been more skewed, and there was rebellion everywhere,” said the star, who won a Best Actor Oscar for the film. “And Adam Sumner, who was the greatest commercial I’ve ever worked with, who worked with us on this movie — and it was his last movie — came in to save the day. There’s never been anyone like him in this industry, and he’ll be sorely missed.”
DiCaprio also revealed that he will begin filming Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film “What Happens at Night” alongside Jennifer Lawrence in two weeks. Although he hasn’t given up on his plans to produce a Frank Sinatra biopic with Scorsese either, DiCaprio did drop the idea of him appearing in the follow-up to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” during the Super Bowl. “There are no secrets here,” he joked.
The conversation with the three Oscar-winning actors also touched on some of the big moments from “One Battle After Another,” like del Toro’s “A Few Little Beers” being delivered to the police officers who pulled over Coach Sergio’s character.
“I didn’t want to lie to the cops. I guess coach wouldn’t lie to the cops. So it’s just me decorated He said. “Hammond has also brought up memes comparing the fate of recently fired Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino to his character Colonel Lockjaw. “Charlie Chaplin’s hatred of Hitler began in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler stole his mustache. Ben said in response: I see history repeating itself.
Finally, on a more serious note, DiCaprio summed up what it was like to watch their film, which shows Americans taking revolutionary actions like liberating immigration detention centers, and spoke about the politically charged moment in the United States, by giving credit to their director. “Paul has written an incredibly relevant script that hits perfectly for this day and age and that really speaks to the division and polarity of our country and the world we live in, and the fact that we can’t hear each other.”
The full panel is available on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival YouTube page.
