Director Martin Scorsese has excavated the terrain of the American crime drama from multiple angles – but with “The Wolf Of Wall Street” he goes straight to the edge with a tale from the outrageous and darkly comic realm of our most contemporary variety of criminal extortion: high finance. The result is an epic trip into intoxication — intoxication by greed, adrenaline, sex, drugs and the constant churning of all too easy money.
Based on a true story, “The Wolf of Wall Street” follows the outlandish rise and non-stop pleasure-hunting descent of Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), the New York stockbroker who, along with his merry band of brokers, makes a gargantuan fortune by defrauding investors out of millions. The film follows Belfort’s wild ride as he transforms from a righteous young Wall Street newcomer to a thoroughly corrupted stock-pumper and IPO cowboy. Having quickly amassed an absurd fortune, Jordan pumps it back into an endless array of aphrodisiacs: women, Quaaludes, coke, cars, his supermodel wife and a legendary life of aspiration and acquisition without limits. But even as Belfort’s company, Stratton Oakmont, soars sky-high into extremes of hedonistic gratification, the SEC and the FBI are zeroing in on his empire of excess.
“This story was like a modern-day Caligula to me,” explains DiCaprio. DiCaprio can’t help but compare Belfort to history’s most debauched and insanely indulgent Roman Emperor – but he was awestruck to see Rome’s boundless lust for the illicit transferred to a New York brokerage full of salesmen from Queens.
It was the setting amidst New York financial outlaws out to have the time of their lives while blinding themselves to the consequences that drew him in. “In the late 80s and early 90s Wall Street was so incredibly unregulated, it was like the wild, wild West,” DiCaprio notes. “And Jordan Belfort was one of those wolves who took advantage of the loopholes to make a gigantic fortune. To me, his story seemed to embody that specific time when our financial institutions went completely awry.”
DiCaprio was also drawn to Belfort’s unconstrained honesty about the heights of ecstasy he found within his grasp – money flowing so freely people were having carnal relations on stacks of it until the totally exorbitant became the ordinary. “What was so fascinating was Jordan’s absolute candidness about his every crazy endeavor. He held nothing back. He pulled no punches. He was unapologetic about his lust for wealth and his mad consumption – and I felt that was the basis for a fascinating character. And the fact that he ultimately had to pay the price made for a great story.”
Before Belfort was charged with securities fraud and money laundering, he was leading his life at the most baroque, orgiastic levels anyone could imagine – flying own personal helicopter, driving 6 luxury cars, sailing a 167-foot yacht formerly owned by Coco Chanel, racking up $700,000 hotel and hooker bills and a feeding a 20-quaalude a day habit cut with cocaine and morphine.
Then, Belfort lost it all. With plenty of time on his hands to reflect, he chronicled his journey in a tell-all book — revealing step by startling step how he started a penny-stock brokerage in a garage, developed it into the ultimate “pump and dump” shop (where fast-talking brokers pump up stocks to inflated prices, then dump the over-valued shares, bilking their investors), then drove his life into the ground with the sheer extent of his appetites. Written with an irreverent New York sensibility, critics praised the book’s rocketing pace and comic touch, with some seeing it as the consummate tale of modern money madness gripping America.
Belfort may not have been in the mob per se, but many saw his story as that of a financial gangster. While his clients suffered disastrous losses, he and his friends made out like bandits – and they publically reveled in their loot, causing Forbes Magazine to call Belfort “a kind of Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to himself.”
DiCaprio, wearing his producer’s hat, always felt Scorsese was the man to direct. “From the start, I couldn’t stop thinking of Marty for this material,” he explains. “He’s able to bring a reality, a life and a sense of comedy to the darkness in this story, and that’s something very, very few filmmakers can accomplish. I always remember Marty telling me that ‘Goodfellas’ was a dark comedy – so that’s why I approached him originally.”
Still, everyone involved was taken aback by the sheer dauntlessness of Scorsese’s leap into unexpurgated depravity. For Scorsese, Jordan Belfort’s story was a chance to go places even he has never gone before as a filmmaker – into the most comic extremes of real-life human behavior.
“Jordan’s story falls squarely into American fascination with the rise and the fall — the gangster tradition,” says the director. Yet Jordan took the gangster tradition and turned it inside out. Rather than hiding from the law, he flaunted his illegal wealth in every way imaginable – and some ways that weren’t imaginable — practically begging for the comeuppance that ultimately toppled his mini-empire.
Scorsese also saw an opportunity to take a highly entertaining trip around the cycle of financial ecstasy, madness and disaster that seems to play out over and over in the American economy.
“As someone who enjoys history, I’ve been quite stunned and amazed that the same things keep happening over and over,” the director comments. “You have periods of financial boom with a kind of euphoria when it seems like everybody’s going to get rich and everything’s gonna be great — and then it all falls apart, and there’s a realization that only a few were getting richer at the expense of others. It happened in the Gilded Age in the late 19th Century. It happened in 1929. It happened in 1987, which is when our film takes place. It happened at the turn of this century when the dot.com bubble burst and it happened again in 2008. And, it could be happening again soon.”
Belfort furthermore fit in amidst a certain kind of character Scorsese has been drawn to throughout his career – men struck by ambition in the most alluringly flawed, human way, men who succeed on their own terms yet can’t escape a moral morass.
“Jordan’s someone who led a life that wasn’t exemplary, that was pretty ignoble in a way,” says Scorsese. “Not because he wanted to harm anybody per se but because this is what he learned from the world around him. So that’s something that I’ve always been attracted to and is interesting to me – people like Jordan or Jake LaMotta or Tommy, Joe Pesci’s character in ‘Goodfellas.’ People try to distance themselves from these kinds of characters: it’s someone else; he’s not like me. But in actuality I feel it’s not someone else. It is us. It’s you and me and if we had been born under different circumstances we maybe would have wound up making the same mistakes and choices and doing exactly the same things. I’m interested in acknowledging that part of these characters which is in our common humanity and we have to deal with it.”
After initial conversations with DiCaprio, Scorsese was drawn to “The Wolf of Wall Street” but there was only one way he was interested in taking it on: with the full force of wicked, wanton decadence he witnessed in Terry Winter’s script and Belfort’s book.
“I had to have total freedom with the cast and crew to do what I needed, which meant we all decided that we were going to go all the way,” Scorsese comments. “This is a story about the profane as opposed to the sacred, the obscene as opposed to the decent. Yet it’s not an expose. I mean the obscenity, the profanity, it’s all right there. It’s in plain sight. It’s part of the very fabric of the culture. Yet ultimately I think it comes out that this is a lifestyle – the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’ as the TV show had it — that becomes about avoiding yourself, or a fear of being alone with yourself.”
This film marks Scorsese’s fifth collaboration with DiCaprio, following “Shutter Island,” “The Departed,” “The Aviator” and “Gangs of New York” – and the director was motivated to take their diverse work together another step deeper.
“I’ve been very lucky over the past 14 years or so to be able to check in with Leo and really to be attracted to the same characters and stories. There’s a matter of trust in our relationship and that translates into the ability to take more risks – for me to push him as an actor and hopefully to be pushed as a filmmaker. Yes, he’s 30 years younger than me but I must say the last several years have given me a kind of a reboot so to speak, with a renewed energy and inspiration.”
DiCaprio wanted to play Belfort from the first time he encountered “The Wolf of Wall Street.” To do so, however, he knew he would have to step off the edge. “The big question that you have going into a movie like this is whether audiences will respond to a character who is really committing atrocious acts. But I think that rests on the honesty with which you depict a character like Jordan. And that was one of the things that Marty said very early on to me. He said, ‘You know, through my experiences in making movies, if you’re authentic with the characters and who they are and don’t betray that, people will go along with anything.’ That stuck with me.”
He continues: “Our attitude was to pull no punches. Let’s not try to whitewash anything. Let’s not try to make these characters ‘likeable.’ Let’s portray them for what they are and the unbelievable times they had during those few years where they were completely unregulated and had no rules. These guys were running wild with America’s money in their hands. But watching them disintegrate, watching them succumb to their own lust and greed, is incredibly entertaining.”
DiCaprio did a lot of research but during rehearsal, and on set, an improvisatory spirit reigned. “We had reference points of where we wanted the scenes to go but it was incredibly loose,” he explains. “It was like a theater company coming in and playing around with the material. We’d have a scene that was only a page long and we’d be improvising for hours and hours. We had such great actors that anything could happen and a lot of times it did.”
Many scenes allowed DiCaprio to delve far beyond the usual boundaries of human behavior – but one particular Quaalude trip stands out. “It all happens in one day that Jordan realizes the FBI are bugging his house, Donnie messes up a money transaction, and then Donnie and Jordan take these very, very, very powerful pharmaceutical grade Quaaludes and take way to much of them because they don’t realize they have a delayed fuse. Marty created this insanely hilarious, very intense and terrifying at times sequence where both Jonah and I are just completely obliterated. I remember Jonah looked at me and says, ‘This is the most insane thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.’ And I had to say the same. It turned into this wild, surreal event in the life of these two maniacs.”
Though he threw himself into Jordan’s self-destructive ecstasy, DiCaprio also became fascinated by his rousing speeches in front of the whole company. “The speeches were very interesting because it almost became like a U2 concert,” he muses. “It took on a life of its own. He had these money-crazed stockbrokers wanting to become rich at any cost and he had to ramp them up for warfare. So it was like stepping up on stage as a rock star and having to get the audience pumped up – only the irony is that he’s pumping them up to be as greedy as possible and to take advantage of other. But those were incredibly memorable scenes for me because we worked on them in great detail and once I got up on that stage it became its own animal.”
