![]() These people are what they are and we didn’t want to give them any false sense of sympathy. By no means is this film a glorification or some sort of promotion of this lifestyle and those who say it is are missing the point entirely. We wanted it to be from these peoples’ perspective, an understanding of the very nature of who these people are, and why this can be so intoxicating and so exciting for them. To me, if you’re an audience member, you want to be completely submerged in the actual film. It was a very conscious decision on our part, so the experience would be almost like taking a drug. We wanted to take the audience on that journey, and so we don’t ever see the wake of that destruction until the very end, where they implode. Number two, we very consciously wanted this to be an analysis of the temptation and intoxication of the world of money and indulgence and hedonism. Why did you make that choice?ĭICAPRIO: Number one, because we didn’t want to take a traditional approach to this film. ![]() ![]() That was clearly a conscious decision by you, Marty Scorsese and Terry Winter. I wanted to make an unapologetic film on the subject matter that didn’t give any false sense of empathy for the character, but that instead was an analysis of man gone awry.ĭEADLINE: There has been a lot of media scrutiny that the movie doesn’t give a lot of time to lives destroyed by Belfort’s greed. We are all consumers, incessantly consuming as much as we possibly can. We have not evolved at all.ĭEADLINE: So that was your motivation to tell this story?ĭICAPRIO: I wanted to make an unapologetic film looking at a character in a very entertaining and funny way, and isn’t passing judgment on them but is saying, look, this is obviously a cautionary tale, and what is it that creates people like this? I thought that could somehow be a mirror to ourselves. As we are progressing into the future, things are moving faster and we are way more destructive than we’ve ever been. It’s a fundamental characteristic of survival. I’ve been talking about greed a lot in interviews, and you can’t pinpoint it to any specific time period, or any civilization or even just human beings. The crash of 2008 was a huge motivator for me as well to want to really see what’s going on in our culture that creates people like this. Everything Jordan wrote in this book was so raw. You rarely find someone willing to vilify themselves so completely and not trying to create false enemies to blame so they don’t have to look inward. He realized he’d completely lost his way, but there was an honesty to it that you rarely find. Greed was the main motivating factor, and he was unapologetic. His life is much different now, but he’s looking back and reflecting on a very hedonistic time period where he gave into every possible temptation. When I first picked this up, I found it a cautionary tale written by Jordan. It is very difficult to reverse that process. A lot of times, I’d gone through the process of getting a great book or finding a great story, and then too many people get their hands on it and it turns into something entirely different. Why did Belfort’s story fit into the profile of movies you wanted to make as producer, while sparking you as an actor as well?ĭICAPRIO: Coming into it as an actor, I set my entire production company up in order to find material that not only was interesting and out of the box from an actor’s perspective, but that could be developed that way from the original source material. Here, DiCaprio discusses that fallout and the challenge of trying to uncompromisingly depict bad guys without judging them.ĭEADLINE: Appian Way was just building steam when you got involved in producing Jordan Belfort’s memoir Wolf Of Wall Street. The shrapnel is new to DiCaprio, who both starred in and produced the film through his increasingly prolific Appian Way shingle. The 71-year old Scorsese has provoked that kind of reaction several times in his career with films ranging from The Last Temptation Of Christ to Goodfellas and Casino, the latter two of which, like Wolf, left behind bitter victims of the mayhem perpetrated by the film’s main characters. The three hours of darkly comic debauchery has in some quarters been met with a “how dare you” reaction, a polarizing response that could be an issue during awards season for the $100 million film financed by indie Red Granite and released domestically by Paramount Pictures. The Martin Scorsese-directed film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as hedonistic drug-addicted stockbroker conman Jordan Belfort, who with dimwitted cohorts plunders his way to such decadence and immorality it’s a wonder he survived long enough to be arrested and sent to prison. When I emerged from watching The Wolf Of Wall Street, I came away thinking the movie had done for stock brokers what Marathon Man did for dentists.
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