We asked Marty if there anything in this film that’s a reflection of the current state Hollywood seems to be in, as some people feel the banks are calling the shots and not the studio heads:
Martin Scorsese: I don’t really know who’s calling the shots anymore. Seriously. I don’t know. All I know is that the cinema we know, and the cinema we took seriously when I was growing up and making films earlier, it’s all changed now – particularly with a marketplace like this. Leo said, we had an opportunity here with Red Granite to make something that can take a risk in a sensible way. It just appears to me, and I’m 71 now, being aware, maybe not understanding, but being aware of America since the early 50s, there’s a change. Everything is about where the money is.
Since we knew Leo was working with Jordan for his performance, we asked him what the most important thing was that he learned from Jordan Belfort, and if he has sympathy for him:
Leonardo DiCaprio: He was incredibly beneficial for me as an actor. I’d been having conversations with him off and on for years. You have to understand, he looks at this as an isolated period in his life and he’s been paying the price ever since. He’s been doing everything he can to repay his debt to everyone he ripped off. He’s since been trying to lead his life in a very respectable way. As a resource, for me, he was incredibly beneficial. He would divulge the most embarrassing things about his life because he looked at it as a part of his past. Even times where we’d start to have conversations where he’d start to veer off into, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t portray…” – I’d say, “Look, you wrote this book. You wrote this book about this time period in your life, you did it for a reason, and you did it to talk about what happened behind the doors of Wall Street and the conversations that were going on in an unregulated marketplace. You’re making a statement here, so let’s tell the truth.” As soon as we had that conversation, he was like, “Alright, I’m an open book. Not only am I going to tell you what happened, but I’m going to tell you something that’s ten times worse.”
I think from Marty’s perspective he wanted to have some distance from Jordan just to be able to have a perspective, so I was in a lot of ways a middle man who would bring a lot of information from Jordan to Marty and it would sometimes result in, “Can we get this set piece tomorrow? Can we get an animal on set? Jordan said this was happening…” – and our great team over here would provide that. It was a very free formed endeavor in that regard.
Martin Scorsese: I did the same thing with Henry Hill. I never met him. I spoke to him once on the phone and that was it. They’re very persuasive – you’d be surprised. I just need to find my own way, but then I’ve got Leo, Terence, everybody here, we’re working together, then I’ve got the actors – I’ve got to find my own way with it. They’re fascinating, that’s what’s so fascinating about them, they can be persuasive.
There’s a hilarious scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street where Leonardo is having an extreme reaction to some particularly strong quaaludes. We asked what it was like filming that scene and if any funny incidents that happened during filming:
Leonardo DiCaprio: A funny thing that happened? I think everything! The trick was we wanted to create – Terence and I talked a lot about early on what we wanted this whole film to feel like. We wanted it to be this hallucinogenic ride, this roller coaster, and that sequence specifically was like a day in the life of two schnooks who took too many drugs. Through some of the rehearsal period we talked about adding more tension to that and condensing a few scenes to create the urgency of him coming back to Donnie, who had given him the drugs as an apology for screwing up, then he’s on the phone with Switzerland while the FBI is bugging him – to me it was almost like a small film within the film.
“Did you do the rolling down the stairs stunt?”
Leonardo DiCaprio: Did I do that stunt? No, but I did do everything else, and I did have injuries if it’s worth anything. A lot of it came from filming Jordan and talking about what quaaludes were really like. I had him rolling around on the floor for me, he was very helpful with that, but a lot of the research that I did really came from watching this one video on loop, it’s on Youtube, called “The Drunkest Man In The World.” It’s a man trying to get a beer but he’s rolling around the floor for hours. That was a huge inspiration for me.
Martin Scorsese: For example, when he crawls, the idea, besides Bo Dietl not understanding him on the telephone, is a key line – a key moment when the drugs kick in. Under those circumstances, you do think you’re saying what you’re supposed to be saying, and you’re not. The organs and the mouth, they aren’t working. You can’t get the signal, it just doesn’t go the direction – nothing goes. So, the funniest part for me is when he finally crawls out, and you see now he has to get in the car, and the car is over here and he’s here – and silence. Then he crawls out, falls down, but the crawling was really obscene because I had forgotten that the door of that Lamborghini opened upwards. Leo said, “What am I supposed to do?” I said, “Try your legs! I don’t know!” “Should I try my foot?” “It’ll take hours if it’s your foot!” That’s how we wound up doing it, just like Jerry Lewis or Jacques Tati with body language. Then the phone call..
Leonardo DiCaprio: It’s great the way you hold that one frame…
Rob Reiner: I put it up with the best comedy scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie in my life, and what makes it good is that they took their time with it. They didn’t rush it every moment, and because you take your time it just gets funnier and funnier and funnier.