Director Martin Scorsese says he shares a relationship of trust with leo and that translates into the ability to take risks
The film’s storyline somewhere depicts the reality of the financial situation and the gamble of money around the world, what do you feelIJ
You have periods of financial boom with a kind of euphoria when it seems like everybody’s going to get rich and everything’s going to be great — and then it all falls apart, and there’s a realisation 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.
Many have read and known about Jordan Belfort, and even his book reveals his many dark secrets. Did you ever think about what and how will people accept a character that can be perceived so negativelyIJ
Jordan’s someone who led a life that wasn’t exemplary, that was pretty ignoble in a way. 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.
What did you initially feel when you heard out the complete script of the movieIJ
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. 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.
leonardo and you have worked together in four films in the past. The Wolf of Wall Street being your fifth collaboration together, how has this relationship grownIJ
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.
You are working with a legendary actor like Rob Reiner for the first time and even with Matthew McConaughey, how was that experienceIJ
I’ve always been a fan of Rob Reiner’s work as an actor and as a filmmaker — so finally I was able to hang out with him on this picture as Jordan’s father. And working with Matthew McConaughey the first time was really interesting.
I saw him in Mud, the Jeff Nichols picture and I really liked him. I didn’t recognise him actually. He just seemed to be part of the very nature of the world that the film was depicting. So when we talked about doing this part, he said, ‘What about my accentIJ’ I said, ‘Well, why couldn’t there be a Southern accent on Wall StreetIJ’ In the luncheon scene in the movie, he and leo played beautifully off each other and Matthew has a way of chanting these tonal vocal exercises, and that found its way into the film.
It opened up the movie for us in a way that we were able to not have any limits as to what would be deemed absurd. It’s all absurd.