The Wolf of Wall Street

[katchitup]

Another Scorsese+Dicaprio collaboration :dance:

The Wolf of Wall Street is an upcoming biographical crime drama film directed by Martin Scorsese, based on the memoir of the same name by Jordan Belfort. The screenplay was written by Terence Winter, and the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort, along with other cast members including Jonah Hill, Jean Dujardin, Rob Reiner, Kyle Chandler, and Matthew McConaughey, among others. The Wolf of Wall Street will make a fifth collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio.[5]

The film is set to be released in 2013, and will tell the story of a New York stockbroker, played by DiCaprio, who refuses to cooperate in a large securities fraud case involving corruption on Wall Street, the corporate banking world and mob infiltration.[4][5][6] The film is currently in post-production.

http://en.wikipedia....ll_Street_(film)

CAST:

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort

Jonah Hill as Danny Porush

Matthew McConaughey as Mark Hanna

Jean Dujardin as Jean-Jacques Handali

Kyle Chandler as Greg Coleman

Jon Bernthal as Brad

Jon Favreau as Lee Sorkin

Cristin Milioti as Teresa Petrillo

Rob Reiner as Max Belfort

Christine Ebersole as Leah Belfort, Max's wife and Jordan's mother

Margot Robbie as Nadine Belfort

Kenneth Choi as Walter

Joanna Lumley as Aunt Emma

Spike Jonze as Dwayne

Ethan Suplee as Toby Welch

Martin Klebba as Frank Berry

[katchitup]

Trailer :dance: Its leo dicaprio making it rain, playing with a monkey on rollarskates, and breakdancing whats not to like

[gustavsson]

Can't wait! It looks so good!!

[BarbieErin]

IT'S AMAZING!

[Clauds]

Trailer looks epic, can't wait to see the movie

[PinkCouture]

The Wolf of Wall Street Movie Stills

contactmusic.com

[PinkCouture]

Gifs Galore....

[2324lebron]

I wasn't expecting a zany comedy. (N) to that trailer.

[katchitup]

Quoting new BTS pics from Leos thread:

 

 

Article pix

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^And the article that goes along with the pics..

 

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese Explore the Funny Side of Financial Depravity in The Wolf of Wall Street

 

 

 

Imagine a world where a guy can make $12 million in three minutes, where blow jobs are a perk of the gig, dwarfs are tossed to raise employee morale, and inhaling anthills of coke, Scarface style, is encouraged. Now imagine a world where a studio would pass on a movie with a subject that titillating, even if it came tied in a ­Leonardo DiCaprio–and–Martin Scorsese bow. That’s the way things were looking back in 2008, when Warner Bros. dropped out of Scorsese and DiCaprio’s upcoming black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street. The two went on to make Shutter Island, then separated for other projects. But when a window in Scorsese’s schedule opened up in 2012, DiCaprio approached the ­director again. “I told Marty, ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to do a movie like this too many times in the future,’ ” says DiCaprio. “Larger-scale, R-rated dramas, like Blood Diamond or The Departed, don’t really get financed anymore.”

 

An independent production company, Red Granite Pictures, eventually stepped in to finance the film (Paramount is distributing), which is based on Jordan ­Belfort’s memoir of the same name. The book chronicles the former stockbroker’s rise and fall as the head of Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage house he founded when he was only in his late twenties. The Long Island–based boiler room bamboozled small investors out of roughly $100 million in the nineties, the heyday of cheap money, junk bonds, and spectacularly ugly ties. In 1998, Belfort was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering, serving 22 months in prison after ­cooperating with the FBI.

Belfort’s writing, alternately horrifying and hilarious, almost reads like a Scorsese movie. And “Marty directing was Jordan’s dream scenario, absolutely,” says DiCaprio, who plays Belfort. “When Marty couldn’t do it the first time, I set it up with a few other directors, but I never felt comfortable pulling the trigger. I was fixated on him. There wasn’t anybody else who could bring the rawness and toughness, the music, and particularly the humor required to convey the excitement of these young punks—these robber barons—taking on the Wall Street system.”

 

Executive producer Alexandra Milchan had brought The Wolf of Wall Street to the attention of DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, in 2007. Warner Bros. quickly optioned it for DiCaprio and ­Scorsese, more than a year before the crash of 2008. “The book personified ­America’s addiction to obtaining wealth at all costs, and that hasn’t changed,” says DiCaprio, who found in Belfort a micro-tale of corruption and greed. “He was a small fish in a gigantic pond, and he’d motivate his guys by telling them they were heroes for taking on the big houses. Un­regulated Wall Street was like the Wild West.” The actor was captivated by the author’s singular transparency. “There was nothing Jordan wouldn’t divulge, no matter how intimate or embarrassing,” he says. “That was the attraction for Marty as well—it’s the kind of brutal honesty that got Marty into making movies like Mean Streets.”

 

Scorsese has dabbled in black comedy before—After Hours and The King of ­Comedy, of course, and long stretches of GoodFellas. But the comedic menace here isn’t violence (unless you count death-­defying self-abuse); it’s Belfort’s spectacular implosion. In addition, the film offered the director his first crack at the Zeitgeist since 1983’s Comedy—Scorsese’s creepy poke at celebrity worship—as well as an entrée into a world as ripe for hyperbole as that of Vegas, the Mafia, and 1840s New York: sin, redemption, obsession, operatic displays of excess! How could he resist?

 

“Jordan was a brilliant guy in a world where there may be no morality ­whatsoever,” says Scorsese. “He got caught at what a lot of people didn’t get caught at.” As he sees it, Wolf is about what happens when free-market capitalism becomes a matter of faith. “If you look at what occurred in the world of finance—many times now and it will probably happen again—you really have to ask the questions: Is dishonesty acceptable? Aren’t people expected to go too far?”

 

Jonah Hill plays Donnie Azoff, Stratton Oakmont’s second in command (a composite of a few characters in the book). Azoff, if possible, is even more gonzo than Belfort, who at least regretted ripping off clients. “Jordan told me that certain people [at Stratton Oakmont] actually enjoyed hurting people,” says Hill, who, along with DiCaprio, spent time with current day ­traders before shooting began late last summer. “I imagine it’s a lot more politically correct and less chauvinistic now. It certainly couldn’t be more politically incorrect or chauvinistic. But it’s still very alpha male, or alpha female, depending on the person in training. People who are weak, or perceived as weak and emotional, are fed to the wolves.” At Stratton Oakmont, says Hill, the philosophy was kill-or-be-killed, and ­Gordon Gekko was fetishized, but so were Scarface and GoodFellas. “Those were their models,” he adds. “They kind of ran their businesses with those sensibilities.”

 

Belfort’s arc does sound a little like Henry Hill’s in GoodFellas—in this case, a nice Jewish kid from Bayside, Queens, with a genius for sales, gets seduced and corrupted by Wall Street. But Scorsese disputes comparisons between gangsters and stock brokers. “The parallel between the Mafia and Wall Street works only to the extent that they’re all interested in making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.”

 

In Terence Winter—creator of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (executive-produced by Scorsese)—DiCaprio found the perfect screenwriter to adapt Wolf. Winter worked in the equity-trading department of Merrill Lynch when he was in law school. “I was there on October 19, 1987, the day of the stock-market crash,” he says. “To see it happen again, on a much larger scale, in 2008, after I had written the script? That was eerie.”

 

His own Wall Street experience wasn’t as crazy, but the excessive testosterone and drug-fueled, locker-room ­atmosphere were familiar enough. And Belfort’s epic charisma was simply irresistible. “For all the bad things he’s done, he’s so utterly charming,” says Winter. “That’s why I’m glad we kept the voice-over; you need his hilarious asides.”

Which, according to Winter, is what will separate Wolf from the many Hollywood films that have already satirized the avarice of the financial world, most infamously in American Psycho and Wall Street. That and the “pretty sadistic humor,” says DiCaprio. “We take the lives of the people in the film seriously; we don’t take the genre seriously.

 

“Marty said to me early on, ‘No matter the genre, no matter what kind of movie, people respond to the honesty in the characters,’ ” adds DiCaprio. “We weren’t interested in sentimentalizing Jordan. We aren’t painting a portrait of someone we want people to feel sorry for. Later in the film, when his life starts breaking apart, people are going to think he’s making the wrong decisions constantly. That’s not to say that people won’t be rooting for him, because he’s a likable guy.”

 

DiCaprio spent weeks with Belfort. “I wanted a close relationship with him so that I could weave intimate details into the movie,” he says, “things that weren’t in the book. I was kind of the middleman between him and Marty, and I would bring pages of notes from my meetings with Jordan—things like this insane orgy on a 747 going to Vegas, chimpanzees in diapers that would skate through the Stratton offices, very intimate stuff about his relationships with women—and Marty was game to try everything. His approach was essentially to put everything onscreen and see what we responded to. It was old-school, really independent filmmaking on a larger scale.”   

            

This is the fifth collaboration between the 38-year-old DiCaprio and Scorsese, who turns 71 two days after The Wolf of Wall Street is released (November 15). What at first seemed an unlikely alliance is obvious now: The two men are equally committed to their independence from Hollywood, even as they play within the system—or, in the case of DiCaprio, becomes one of the most popular and highly compensated actors of his generation, without ever starring in a blockbuster franchise. “Leo and I share a certain sensibility,” says Scorsese, “a temperamental affinity.” Scorsese lived through, and DiCaprio reveres, a time when films were discussed as urgently as television is now, when it was as much an art form as it was a business. Their collaborations might lack the brute-edged intensity of Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s, but that relationship was less of a partnership. Without DiCaprio, their shared sensibility—for full immersion in a comically depraved world—would never have been financed.

 

“Marty is brilliant at many things, but one of them is showing people doing things that are morally corrupt and still making them enjoyable to watch,” says Hill. “You root for them and adore them in some way—it’s cool and exciting to be doing something wrong.” And the same, Hill realized, applies to the guys in Wolf. “Leo and I had numerous conversations while our characters were doing really despicable things. I was disgusted by what I was doing!” Hill laughs. “There are people who won’t see the darkness of it. Spring Breakers came out while we were making the movie. I’m a big Harmony Korine fan. I saw Kids when I was way too young—probably 11—and I completely disregarded the aids plot; I just wanted to be like those guys. So now I’m 29, and I walked out of Spring Breakers thinking, Gosh, this generation is so screwed. I was really depressed by the movie. But I realized that if I was 14, I’d be like, Oh, let’s go on spring break!”

 

“It’s an old story, really: People can take their identification with movies and novels to some alarming places,” says Scorsese. “Some people might just zero in on the fun, exhilarating side of it. But if you’re putting a world on film, and you’re going to stay true to that world, as opposed to show it from a distance, you’re going to make it attractive and entertaining—and, by the way, the people are entertaining, and they had a great time until they got caught.”

 

You can’t call Scorsese a prude, not with all the violence in his films. But sex—lots and lots of sex—has never been one of his obsessions. In one scene in the film, a coked-up Belfort furiously dry-humps a first-class stewardess on a flight to Switzerland. It’s reminiscent of the alarming comedy in Scorsese’s earlier films—classic Joe Pesci stuff. DiCaprio’s natural grace remains (it was there even when he played a sadist in Django Unchained), but he’s never been so feral. And this is one of Wolf’s tamer scenes. “It’s a modern-day Caligula,” says DiCaprio, “the height of debauchery.”

 

The courtly Scorsese officiating over an orgy is an incongruous image—perhaps for him as well. “Before one pretty explicit sex scene,” says Margot Robbie, the Australian actress who plays Belfort’s second wife, “Marty was talking to me about my comfort level. He said, ‘Okay, so when you’re making love …’ And I was thinking, Making love? I wouldn’t really call it that. It was quite sweet and funny.” In a memorable moment of self-pleasuring early in the film, Robbie teases DiCaprio in their daughter’s nursery—a scene that took seventeen hours to shoot. “That’s a long time to pretend you’re masturbating,” says Robbie. “It was exhausting! But most of the time it was impossible to stop laughing. How could you not, when every shot was something completely absurd, and you’re directed to take everything as far as you want? I mean, there’s a naked marching band in one scene. We sank a yacht!”

 

I ask Hill to identify the most outrageous scene in the film. He is unable to pick just one. “I can safely say that this is the craziest performance I’ll ever give as far as what the character gets involved with.” And this is a guy who played a guy who got sodomized by the Devil in This Is the End. 

Winter is momentarily stumped as well. He mentally sifts through a long list of possibilities. “Oh, yeah,” he says finally. “There’s a scene where Donnie and Jordan take a lot of vintage quaaludes from the eighties. It takes a while for them to kick in, so they keep taking more.” The result is a five-­minute fever dream of apparently world-class fucked-up-ness that, among other things, introduces the potential for a new comedy team. “DiCaprio and Hill on drugs rival Laurel and Hardy,” says Winter. “When my wife read the scene, she was nursing our newborn son, and she nearly dropped the baby she was laughing so hard. You alternate between enjoyment and thinking, When is it going to stop? How can they possibly survive this? ”

Given his time on Wall Street, I ask Winter if he learned anything new writing the screenplay. “I was under the impression that we were playing on a semi-level playing field some of the time,” he says. “But when you start to uncover the layers of how things could get corrupted, you realize that the whole system can be rigged—even the government end of it. Knowing what I know,” he adds, “I don’t put my money in the stock market. I’d rather invest in pretty much anything else—like a vintage-Matchbox-car collection.”

 

Hill’s takeaway was more basic. “Maybe don’t do bags of ­quaaludes and cocaine every day for four years,” he says, and laughs. “Everything is going to feel like a letdown after that kind of sensory overload, you know? It’s like the end of Good­Fellas. Ray Liotta is in witness protection. He orders spaghetti and gets egg noodles and ketchup. The rest of his life he’s going to be eating egg noodles and ketchup. He’s going to live life like a schnook.”

 

The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese. Paramount. Not yet rated. November 15.

 

 

 

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/dicaprio-scorsese-wolf-of-wall-street.html

 

[katchitup]

FYI I bought the book and its awesome There are alot of Goodfellas comparisons going around...which I love :D

[Clauds]

I'm so excited for this movie, it looks amazing

[katchitup]

just an FYI to the thread, its looking like its going to be opening christmas day as opposed to Nov. 15! Apparently the movie is too long, and about NC17, so they're trying to get Marty to cut it down. 

 

I say if Martin Scorsese wants a movie 3 hours you freaking let him

[katchitup]

from leos thread:

 

 

Now that its official hopefully they can start promoting the film and that second trailer will finally be released. Running time will be 165 minutes.

 

It's Official: Martin Scorsese's 'Wolf of Wall Street' Gets Holiday Release

 

Martin Scorsese will finish The Wolf of Wall Street in time for Christmas. Paramount decided on a Christmas Day release late Monday after the filmmaker delivered a shortened version of the film that was screened for Paramount chairman Brad Grey and star Leonardo DiCaprio, according to studio sources.

 

The movie charts the rise and fall of former Wall Street broker and party boy Jordan Belfort. Red Granite is fully financing and produced the drama, which is expected to be a player in this year's awards race.

 

Wolf of Wall Street also stars Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Jean Dujardin, Rob Reiner, Kyle Chandler, Margot Robbie, Jon Bernthal, Cristin Milioti, P.J. Byrne and Ethan Suplee.

 

Scorsese's initial cut of the movie was more than 180 minutes long, forcing Paramount to scrap the film's original Nov. 15 release date in order to give the director time to trim the length. The film's running time is now 165 minutes.

"Marty's work is fantastic. He's continued to work on it but now it's officially going to be ready for Christmas Day and I'm delighted," said Paramount chairman Brad Grey

 

Red Granite's Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland are producing with DiCaprio, Scorsese, Emma Koskoff and Alexandra Milchan.

Paramount's Jack Ryan, starring Chris Pine as the iconic intelligence officer created by the late Tom Clancy, was originally supposed to open on Dec. 25, but last week, the studio pushed back the film's opening to Jan. 17.

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/martin-scorseses-wolf-wall-street-651367

 

 

 

------new trailer coming soon/tonight too

[katchitup]

The Wolf of Wall Street Official Trailer #2 (2013)

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TV spots:






 

[katchitup]

Also the reviews are coming in...not gonna post all the tweets, but they are all amazing! Alot of people came from a SAG screening and said that it was just as good, some saying better, than Goodfellas! Which if this movie was almost as good as Goodfellas then its amazing

 

Hope it keeps up through the critic reviews!

[la veronika]

Thids movie will be epic, im really feeling it. but i hate how they keep pushing the release date. I wanna see it already.

[katchitup]

^lol I think they are sticking with Christmas day now, all the promos have been set I can't possibly wait anymore...like

 

Some early reviews quoted from Leos thread...

 

And from Deadline Hollywood's Oscar watcher Peter Hammond

The last shoe to drop in the 2013 awards race dropped Saturday as Martin Scorsese’s much-awaited The Wolf Of Leonardo Dicaprio in The Wolf Of Wall StreetWall Street was unveiled to SAG voters at a couple of screenings at the WGA theatre in Beverly Hills. I caught the film earlier at a small 10am screening for some of the cast members on the Paramount lot and then moderated the Q&A following the 6:30pm screening of the 3 hour film . To say it was rapturously received would be an understatement. DiCaprio received a standing ovation when I introduced him, and just before that co-star Jonah Hill also won huge applause from the packed-to-the-rafters house who also enthusiastically cheered co-stars Rob Reiner (who plays DiCaprio’s dad and stole the show at the Q&A) , Jon Favreau, P.J. Byrne, Ken Choi and Cristin Milioti. I heard the film also received the same kind of enthusiastic response at the earlier screening too. Paramount also threw a party to kick things off in style. Celebration was in order since Paramount at one time wasn’t even sure the film would be ready as Scorsese has been editing to make a 2013 date. Originally it was scheduled for a November 15 release but moved to Christmas bumping Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit into January to make room for the wide release awards run of Wolf.


Formal reviews are embargoed but as an initial observation I would label the movie “Scorsese Satyricon” , a wild ride full of contemporary debauchery to say the least (DiCaprio compared some of it to Caligula) , with a fine ensemble and a frenetic pace that belies its three hour running time. And even at that length it never lags. It is the perfect companion piece to Goodfellas and puts Scorsese right back in the thick of the Oscar race, if Academy members, particularly older ones, can deal with the almost non-stop parade of sex , drugs, nudity and rock and roll. Violence, a Scorsese staple in this type of film, is missing but there are a number of remarkable set pieces including a storm-driven yacht voyage that has to be seen to be believed (Rob Legato supervised the Special Effects team). An NC-17 was avoided by some reported judicious cutting but its hard to imagine the stuff that didn’t make it in considering the edgy material that did.


There are also the performances, including two sure to gain Oscar recognition for Di Caprio and Hill. As many observers I talked to noted DiCaprio in fact has simply never been better in the signature role of his career as Jordan Belfort , the out-of-control Wall Street hot shot who is at the center of this story. Leo just knocked someone out of the Best Actor lineup making an impossibly difficult year even more difficult. It would be unthinkable to imagine he won’t be in the top five. And Hill, hilarious and memorable as his co-hort in white collar crime is equally great, an almost certain second Best Supporting Actor nod for the actor who was first nominated opposite Brad Pitt in Moneyball. The incredible thing about it all is it’s supposedly all true. This story from Belfort’s book about his rise and fall in the financial world is almost hard to believe but apparently it happened and that should give us all pause. It certainly explains why the economy tanked and we went down with the ship.


At age 71 Scorsese is rare among directors at that age, clearly at the top of his directorial powers. He seems energized by the material and the script from Terence Winter. It is a perfect companion to films like Goodfellas and Casino. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has deemed it a comedy for the Golden Globes and I guess that seems right. These guys are hilarious, if tragic. Whatever the label it is a movie that won’t be easy to ignore even as it comes out at the tail end of the season on December 25th. Paramount tells me they are getting it seen by most critics groups in time (though screeners won’t be out by those deadlines) and will be anxious to see the reaction. Despite its length it seems commercial to me and also contains distinct , if limited , turns by the likes of Oscar winner Jean Dujardin and especially Matthew McConaughey , terrific in one brilliantly funny scene as the stock wizard who sets DiCaprio’s Belfort out on the course to self-destruction (incredibly Belfort’s first day as a stock broker was the 1987 day the market crashed). Of particular note among the women is Australian actress Margot Robbie who nails the second very New York wife of Belfort


“It’s all true. That’s what is so fascinating about the novel. That’s why I was so obsessed with playing this character. It was a seven year process to get this film made. The financing kept falling apart. ..It was a very difficult film to finance. It’s like the Roman Empire in the 80′s. It’s debaucherous , it was sex and drugs and greed. It wasn’t the most commercial sounding film but Marty’s attitude was always ‘let’s focus on this being a really dark comedy’ and as he said before he intended Goodfellas to be a comedy,” he said adding that he pursued Scorsese consistently to do this movie with him. “I told him after the Golden Globes one night ‘ we have to do this movie. We don’t get opportunities like this ever. These opportunities like this don’t come about . We have to do this movie.”


Caprio said he spent many months working with Belfort to take him to the specific moments of his life which15-outrageous-scenes-in-martin-scorseses-wolf-of-wall-street-we-cant-wait-to-see he helped bring to the screen, a rare experience for an actor and that is what clearly helped make the role pay off as well as it does. “It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire. You just can’t believe this man lived this life. This is kind of a microcosm of a much bigger story. They are kind of an outsider beating on Wall Street’s door. These guys are out in a chop shop in Long Island trying to emulate Gordan Gekko. They want to be these guys they admire. And Jordan found a tiny loophole and just kept pushing it further and further and the money took over and the women , and the drugs and pretty soon he was in over his head,” he said.

It’s also interesting that Scorsese cast three directors in straight acting roles including Spike Jonze, Jon Favreau and Rob Reiner who got big laughs when he said, “if you get a director who can also act a little bit, then for the director making the film it makes it a little easier because we know what they are going through. We aren’t going to be a pain in the ass. ‘You know in this scene, what’s my motivation? Fuck your motivation. Just say the fucking words


Hill said, “I saw it today, this morning for the first time and it’s taken until now to digest what I saw. Martin Scorsese is my favorite artist in the world and to get to play that kind of character in this kind of film, this is the ultimate dream of my life,” he said while also hilariously describing an instant movie classic scene involving taking ludes with Di Caprio and another in which he swallows a live goldfish.

Paramount threw a party afterwards in the lobby based on the wild one in the movie and . also like in the movie, hired a marching band to play during the festivities. Understandably, with killer competition getting a head start out there, the studio wants to do everything it can to say The Wolf Of Wall Street has arrived and staked a place in the race.

Indeed it has.


http://www.deadline.com/2013/12/oscars-scorsese-and-dicaprio-back-in-the-race-as-wolf-of-wall-street-makes-a-raucous-debut/#utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

 

[katchitup]

Kris Tapley of Hitflix , one of the internet movie bloggers who was at tonight's screening wrote an article about tonight's screening

 

Are Leonardo DiCaprio and 'The Wolf of Wall Street' just what this Oscar season needed?

Martin Scorsese's dark comedy finally screens and it could take the edge off

It's been quite the somber season in some ways: slavery and racial tension, piracy and health care, dementia-addled fathers and embittered folk crooners. Even the year's biggest spectacle achievement, Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity," ultimately takes its weightless heroine to weighty moments of emotion and catharsis (not that we're complaining). It almost feels like what the 2013 film awards season needs is a nice prestige-level dose of outrageousness rather than outrage, something bonkers, something to take the edge off. And Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" is here to answer the call.

The film isn't set to screen for the press at large for another week, but this weekend it began making its way through guild screenings, where plus ones and crossover memberships with critics and the film commentariat are just unavoidable. So it was Saturday afternoon that I made my way to the first of two SAG screenings of this absolutely unrepentant entry (hopefully that caveat saves the studio some disgruntled phone calls — over 100 people were turned away from the two screenings, which were filled to the brim). Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Rob Reiner, Cristina Milioti, Jon Favreau, P.J. Byrne and Kenneth Choi were on hand to discuss working with a master filmmaker and the life and times of a man, Jordan Belfort, who by anyone's measure should probably be dead by now.

As first reported by In Contention, Scorsese's latest found itself tied up in the editing room and on the verge of blowing past an originally-planned Nov. 15 release back in September. It eventually did just that and soon re-calibrated its sights for Christmas Day. The director chopped and whittled a massive first cut down to a, well, still-massive 159 minutes, and that's what we're left with: three sensational hours of unbound, naughty (nearly NC-17), bleak comedy that immediately registers as a different sort of contender this season. Someone described it to me a few weeks ago as "Marty on methamphetamine," and I'm not going to argue with that. Though maybe "Marty on quaaludes" is more apt. I'll get to that…

During the Q&A, DiCaprio — who also produced the film and received a (typical) standing ovation from the guild members in attendance — talked about how when he first read Belfort's memoir, the debauchery was so outrageous that he was eager to develop it as a film. "To me it was like a modern-day 'Caligula,'" he said. "The story is out-of-this-world. You can't believe it happened."

But while it was all set to be his and Scorsese's fifth collaboration right after "Shutter Island," DiCaprio said the financing fell through because the studio balked at some of the more salacious elements of the story. Indeed, the film narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating (which Scorsese liked the idea of releasing in a "Midnight Cowboy" sort of way, a source told me some time ago). But even as the director went off to do "Hugo" and the actor moved on to projects like "J. Edgar" and "The Great Gatsby," DiCaprio couldn't envision the material in another filmmaker's hands.

"I really couldn't get Marty out of my mind," DiCaprio said. "He's somebody that's able to sort of encapsulate the underworld with such authenticity and bring such humor to these characters. I mean, 'Goodfellas' was supposed to be a comedy, he told me. This was tailor-made for him."

Without the cooperation of the real Porush, whose surname was changed to Azoff in the film, Hill had to lean on the well of information provided by the real Belfort. "Any time I play someone real in a movie, they ask to have their name changed," Hill said, referencing his Oscar-nominated work in "Moneyball." The actor was intrigued by the fact that Belfort, who has a small cameo toward the end of "Wolf," would rattle off the litany of despicable things he's done but that "he would never judge himself." But for his part, Scorsese kept his distance from Belfort, DiCaprio said, "because he wanted to be able to have a different perspective." DiCaprio and Hill would then serve as middle men, bringing new material and stories not necessarily documented in the book to the director's attention.

And there were so many stories it was dizzying. One of them, in fact, featuring "German Shepherds and blow jobs in Vegas," according to DiCaprio, was far too scandalous to make it to the screen. "It was so bad I wish I never heard it," Hill said. Cue your imaginations. But that's the kind of outrageousness that was the name of the game here, an almost mercurial sort of spirit that Scorsese even wanted to infuse with the performances.

"It was sort of controlled, calculated chaos," DiCaprio said, noting that he looked into the making of "The King of Comedy" because of the amount of improvisation that went into that 1983 Scorsese film. "And he wanted it to be like that, specifically. He wanted all the actors to have a loose sort of feeling in their performance. It's the first film I did with Marty in the sense that there weren't all these moving puzzle pieces that had to culminate in a powerful ending. This was the story of a man's life, and an insane one at that. So that was his intent, to let it sort of spiral off into madness."

The film's shenanigans therefore play out for a minute shy of three hours, and in many ways, it feels like a film that wants to be longer. Nearly two hours were lopped off during the editing process, but it's the kind of thing that either needed to be an hour shorter (for the potency of, say, "Goodfellas") or a full-blown mini-series (because Belfort's story certainly has the material and the intrigue to sustain that length) to strike the perfect balance. Structure issues start to plague a film this long (particularly a comedy), caught between being a jab and a roundhouse. But it's an epic yarn no matter how you slice it.

And Favreau — who has maybe 60 seconds of screen time in the film — perhaps put it best, mentioning Scorsese's ability to drive out nuanced and subtle performances despite how over-the-top the circumstances of the narrative may be. "It never loses its sense of grounding, and I think that's a hallmark of Scorsese's work," he said. "And as you guys who have seen 'Swingers' know, I've been really fixated on this guy since my earliest moments. So to be a fly on the wall, it was very intimidating, but it was quite an honor."

We'll dive deeper into "The Wolf of Wall Street" in due time, including its Oscar potential, which, I don't mind saying, seems like a bit of a mixed bag, though reaction so far has been hugely enthusiastic. Hill is a great bet for Best Supporting Actor and DiCaprio could frankly nudge someone out of that seemingly locked-up Best Actor race. If she had a few more scenes, it seems to me that Margot Robbie (who will nevertheless be a star after this film comes out) could have pushed into the Best Supporting Actress race, but I'm not so sure beyond that.

Enter film financiers Red Granite, who came in and told DiCaprio and Scorsese not to hold anything back and to push the envelope as far as they possibly could. "I said to Marty, 'We just don't get opportunities like this, ever, in this industry,'" DiCaprio said. "'People do not give you the freedom that these guys want to give us and the budget to make this an epic tale, so we have to take this opportunity.' Thankfully he agreed, and that's what you just saw up on the screen."

At The Weinstein Company's Golden Globes after-party last season, DiCaprio told me in no uncertain terms that he felt his performance in "Wolf" was his best work to date. Not quite, I would argue, but it's absolutely up there as the commitment to the insanity is hugely impressive. One quaalude-driven experience in particular functions in the film almost as a "mini-movie," as the star put it, giving DiCaprio the opportunity to be quite physical with his work as his character suffers through what must have been one of the worst highs anyone ever experienced. The actor said for him it brought to mind the extended "meatballs and helicopters" sequence at the end of "Goodfellas."

Reiner, who was seeing the film for the first time Saturday, took a moment to mention that particular scene as well. "That is one of the funniest set pieces I've ever seen in a movie," he said. "You get nervous when you haven't seen the film because you've got to do a thing with a Q&A, and what if it stunk? I knew it had laughs but I didn't realize how many laughs."

Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/are-leonardo-dicaprio-and-the-wolf-of-wall-street-just-what-this-oscar-season-needed#ZYr8WdqRoh7xqjHm.99