Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street

How would you encapsulate your feelings on the story of the movie, now that you have literally lived Jordan Belfort’s life? In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Wall Street was so incredibly unregulated, it was like the wild, wild West. 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.

What is that attracted you to produce and act in The Wolf of Wall Street?

What was so refreshing and fascinating was the way Jordan wrote the novel and his absolute candidness. He held nothing back... he pulled no punches. And whenever you are presented with an opportunity to do a movie, you look for that kind of honesty in every character and the storyline. He was unapologetic about his actions and lust for wealth and his mad consumption of everything around him... 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 movie.

Martin Scorsese was always your first choice of director, but then you tried making the movie with others. What made you go back to him?

Since when we originally got the screenplay, I completely fell in love with the character and I really wanted to do this movie. Scorsese was also very interested in the project. You know, we had just finished Shutter Island and we were trying to set the film up but the financing fell through. So he went on to do another project and was about to do another one and I tried to move on with another director, but from the start, I couldn’t stop thinking of Marty for this material.

We have seen from his work that he’s able to bring a reality, a life and a sense of comedy to the darkness which is very apparent in this story, and that’s something very, very few filmmakers can accomplish. I always remember Marty telling me that Goodfellas (1990, with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci) was a dark comedy... so that’s why I re-approached him and said: ‘Look we have these collaborators who want to give us full reign to explore this dark side and not just do a U-rated version and they want to give us the budget to show this epic expanse of the world in ’90s in America’. It is one of the very rare experiences where artistes get free creative control over the content and that was the attitude we needed for making this movie. I wish all movies were like that.

Did you ever fear about people not accepting a character like Jordan Belfort? Well, that’s always the big question that you have going into a movie like this... 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.

Some of the greatest characters of all times have been horrible people! (Laughs) These guys were running wild with America’s money in their hands. But you can’t help wanting to watch them, watching them disintegrate, watching them succumb to their own lust and greed...ironic but incredibly entertaining. You know, this wasn’t classic material... it wasn’t an iconic piece of American literature. It was one man’s account of a very insane time in recent history.

You had to memorise really long speeches as dialogues. How was that experience?

The speeches were very interesting because it almost became like a U2 concert! It took on a life of its own. Jordan 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 rockstar 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 others. 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.

You also had to improvise a lot on set...

One of the references that I had was the film Caligula (1979), a mass and orgy of wealth and drugs and a group of people that really want to succeed at any cost. There have been films in the past like Boiler Room or Wall Street, but this had this sense of humour that has never been put on film before, and our approach was to be very improvisational. I think all of us wanted to connect with our characters, do as much research as we possibly could.

I got the chance to meet Jordan Belfort himself and get a first-hand account of a lot of these incidents and then there was this massive rehearsal period with a lot of improvisation and then we just kind of integrated all that improvisation into the filmmaking process. It was like a theatre company of guys coming in and playing around with the material. There were these sequences that were only a page long, but we would be improvising for hours and hours.

How did the other actors approach their characters?

Our attitude was: ‘Let’s not try to whitewash anything. Let’s not try to make these characters likeable. Let’s portray them for what they are’. That meant exploring the unbelievable times that they had during those few years where they were completely unregulated and had no rules. Ultimately they pay the price and everything comes crashing down in a flaming pile of rubble but you know, let’s be honest about what they were doing and they were having an insanely good time.

You are working with Jonah Hill for the first time. What did he bring on board?

It was an amazing experience for all of us because I have traditionally worked on a lot of movies that have a very specific plot structure, and there are so many different moving parts that need to happen to ultimately culminate in an ending and this film was a much different experience and so somebody like a Jonah for all of us was an electrifying force that ignited each scene he was in, every single day and I am very thankful he did that for us on this film.

You will be bringing the audiences in to what is clearly an ‘unruly time’...

There will be some moments in the movie where people will be shocked and appalled, but you get wrapped up in this world and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to bring people into a time period that was wild and rampant without regulations and that which would envelope you and you almost become desensitised to the debauchery.

Why will viewers remember this film?

When you go into a filmmaking process, you aren’t very flexible about what’s yet to come. This is an example of one of those films where a group of artistes get together and say: ‘Let’s see what happens... let’s come incredibly prepared, but let’s see what magic happens in that moment’. And that’s why, to me, there are so many memorable sequences in this movie that may even take a while to resonate with the people because, like I said, people are very desensitised to what they see on screen... But I think the way Marty let us play... I think people are really going to remember this movie.