MTV: It's also a really stylized approach, between an unreliable narrator, the voiceovers, some kind of telepathy. We did it, and we read it aloud in the room, and it was like, "God, this is really great. "God, I think this actually is ten times better than what we had," which we already loved. Like the whole quaaludes thing at the country club was so fun, like how do we keep that energy going? So we took that choking thing and put it on the end of that, like what if he's on his way home and he finds out he's on the phone with Switzerland and that sort of happened there, and in the process Marty goes, "OK, let's try it, go write it and we'll see how it goes." So I went off and I did it and was like. That had happened originally in a pool later in the movie, but Leo, while we were talking about the tone and the pacing and the energy, reminded me of the sequence in "Goodfellas" where it's Ray Liotta's crazy day where he has to go to the hospital to his brother, he's gotta get the spaghetti and he's coked out of his mind and yadda yadda. Most notably is the quaaludes sequence, the overdose sequence, originally the scene where Donnie chokes on the ham was a totally different scene. many, many meetings with Marty and Leo going through the script line by line by line.Īs things developed, we combined some scenes, we shortened some things, we lengthened some things, we changed some scenes and got it ready for production. I said, "Would you mind if I did it that way." That was a discussion early on, and he said, "Let's actually make this a companion piece to 'Goodfellas.' We'll make it really in that style." So I had permission to go off and do that, which was great, and then once I wrote the script. Like in the movie, the five different phases of being high, three different types of hookers, things that didn't necessarily lend themselves to dialogue but were interesting, and I'd go, "God, I'd really love to see this in the movie." So basically I wanted his permission to incorporate voiceover into the film.
Terence Winter: Initially, my big request of Marty, who I met before I went off to write the script, I said, you know, Jordan is such a big personality and one of his part of his charm is the way that he describes things, and his asides are really hilarious, the way he breaks people's balls. How much did you collaborate while you were writing the script, and what did he bring to the process that you wouldn't usually do?
WOLF OF WALL STREET MOVIE
MTV: This movie has been years in the making, and Scorsese definitely has his own style. We talked to the writer of one of the most polarizing films of the year about working with Scorsese, how "Wolf" is a spiritual sequel to "Goodfellas" and how he wrote the best drug scene in recent history. Winter is no stranger to the screen (or morally ambiguous leading men, for that matter), having created "Boardwalk Empire" and served a long tenure as a writer on "The Sopranos." `Still, "Wolf" is a different beast, between its real-life storyline, larger-than-life cast and one of the most respected directors of the generation. "You've just gotta strap in and go for the ride," Winter said in a recent interview with MTV News. To adapt former stockbroker Jordan Belfort's tale of extravagance, loose morals and general craziness on Wall Street in the '90s, Terence Winter spent years tussling with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese (the eventual star and director, respectively, of the movie) and untangling a drug-addled narrative in a way that would make it translate logically to the screen but still keep the kinetic wildness it had on the page. When you're writing a script called " The Wolf of Wall Street," you've got to be a bit of an animal yourself.