The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American epic biographical dark comedy crime film co-produced and directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Terence Winter, and based on Jordan Belfort's 2007 memoir. It loosely recounts Belfort's career as a stockbroker in New York City and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, engaged in rampant corruption and fraud on Wall Street, leading to his downfall. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort; Jonah Hill as his business partner and friend Donnie Azoff; Margot Robbie as his second wife, Naomi Lapaglia; Matthew McConaughey as his mentor and former boss Mark Hanna; and Kyle Chandler as FBI special agent Patrick Denham portraying Gregory Coleman. It is DiCaprio's fifth collaboration with Scorsese.
DiCaprio and Warner Bros. acquired the rights to Belfort's memoir in 2007, but production was halted due to content restrictions. It was later produced by the independent Red Granite Pictures. The film was shot in New York in late 2012, using mostly 35mm film stock.
The film premiered in New York City on December 17, 2013, and was released in the United States on December 25, by Paramount Pictures, with Universal Pictures releasing in Europe and the United Kingdom. It was the first major American film to be released exclusively through digital distribution. It was a major commercial success, grossing $407 million worldwide during its theatrical run, becoming Scorsese's highest-grossing film. However, the film initially sparked controversy for its moral ambiguity and lack of sympathy for victims, as well as graphic sexual content, extreme profanity (with at least 500 uses of the expletive "fuck"), depiction of hard drug use, and use of animals during production. The film was initially rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America, but it was shortly appealed for an R rating after Scorsese made slight changes to the film. It set a Guinness World Record for the most instances of profanity in a film. The film's financing became implicated in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad corruption scandal; the U.S. Department of Justice and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission investigated Red Granite Pictures, and producer Riza Aziz was arrested in 2019. He was discharged in May 2020 on a 1,000,000 Malaysian ringgit (US$240,000) bail.
The film received positive reviews from critics and appeared on several "best of the year" lists. It was nominated for several awards, including five at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (for DiCaprio) and Best Supporting Actor (for Hill). DiCaprio won Best Actor – Musical or Comedy at the 71st Golden Globe Awards, where the film was also nominated for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy.
Plot
In 1987, twenty-two-year-old Jordan Belfort becomes a Wall Street stockbroker for L.F. Rothschild, employed under Mark Hanna. Quickly enticed by the drug-fueled stockbroker culture, he learns that their goal is to make themselves rich. Jordan loses his job following Black Monday, the largest one-day stock market drop since the crash of 1929, and joins Investor's Center, a boiler room brokerage on Long Island, specializing in pink sheet penny stocks. He makes a small fortune thanks to his aggressive pitching style and high commissions.
Befriending neighbor Donnie Azoff, Jordan and he start their own boiler room brokerage. Jordan's childhood friends Robbie Feinberg, Alden Kupferburg, Nicky Koskoff, Chester Ming, and Toby Welch are recruited as well as drug pusher Brad Bodnick. Jordan trains them on the "hard sell." Jordan's tactics and salesmanship make his pump and dump scheme successful. To cloak this, Jordan gives the firm the respectable-sounding name of Stratton Oakmont in 1989.
Soon after, the company becomes immensely successful, moving out of the auto repair shop into a bigger office. An exposé in Forbes which dubs Jordan "The Wolf of Wall Street" – "a sort of twisted Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers"— initially enrages Belfort until it causes hundreds of ambitious young financiers to flock to the company, thus causing them to move into even bigger offices.
Jordan becomes immensely wealthy, and slides into a decadent lifestyle of prostitutes and drugs. He has an affair with lingerie designer Naomi Lapaglia; when his wife Teresa finds out, Jordan divorces her and marries Naomi in 1991. Meanwhile, the SEC and the FBI begin investigating Stratton Oakmont.
In 1993, Jordan illegally makes $22 million in three hours after securing the IPO of Steve Madden, Ltd., founded by Donnie's childhood friend and women's shoes designer Steve Madden, bringing him and his firm further FBI attention. Jordan tries to bribe agent Denham but fails, prompting him to seek a safe place for the money. He opens a Swiss bank account with corrupt banker Jean-Jacques Saurel, in the name of Naomi's aunt Emma, a British citizen who is outside the immediate reach of American authorities. He uses Brad's Swiss-Slovenian wife Chantalle and her family, who have Swiss passports, to smuggle the cash into Switzerland.
Donnie and Brad get into a heated argument in public during a money exchange, resulting in Brad's arrest as Donnie escapes. Donnie informs Jordan that he has come upon some "Lemmon 714" quaaludes, which the latter refers to as "the holy grail" of drugs. The two take the pills at Belfort's home, but they have no effect. They assume that they have expired, and wind up taking the rest of their supply.
Jordan's private investigator Bo Dietl calls him and tells him he needs to talk to him on a payphone. Jordan drives to a local country club and calls Bo, who informs him that the FBI is wiretapping his phones. While talking with Bo, the quaaludes kick in, and Jordan becomes extremely inebriated, struggling to get home in his Lamborghini Countach. When he gets home, he finds Donnie talking on the phone, and nearly strangles him with the phone cord. Donnie chokes on some meat; Jordan ingests cocaine to counteract the quaaludes and gives him the Heimlich maneuver. The next day, the police arrive and inform Jordan that his car has been trashed.
Jordan's father Max advises him to leave Stratton Oakmont and lie low while Jordan's lawyer negotiates a deal to keep him out of prison. In the midst of his farewell speech, Jordan cannot bear to quit and talks himself into staying, to the relief of his friends and employees, and the dismay of his father.
In 1996, Jordan, Donnie, and their wives are on a yacht trip to Italy, when they learn that Emma has died. Fearing for the money he left under her name in a Swiss account, Jordan announces that they will chart a course to Switzerland to forge her name on a document and save the account before going to London for the funeral. To bypass the border patrols, he orders his yacht captain Ted to sail to Monaco, but their ship capsizes in a storm. After their rescue, the plane sent to take them to Geneva is destroyed when a seagull flies into the engine; Jordan takes this as a sign from God to address his worsening drug addiction and attempts to sober up.
In 1998, Saurel and Koskoff are arrested for an unrelated crime, the former informing the FBI about Jordan as part of a plea bargain. Since the evidence against him is overwhelming, Jordan agrees to gather evidence from the rest of his colleagues in exchange for leniency. Now fully disgusted with Jordan's lifestyle, Naomi tells him that she is divorcing him, and is taking full custody of their children, causing Jordan to angrily punch her, relapse on cocaine, and tries to drive away with their daughter, but crashes his car in the driveway.
Later, Jordan wears a wire to work but slips a note to Donnie, warning him. The note is found by the FBI, who arrest Jordan, then raid and shut down Stratton Oakmont. Despite breaching his deal, Jordan receives a reduced sentence of 36 months in a minimum security prison for his testimony, and is released in 2000 after serving 22 months. After his release, Jordan makes a living hosting seminars on sales techniques, using the same test he used with his founding partners at his firm.
Cast
In addition, cameos and smaller roles include Bo Dietl as himself, the real Jordan Belfort as the Auckland Straight Line host at the end of the film, Stephanie Kurtzuba as Kimmie Belzer, Thomas Middleditch as a Stratton broker whose goldfish is eaten by Donnie for slacking off, Jake Hoffman as Steve Madden, Fran Lebowitz as The Honorary Samantha Stogel, Edward Herrmann as the voiceover in the Stratton Oakmont commercial at the beginning of the film, Steve Buscemi appears through archive footage in an episode of The Equalizer, and an uncredited Spike Jonze as Dwayne, the head of the Long Island brokerage firm who introduces Belfort to the world of penny stocks.
Production
Development
In 2007, DiCaprio and Warner Bros. won a bidding war for the rights to Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street, with Belfort making $1 million off the deal. Having worked on the film's script, Scorsese was considered to direct the film but abandoned the project to work on Shutter Island (2010). In 2010, Warner Bros. offered the directorial role to Ridley Scott, with Brad Pitt playing Belfort, but the studio eventually abandoned the project.
In 2012, the independent company Red Granite Pictures greenlit the project without content restrictions. Soon after, Scorsese came back on board. Red Granite Pictures also asked Paramount Pictures to distribute the film; Paramount agreed to do so in the United States, Canada and Japan, with Red Granite Pictures holding international rights through various independent distributors, Universal Pictures distributed the film in some countries in Europe and Roadshow Films distributed the film in Australia and New Zealand.
According to Belfort, Random House asked him to tone down or excise the depictions of debauchery in his memoir before publication, especially those relating to his bachelor party, which featured bestiality, and rampant use of drugs like nitrous oxide; neither the published memoir nor the film contains references to this.
In the film, most real-life characters' names have been changed from Belfort's original memoir. Donnie Azoff is based on Danny Porush. The name was changed after Porush threatened to sue the filmmakers and Paramount. Porush maintains that much of the film is fictional and that Azoff is not an accurate depiction of him. Former Donna Karan Jeanswear CEO Elliot Lavigne does not appear in the film, but an incident recounted in the book, in which Belfort gives Lavigne mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save him from choking to death, is similar to a scene in the film involving Donnie. The FBI agent Patrick Denham is the stand-in for real-life Gregory Coleman, and lawyer Manny Riskin is based on Ira Sorkin. Belfort's first wife, Denise Lombardo, is renamed Teresa Petrillo, and his second wife, Nadine Caridi, is Naomi Lapaglia on-screen. In contrast, Mark Hanna's name remains the same as the LF Rothschild stockbroker who, like Belfort, was convicted of fraud and served time in prison. Belfort's parents Max and Leah Belfort's names remained the same for the film. The role of Aunt Emma was initially offered to Julie Andrews, who declined as she was recovering from an ankle injury, and was replaced by Joanna Lumley. Olivia Wilde auditioned for the role of Naomi, but she was rejected as she was deemed "too old" for the role despite DiCaprio being a decade older; the role eventually went to Margot Robbie. In January 2014, Jonah Hill revealed in an interview with Howard Stern that he had made only $60,000 on the film (the lowest possible SAG-AFTRA rate for his amount of work), while DiCaprio (who also produced) received $10 million.
Filming