Leo said he wanted to keep that insane sequence going. But then we were talking about the whole wonderful energy of the first part of that scene earlier in the movie, where Jordan’s at the country club and he passes out and has to get home, how funny that was. Jordan looks down and Donnie’s at the bottom of the pool and he has to pull him out and save him. Donnie was high and challenged Jordan to a race and they’re swimming. The part where Jordan rescues Donnie and saves him from choking was originally later in the movie, after Jordan had gotten sober. Winter discusses one of the movie’s comedic highlights: the scene wherein DiCaprio attempts to exit his country club and drive home under the creeper effects of some vintage quaaludes. You get it in the hands of an actor like that, he’ll just hit it out of the park. When I eventually wrote the speeches that you see in the movie, I’d read these things aloud to myself in my head, and say “That sounds pretty good,” but I couldn’t imagine how much better it would sound when Leo did it. But we ended up filling a conference room at CAA with agents and their assistants and he sort of recreated one of these sales speeches, and he was amazing. So I asked if he had any old speeches, and he didn’t. He’d written in the book about these speeches he used to make to motivate the brokers at Stratton Oakmont, but not in great detail. An important part of Jordan Belfort is his gift of oratory. Leo’s handling of those big speeches made me feel like I’d written the character to the best of my abilities.
But I understood the lingo, and I understood these sort of “big swinging dick” guys and their flashy suits and cars and money, and it certainly helped me get perspective on what I was writing about. It was a whole different game than what you got in Manhattan.
Merrill Lynch was of course a much more conservative space than Stratton Oakmont became. I understood who those guys were, though. Rothschild a quarter mile away that day, but of course I didn’t know him. I was actually on the Merrill Lynch trading floor the day the market crashed in 1987. It helped that I already understood the business aspect and the jargon from when I worked on Wall Street. It was probably only six or seven pages of the script, and it took me a long time to get it right, but once I did, I felt I knew who I’d be spending the next few hours with. Once I got past the introduction, I knew who Jordan Belfort was. Those were sort of my marching orders when I went off to write, and I kept that in mind throughout the whole process. He used the word “ferocious.” He wanted it to feel like strapping into a rocket ship and it takes off and never slows down.
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He wanted to make this movie a sort of a companion piece to Goodfellas, in the same tone and style. So I really needed voiceover to do that, and Marty was on board immediately.
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Also, there are these little asides in the book, like Jordan would talk about the four stages of being high, or the three kinds of hookers, and these were things that I couldn’t figure out how to work into dialogue, but they were really funny detours for Jordan to take. “This is who I am, this is what I did, this is what happened to me.” I was worried that Marty wouldn’t be interested in doing that, because he did it already in Goodfellas and Casino, so I went in there hoping I’d be able to make my case. He’s a salesman, so I wanted Jordan to tell you the story from his point of view. I was very interested in using voiceover–letting Jordan tell you, or sell you, his story. Right out of the gate, I knew I wanted my approach to be similar to Goodfellas and Casino. Terence Winter Image: Stephen Lovekin | Getty Images The Decision