The True Story Behind 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

BYJONATHON NORCROSS

PUBLISHED JUN 25, 2022

What's the deal with the real Jordan Belfort?

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a darkly comedic portrayal of unrestrained Wall Street hedonism and greed that ranks among the maestro’s greatest works of the last decade. Like all narrative films based on true stories, a few liberties were taken with Jordan Belfort’s life and crimes, such as using Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff character as a stand-in for multiple real-life friends of Belfort’s. Overall though, the film is remarkably accurate and certainly conveys the underlying truths of Belfort’s 2007 memoir, which was the primary source material for the film. Although the film is 3 hours long, some details and interesting subplots were unable to make the final cut. As we explore the real-life stories of some of the film’s principal characters, we’ll see where Scorsese’s film diverted from the truth, and we’ll understand the additional context that helps add complexity to this remarkable, hilarious, and tragic story.

COLLIDER

 

CREDIT: GETTY (2)

Martin Scorsese Remembers Goodfellas Star Ray Liotta After His Death: 'He Absolutely Amazed Me'

The legendary director worked with the late actor on the 1990 classic gangster film

By Nigel Smith, Olivia Jakiel and Kara Warner
May 26, 2022 08:21 PM

Martin Scorsese is paying tribute to his Goodfellas star Ray Liotta.

The Emmy Award-winning actor died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic, PEOPLE confirmed Thursday. He was engaged to fiancée Jacy Nittolo, and he was dad to daughter Karsen, 23, with ex-wife Michelle Grace.

Il Maestro By Martin Scorsese / Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema

Il Maestro

By Martin Scorsese

Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959).

CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare.

Under one arm, he’s carrying books. In his other hand, a copy of The Village Voice.

He walks quickly, past men in coats and hats, women with scarves over their heads pushing collapsible shopping carts, couples holding hands, and poets and hustlers and musicians and winos, past drugstores, liquor stores, delis, apartment buildings.

Scorsese / Shutter Island

POSTERS & TAPAS

Martin Scorsese

SHUTTER ISLAND

Poster / Raging Bull

Posters

RAGING BULL

‘I made it as if this was the end of my life’: Scorsese on Raging Bull at 40

 

At a Tribeca film festival event, the director and his star Robert De Niro discussed the legacy of the greatest boxing movie ever made

Charles Bramesco

Monday 21 June 2021

In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.

 

Raging Bull at 40: Scorsese's brutal boxing saga still bruises

Robert De Niro’s Oscar-winning performance as Jake LaMotta remains chilling yet it’s a defiant refusal to soften a deeply unlikable lead character that hits hardest

Guy Lodge
Friday 13 November 2020

T

here is a tendency among audiences – including, sometimes, even the best of critics – to judge movies by how much we warm to their characters. An “unlikable protagonist” surfaces again and again in reviews as a strike against a film: a problem, certainly, in a romantic comedy where you’d rather throttle both leads than applaud their happy ending.

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta: a flawed character alchemised by Raging Bull into a mythical figure

 

LaMotta was immortalised on screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, but their brilliant 1980 movie remade boxing history in the process

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 21 September 2017

“Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I’m looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white, I don’t know, but it is. Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and no end.”

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta, former boxer whose life was subject of Raging Bull, dies aged 95

Bryan Armen Graham

Wed 20 September 2017

 

Jake LaMotta, the Bronx boxer who captured the world middleweight championship in 1949 and whose turbulent life was later the subject of the 1980 film Raging Bull, died on Tuesday because of complications from pneumonia. He was 95.

New York Stories / Review by Pauline Kael

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NEW YORK STORIES (1989): TWO-BASE HIT – Review by Pauline Kael

by Pauline Kael

As an artist in Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons, the first part of the anthology film New York Stories, Nick Nolte is more bricklayer than aesthete, and that’s what’s great about him. After the artist’s girl tells him she’s leaving him, he gets into a rhythm as he spreads bright colors on a huge horizontal canvas, and you can see that he has the energy to breathe life into it. This isn’t a matter of physical size; it’s his conviction, his sureness. Scorsese is a skinny little guy, but he’s got this energy, too. And he uses Nolte’s Lionel Dobie for good-humored self-satire. Still, Nolte’s towering stockiness does help: he’s a wonderful sculptural object—a loping, gray-bearded beast spattered with paint. He pads up and down in front of the canvas moving his brushstrokes to rock and roll, played loud enough to drown out distractions. Do­bie works fast. Smiling, he’s dancing with his brushes, painting to the music. Scorsese knows that painting to rock is a cliche, but he also knows that it’s a good way for an Action painter to work. The music turned up high like that unifies Dobie’s impulses. His sensuality is all working together, exciting him, keeping him going.

Martin Scorsese: digital de-ageing could replace make-up

Martin Scorsese

In our November 2019 issue, Martin Scorsese discusses the new work in digitally ‘youthifying’ Robert De Niro for his new film The Irishman – and speculates that it could become a more significant tool of illusionism than traditional tricks of hairdressing and make-up.

The Irishman sees Martin Scorsese re-uniting with his old star Robert De Niro to tell the story of Frank Sheeran, a World War II soldier turned mafia fixer who was assigned to handle relations with the powerful union boss Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino) and later claimed responsibility for Hoffa’s disappearance and death. 

For our November 2019 issue, Scorsese sat down with Philip Horne for a generous three-and-a-half-hour interview covering mob culture, power and politics, his history with Al Pacino, why he made the film for Netflix, what he learned from his Bob Dylan documentaries and much more. One revelatory topic was the filmmakers’ groundbreaking work with digital ‘youthification’ technology to allow De Niro and his fellow septuagenarians to play their characters across 50 years of American history.

Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino

In the section of the interview excerpted below, Scorsese explains the fine details of facial analysis and animation that he, his editor Thelma Schoonmaker and the visual effects team led by Industrial Light & Magic’s Pablo Helman found was required to preserve the actors’ performances and emotions as the de-ageing technology rolled back the years from their faces. Given more practice and perfection, could this – rather than “prosthetics and that sort of thing” – become the standard for telling film stories that cross the decades? 

 

Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino

Philip Horne: About the use of ‘youthification’ in the film. You were quoted as saying at an earlier stage, when I think you weren’t happy with the first version, “Does it change the eyes at all?”

Martin Scorsese: That’s the second time I’ve heard that as if it was a negative thing. Actually not.

What I was saying was: “That’s the job, that’s what we have to do.” In other words, you keep the eyes, but even if you keep the eyes, there’s much more to that: there’s the crow’s feet, there’s the bags under the eyes, there’s the eyebrow. There’s the way the light hit. So every frame you see, there’s infinitesimal work that’s been done. Ultimately, it’s about the performance and about the character.

I knew the sort of picture it has to be. I said, “I can’t have the actors, these actors, with mechanical objects on their heads” because they’re not going to do it, it gets in the way.

But then Pablo came back to me and said, “I think I’ve figured a way.” And he made the… I guess they’re called contacts; little pieces of fabric or something that really were invisible. And you know, you could be wearing it like, round here [indicates his face], and at a certain point you’re talking to a person, you’re not talking to a machine.

The challenge, as they say these days, was to take those elements and keep the person, not lose them in something that is cleaned up. It’s really about keeping that character, keeping those emotions and their faces alive.

In one scene where De Niro’s younger, for example, and he’s talking to some people and he has to convey a kind of vulnerability and a haplessness – making him younger, a couple of times we noticed, made him look like he was threatening them.

Now why’s that? The line around the mouth. So, let’s go into the mouth, work on that.

A week later they bring it back. “No, it still looks like he’s threatening.” Well, maybe the eyes have to be fixed – around the eyes.

I’m going for what the performance is. Ultimately, we felt that we regained through the youthification process the vulnerability in that moment.

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino

So it makes you look very closely at the actual way that facial expressions work?

Yes, at every aspect of the face. And then of course as the actor moves in the frame, the light changes. So a few frames this way – you’ve got to put some texture here… and so you’re really creating, recreating, the performance, in a way, with the basic truthful elements of the actor, and protecting those.

We stumbled through that. We said, “What about trying this? What about that?” It would come back a week later, we would say, “It looks a bit funny here, or there.” And so we’d go back. We did that with every shot, with Joe Pesci and with Al too. It’s a learning experience.

Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa

In a way, I look at it as… well, there’s the convention in cinema of the use of make-up. If you look at an older film, there was an acceptance by the audience where the hair is powdered, or you know that that’s make-up and that the moustache is fake. But you went with the illusion.

I always remember the great Dick Smith, and the old-age make-up he made for [Dustin Hoffman’s 121-year-old character in] Little Big Man [1970]. Or the make-up in The Elephant Man [1980]. Where’s the heart? Where’s the performance? It’s there, because John Hurt was great. But I know that’s make-up, so as a viewer I go with the illusion. I give you something back so I can get something from the world that you’re trying to depict for me and the characters.

It’s another level of that, I think. And ultimately, it might be superior in the long run, to creating an illusion. Rather than having to apply prosthetics and that sort of thing. Mind you, we did a great deal of make-up on the film too.

Do you think this system will have an effect on other films that are made?

I think so. Obviously, it may have an effect on films that are trying to create more of a futuristic world. But it’s as good as the people doing it, really. Pablo and his group and ILM were amazing; and we were – myself and Thelma – on them to work in the slightest, the most scrupulous way.

One of the key things was, I didn’t want to make a film dealing with this subject-matter, and this character – and where we were taking him, to the very end – and have half the film working with younger actors that were supposed to be Bob, supposed to be Joe, and supposed to be Al. I just didn’t.

And so you may find that now that’s something that is doable: actors playing themselves younger – or older. This is a first time and there is an element of cost. But I think the more it’s used, the more the cost will become reasonable.

BFI

Daniel Day-Lewis (Newlan Archer) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Countess Ellen Olenska)

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE: DREAD AND DESIRE

by Amy Taubin

BIOGRAPHY
Covers / Edith Wharton / The Age of Innocence
The 100 best novels / No 45 / The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)

At the close of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer, a recently widowed 57-year-old with three adult children and a pillar of late-nineteenth-century New York society, sits on a bench in a residential street in Paris beneath the windows of Countess Ellen Olenslca, the woman who was the great love of his life and who had become in the 26 years since he had last seen her “the composite vision of all he had missed”. The countess has invited Archer and his son to tea. Archer gets as far as the front door and then hesitates, musing about the past and about possible futures, and about the occupant of the top-floor apartment, “a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it”, if only he could bring himself to enter.

“‘It’s more real to me here than if I went up,’ he heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the moments succeeded each other.” With this, Wharton elevates Archer to the highest rank of romantic hero – one whose desire turns on an act of the imagination rather than an engagement with the world.
Martin Scorsese’s remarkably faithful adaptation of Wharton’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of manners, marriage and missed opportunities includes, through dialogue and voiceover narration, as much of the original text as possible in a 136-minute film, but conspicuously omits Archer’s last exclamation and the three paragraphs of description that follow. At the last possible moment, Scorsese gambles on image alone (coloured by Elmer Bernstein’s lushly old-fashioned score) to convey that Archer is lost in the movie inside his head, and that that movie is precisely the one we’ve been watching.
I have no way of judging whether the gamble pays off. Having read Wharton’s novel some half dozen times, I found myself supplying her text at crucial moments; and I suspect that Scorsese couldn’t keep from doing the same while editing. Among the qualities we expect from great film-makers is a show of independence, that their works seem sufficient in themselves even as they offer a rich lode of material for interpretation. It’s a bit disconcerting, therefore, when the director of Raging Bull, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver – Ur-texts for contemporary American film-makers – makes his debt to his source material so evident, refusing to define boundaries between original and adaptation.
Scorsese proffers neither an aggressive interpretation that would have made Wharton’s novel his own even as it established his distance from it (as with Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Lolita); nor is he acting as a post-modern scavenger, denying the inviolability of everyone else’s texts while using them to shore up an impenetrable fortress of his own; nor is he involved in literary grazing like such classical Hollywood directors as William Wyler or such art-house darlings as Merchant-Ivory. Rather, Scorsese’s relation to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is totally fetishistic. “What I wanted to do as much as possible was to recreate for a viewing audience the experience I had reading the book,” he commented when I interviewed him a few weeks after the film’s US release, adding that although he’d read many novels from or about the nineteenth century, he’d never felt about any of them the way he felt about The Age of Innocence. “For me, it has to do with Archer’s relationship to Ellen and his not being able to fulfil it as he thinks he would like to. That’s what’s so moving – the things you miss in life with people, or the things you think you miss,” he explained on another occasion.
Scorsese’s desire was somehow “to present” Wharton’s novel, as in recent years he has presented restored prints of films from his personal canon: The Age of Innocence as a Martin Scorsese presentation rather than a Martin Scorsese picture. The fetishism implicit in this approach mirrors the fetishism of the society depicted in the novel, where desire is felt as a threat that must be deflected on to objects and contained by ritual. (And it’s precisely Wharton’s understanding of the mix of dread and desire in sexuality that makes her work so resonant in the age of Aids.)
Two years ago, when Scorsese announced The Age of Innocence as his next project, the media gasped in snobbish amazement at the prospect of the goodfella invading Wharton’s drawing rooms. But class difference notwithstanding, there are striking parallels between them. Raging romantics, they can also call a spade a spade and look into the grave it digs.
In their best-known work, Scorsese and Wharton examine the cultures in which they came of age from the perspectives of insiders who were always outsiders. Ambivalence is central to their style. Aware, even as children, that they were unsuited to the gender ideals prescribed them, they each found an identity in art. Scorsese grew up in New York’s Little Italy, an ethnically enclosed working-class neighbourhood. Exempted because of his asthma from the male rites that his films eroticise and critique, he spent his time going to the movies with his father and drawing comics – prototypes for the storyboards he still uses to prepare for production.
Wharton was born in 1862 into a no less rigid culture – that of the upper-class descendants of New York’s original Dutch and German settlers. Her adolescent nicknames included both “Pussy” and “John”. Confined by a social order that viewed literary achievement with suspicion if not contempt, she nevertheless devoured her father’s library and began to write when she was 12. When her first engagement was broken off, the Newport, Rhode Island Daily News speculated that the cause was “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Wharton didn’t take herself seriously as a writer until she was in her late 30s and didn’t consider herself a professional until The House of Mirth (1905) became a best-seller. Like Scorsese, Wharton, by adhering to the codes of realism, straddles the divide between art and mass culture.

New York, New York
A year after the success of The House of Mirth, Wharton began a move from the US to France which became permanent shortly before the beginning of the First World War. The Age of Innocence, which apart from its leap into the twentieth century in the last chapter is set in the New York of her childhood, was written from a position of self-imposed exile (or escape to freedom) – and from what Wharton saw as the unbridgeable distance produced by the war. Always a period piece, it satirises the society that marked its author for life, but also reveals her primal attachment to New York and its history, an attachment Scorsese shares.
If Scorsese is known for his brutal dissection of the codes of masculinity, Wharton, whom Henry James dubbed “The Angel of Devastation”, applied her scalpel to the construction of femininity that makes women complicit in their own subjugation. Her primary target was marriage; her identification of that institution as central to women’s oppression makes her work fascinating to contemporary feminists. (Scorsese is similarly interested in how social institutions mould feeling into expression. He has an anthropologist’s eye for the rituals of daily life and a Freudian’s grasp of the dynamics of guilt, rage and repression.)
But Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, however rich its descriptions of tribal forms and rituals, is not simply a social satire. While acknowledging that satire was “her weapon”, Wharton wrote of wanting “The Age to be taken not as a costume piece but a simple and grave story of two people trying to live up to something that was still felt in the blood at that time.”
Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence also runs the danger of being taken as a costume drama, although he, like Wharton, is enthralled by the love story. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), an eligible bachelor with intellectual leanings, meets the love of his life, the enigmatic, slightly scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) just hours after proposing to her more conventional cousin May Welland (Winona Ryder). Although Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in the third person, her focus was Archer – his is the only subjectivity to which we are given access. What we know of Ellen and May is almost entirely mediated by his not altogether reliable perception of them.
It may be that Wharton found the investment of the women characters in this love triangle a bit too hot to handle. Psychoanalysis counsels that all romantic triangles originate in unresolved Oedipal fantasies. (Wharton called the jargon of Freudianism “sewerage”, but she left unfinished at her death Beatrice Palmietto, a novel that would have been about father/daughter incest.) So it is perhaps no accident that Newland and May bear a certain resemblance to Wharton’s own father and mother, and that there’s much of Edith herself in Ellen, the exotic interloper, the Europeanised bohemian, the only successfully independent female character Wharton created. It’s the unspoken fantasy of the daughter’s rescue of the father from the controlling mother that gives the novel its double edge and that accounts for the amazing empathy Wharton has with Archer.
Scorsese, however, takes Wharton at her word. The film belongs to Archer, who despite differences of class and historical circumstance shares with the director’s other heroes the repression and guilt that makes it impossible for him to act on his desires – and makes him desire only the impossible. Trapped between duty, his need to do what he’s been bred to do, and rebellion, his longing to break free from
other worlds to which Ellen holds the key (that’s why she’s more than a sexual object), he vacillates, dashing from one woman to the other, until the tribe, rallying around the seemingly guileless May, decides for him.
What’s new here for Scorsese is that the gap between desire and action cannot be bridged by physical violence. Not by the carnage of Travis Bickle nor by the head-banging of Jake LaMotta. The repressed does not return in this film; it merely produces the anxiety of ambivalence.

Under their hats
In the scenes between Newland and Ellen and between Newland and May, Scorsese charts that ambivalence – the barely perceptible oscillations of desire – frame by frame. Here, rather than in the obsessively researched, baroque displays of decoration and architecture, costumes and artefacts, food and flowers, is where the film-making brilliance is located. Scorsese has always communicated a taste for anxiety, but never so much as in The Age of Innocence – the suffocating anxiety of waiting for the sign on which one believes one’s life depends, wanting it to come and at the same time fearing it. Scorsese plays with the rhythms of anxiety and sexual guilt the way Hitchcock did in Vertigo -an unlikely film to reference were it not for the Saul Bass title sequence. In the titles to The Age of Innocence, the central image is not an eye, but the petals of a flower unfurling over and over in slow motion superimposed on a page from the original text. The image is sickly sweet -sensuality is posed as a threat, a disruption. One could be sucked into that sweetness, one could die of it. Better to keep it at a distance. A movie-going affair. A fetishistic object.
Full-blown romantic passion is a new subject for Scorsese and he has constructed some ravishing visual tropes to express it: dissolving an image into vaporous red or yellow as if perception was suffused, completely coloured by emotion; rising in on the lovers and then dropping out the sound so it seems that for each of them nothing exists but the other. For the most part, however, he allows the performances, particularly Day-Lewis’, to carry the film.
In the rigidly coded society of The Age of Innocence, people rarely spealc their minds or act on their feelings. So skilled is Archer in keeping up fools even himself. He doesn’t realise until half way through the film that his initial feelings for Ellen of pity (because she’s the victim of a bad marriage) and envy (for her freedom to come and go as she pleases) have coalesced into amour fou. Day-Lewis’ performance is at its most extraordinary when he manages to let us know things about Newland that Newland doesn’t know himself. Early in the relationship with Ellen, Newland goes to a flower shop to fulfil his daily ritual of sending lilies of the valley to May and finds his hand wandering towards some yellow roses and then writing a card addressed to Countess Olenska to accompany them. The gestures are of a man sleep-walking through a decision that will change his life. And what is moving for us is precisely the intensity of the denial.
If Pfeiffer and Ryder fare less well, it’s partly because their roles are less fully written. The film provides them with no more subjectivity than the novel – and unless you’re willing to probe for subtexts, that’s almost none at all. May has one moment at the climax when we understand not only what she wants, but what she has done to get it – and Ryder plays it like a demon. Ellen, however, remains a projection of Archer’s imagination, an impossible part for an actress because there’s no way to flesh out a fantasy without destroying it (although Pfeiffer will probably be nominated by the Academy).
As “grave” as anything Wharton could have envisioned, but hardly “simple”, The Age of Innocence is made for multiple viewings – the first time for the shock of betrayal in the last 20 minutes, the next few to unpack the narrative structure that gets us to that point, one more to ponder the ontological problems of adapting novels to film, and another just to look at the image. At some point in the second half of the film – meaning after the wedding that’s more like a funeral – Scorsese cuts from an abortive encounter between Archer and Ellen to a slow-motion shot of a crowd of men in identical bowler hats walking towards the camera, while on the soundtrack we hear a mournful ditty about lost love. Newland is about to be engulfed by these men whose hats are a sign of the conformity he fears – the conformity of men who’ve learned to keep it all under their hats. The most haunting and revelatory image in the film, it’s nowhere to be found in the novel.
The Age of Innocence opens on 28 January 1994

Sight & Sound, December, 1993

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