Despite having been released nearly eight years ago, Wolf of Wall Street continues to be a hot topic of discussion.
It was just one of those films that was obviously destined to be iconic — I mean, look at the cast!
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If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen this movie a handful of times — might even be able to recite a line or two. But turns out there are a lot more BTS secrets that we didn’t know!
1. *Wolf of Wall Street* set the record for scripted film with the most F-words.
Believe it or not, throughout the film , the f-word was spoken more than 500 times, setting the record for most f-words used in a scripted film.
For some, this is a huge honor.
2. Leonardo DiCaprio had to sit down and chat with real-life drug addicts in order to portray his character properly.
Leo has stated in the past that he has never actually tried drugs IRL, and so, would have had a difficult time playing a cocaine-addict.
So, in preparation for the film, he sat down with actual drug addicts to gain some perspective .
3. The script was made to make the characters likable to some extent through authenticity, even though they were doing unethical things.
“None of the people that made this movie likes these people, at all. We had a lot of conversations at the beginning about whether we could make them so unlikeable that people would completely not identify with them, or not care,” Leo revealed to Deadline .
“I’ve done many movies like this. I don’t want to pass judgment on these people. I want to show them for what they are,” he went on.
“If you look at Goodfellas , there is an attractiveness to that lifestyle, but it’s never condoning that behavior. It’s getting you, as a human being, to more closely understand what these people are like, and to understand maybe something within ourselves that could also be attracted to that world. He said you are okay as long as you portray people as authentically as you possibly can and don’t try to give some false sense of sympathy and don’t apologize for their actions .”
4. Although some find the film to be funny, it wasn’t actually supposed to be a comedy.
“At no time did we ever say, we are making a comedy. These people were having an outrageously good time at the expense of other people. They were living in a Roman empire while other people were suffering,” Leo said to Deadline .
5. The cocaine in the film was made up of crushed vitamins.
They couldn’t use real cocaine on the set of the film, for several obvious reasons.
But in an attempt to create the most realistic-looking fake cocaine, they crushed up white vitamins .
6. Jonah Hill was hospitalized for snorting too many crushed vitamins on the set of the film.
“If you ingest that much matter into your lungs you’ll get very sick, and we were literally doing fake coke for, like, seven months, every day,” Jonah said in a subsequent interview with The Independent .
7. The movie was almost made once before, but Leo admitted that it probably would not have come out quite as good.
I know! Surprising, isn’t it?
“We almost did this movie once before, on a different scale,” Leo said to Deadline .
8. Margot Robbie agreed to nudity, because she knew that if it were in a Martin Scorsese film, it would be done tastefully.
“If there’s ever a time to do nudity, it’s in the hands of Martin Scorsese, who going to do it tastefully, who doesn’t exploit nudity. You watch his films, there’s a lot of violence—which he does so well—but he doesn’t use nudity as a tool for shock value. It’s not like he’s going to keep nudity in his back pocket and say, ‘Here I wanna do something exciting to pick the pace back up.’ It’s not like that,” she told Indiewire .
9. Matthew McConaughey’s chant was impromtu.
“The actual chant, that is something I’ll do not only in this film but before scenes in a lot of films,” Mattew told Indiewire .
“I’ll come up with a different tune and it’s a relaxation tool for me. It’s musical, so it gets me out of my head because I don’t want to be thinking as an actor, I want to be doing .”
“I was doing it before every take and then on ‘action,’ I’d go to do the scene. It keeps my voice low and my instrument loose.”
“We did five takes and we have the scene, Martin is ready to move on and I’m good. As we’re packing up to go onto another scene, Leonardo goes , ‘What’s that thing you’re doing before the scene? What if we put that in the scene?’”
10. Jonah Hill wanted to swallow a real goldfish, but opted for a fake one to not upset animal rights activists.
“I wanted to eat the fish for real. I tried aggressively to eat the goldfish, but PETA stopped it!,” he told The Times .
11. Margot Robbie intentionally changed Naomi’s accent throughout the film to adapt to where they were living.
“This is how specific I was hoping [the accent] to be: she was meant to have a Bay Ridge accent from the beginning, and then once they were living in Long Island I wanted it to have Long Island influences,” she said to Indiewire .
“I also wanted her to have made a conscious effort to dull down the Brooklyn from the accent; I wanted her to be aware of the fact that she was hanging out with people with a lot of money and she would be a little embarrassed of her original humble beginnings.”
12. Jordan Belford is a real person, and the film was based on his autobiography.
“When I first picked this up, I found it a cautionary tale written by Jordan. His life is much different now, but he’s looking back and reflecting on a very hedonistic time period where he gave into every possible temptation. Greed was the main motivating factor, and he was unapologetic,” Leo told Deadline .
“He realized he’d completely lost his way, but there was an honesty to it that you rarely find. You rarely find someone willing to vilify themselves so completely and not trying to create false enemies to blame so they don’t have to look inward,” he continued.
“Everything Jordan wrote in this book was so raw. The crash of 2008 was a huge motivator for me as well to want to really see what’s going on in our culture that creates people like this. Greed is a timeless virtue. I’ve been talking about greed a lot in interviews, and you can’t pinpoint it to any specific time period, or any civilization or even just human beings.”
