Leonardo DiCaprio, along with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese, addressed and defended the one film that got nominated for an Oscar but received some amount of backlash from the critics and viewers; Ethan Hawke being the most notable one who once told Daily Beast that the film was dangerous.
In 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese explored the corruption in the money market and the lengths that DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort can go to, to be fully consumed by the misogynistic lifestyle and hunger for money without focusing on the ones that were affected by it.
The duo had collaborated four times before this, and Leonardo DiCaprio even won Scorsese an Oscar for The Departed (2006). Films like Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), and Shutter Island (2010) were all sweeping hits among fans. But, for The Wolf of Wall Street, they felt it couldn’t have been done any other way.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Defense of The Wolf of Wall Street
DiCaprio realized that they had touched on a very sensitive subject but he said that the audience had to be taken on that journey into the psyche of such culprits so that they could understand why a traditional approach wouldn’t have worked.
“It is an indictment of this world,” he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t like these people, you know what I mean? But we very consciously said, ‘Let’s insulate the audience in the mindset of what these people’s lives were like so we better understand something about the very culture that we live in.’ We very purposely didn’t do the traditional approach of cutting away to the people affected by this.”
He further shared that Martin Scorsese was interested in wrapping his head around the lives of such people and wanted to highlight their destruction, more than anything else.
Martin Scorsese’s Views On The Backlash
Scorsese, too, walked along the lines of Leonardo DiCaprio’s point of view that if the film had gone down the already explored paths of showcasing the lives of people who suffered at the hands of these money mongers, it would have fallen flat.
“It should touch a nerve,” Scorsese said to IndieWire. “What would be the point of making a film that exposes corruption in the financial world, in a conventional way? It’s already been done!”
Even though he realized that The Wolf of Wall Street was not for sympathizing with the victims, he felt that the films that are about the victims, do not bring about a change either.
The Wolf of Wall Street is streaming on Netflix.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire
