CraveOnline: That scene where Leonardo DiCaprio is climbing down the steps to that Lamborghini is just fucking hilarious.
Terence Winter: Well yeah, one of the funniest things I ever had the opportunity to write. I’ve told this story… I wrote this script in 2007. My son was an infant. My wife was feeding him while she was reading the script and almost dropped him because she was laughing so hard. And that was just on the page! I had seen a cut of the movie before she did and said, “You think it was funny on the page? Wait till you see what this looks like in real life with what Marty did with Leo and Jonah together. It is un-fucking-believable. These guys commit in such a big way to that sequence that it’s just mind-boggling how… It’s Laurel & Hardy on Quaaludes.”
That’s about right.
Yeah.
I want to confirm… You said there was a four-hour cut of this at some point?
Yeah, I’ve never seen it. That was just Marty’s initial cut. Apparently it was really long. I didn’t see it until it was sort of in the incarnation it’s in now.
But you did write the script, so you can tell me if there was a significant subplot that got cut…?
No, no, I think a lot of it might have been longer versions of the same scenes. Marty is a fan of letting actors ad-lib. It might have been a lot of stuff that was ad-libbed that ultimately ended up getting cut. But I think it was just longer versions of scenes that are already in the movie.
How does Martin Scorsese break news to you? Like, “Yeah, this scene got cut…”
I just sort of watched it. It’s funny, he didn’t want to tell me anything that he cut because he wanted me to just see the movie as the movie, and not influence what I might think going into it. He wouldn’t even tell me how long it was, because he didn’t want me to go into it thinking it’s three hours, or it’s this and that. “Just watch it. Just let it wash over you and then we’ll talk after that.” Which was exactly the right approach, because you don’t need any knowledge of it.
And then it’s funny, when I walked out of it, if you said, “How long was it?” I would have said, “Two hours and twenty minutes, maybe.” And then it was three hours. So it just felt like it moved to me, and that’s the real answer. That’s the answer, that it doesn’t matter. As long as you were entertained and compelled it doesn’t matter, and he doesn’t sway you one way or the other.
Whatever happened to Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna?
I don’t know. I think, if I’m remembering this correctly… I believe that the real Mark Hanna actually went to work for Jordan at Stratton Oakmont. So he followed him from L.F. Rothschild to, a couple years later, then resurfaced working for Jordan at Stratton. And then I don’t know what happened after Stratton…
It’s an interesting character because he such an important influence on Jordan in one really great scene, and then he’s a phantom. He’s gone, so I found myself wondering…
Yeah, he’s sort of Jordan’s introduction to the world of Wall Street: this is how it works, and this is the debauchery, and I am your mentor and guide into this world. And then he’s gone, which I think actually worked better for our purposes than to say, you know, Hanna then goes to work for Jordan, which apparently happened in real life. But yeah, I like it better this way.
