CraveOnline: There’s a couple bits in the movie in which Jordan explains to the audience how the stock market works, and exactly what crimes he’s committing, and then he stops and says, “You have no idea what I’m talking about…”
Terence Winter: Yeah.
And I didn’t. Here’s what I’m wondering. How well do you understand this stuff at this point? Because it seems like gobbledygook to me.
I understood it pretty well. I worked on Wall Street. I actually worked at Merrill Lynch on the day the stock market crashed in 1987. So I had a pretty decent understanding. I’m not an expert of course, but I knew enough about how to explain what an IPO was and stuff like that.
The running joke between me, Marty and Leo is that they didn’t, and they don’t really have a firm grasp of the financial stuff, so the more we [realized] it doesn’t really matter. It’s sort of like science fiction where they talk about the flux capacitor, and this radon and just blah-blah-blah. All you need to know is, if this red light comes on while we’re in outer space, we’re in big trouble.
We had the same thing. So why don’t we just shine a light on this? Like, “The stocks and the IPO… You know what? You don’t care what I’m talking about. It doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that we made $23 million in two hours, and that’s it.” It’s like, god, that works so much better, and it’s actually funnier to just say, “You don’t really care. You don’t want to know.”
Is the story depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street common, or is it an extreme scenario that we should look at as a cautionary tale?
You know, I worked on the real Wall Street. I worked for Merrill-Lynch, which is a really conservative, publicly traded company. Jordan’s Wall Street was really his version of Wall Street that actually took place on Long Island. So it wasn’t exactly a Wall Street firm, it was a firm that aspired to be on Wall Street.
So even though it was stock brokering, stock brokerage, trading stocks, all that stuff, it wasn’t actually on Wall Street. It was sort of Jordan’s kind of twisted version of Wall Street, and he made up his own rules. I mean, there was a lot of excess on the real Wall Street, certainly a lot of bad behavior and a lot of drugs and illegality going on, but I think the Stratton Oakmont depicted in the movie is sort of a fairly exaggerated case, even though what you’re seeing is all real, and really did happen.
Is it difficult to make a story about excess feel human?
I don’t think it was. I felt like all of this was very human behavior. It’s sort of like when you let a kid loose in a candy store, this is what’s going to happen. You don’t have any rules and it’s just money, money, money, drugs, drugs, drugs, and nobody around to tell you, “Hey, you’ve gone too far now.” They’re making all the rules. It’s really the inmates running the asylum and you know, it is human nature and certainly an aspect of our society to want more, more, more, bigger, better, stronger, faster, more cars, more houses, more real estate. Bad behavior is rewarded and applauded in incredible ways. I think a lot of people will watch this movie and think, “There but by the grace of God… If I were him, who knows?” Certainly when you throw Quaaludes and cocaine into that, you’re starting to do stuff that you would never imagine in a million years that you would do.
Is it really true that there are no Quaaludes left? They’re all gone?
Well there are some, but a lot of them are much lesser versions of the Lemmon 714s that are depicted in the movie. Those are… I would be shocked if are whole lot of those left, because those truly were discontinued. I think you could probably find counterfeit ones at this point, but they were such an addictive party drug in the early ‘80s that the government stepped in and outlawed them.
I learned so much about drugs from this movie.
This is how I give back to the world. [Laughs] Glad I can help educate people.
Thank you very much. I really think this is a very impressive movie, man.
Thank you. It was absolutely a blast to write, and to be involved with Leo and Marty is a dream come true.
