Scorsese, DiCaprio ink deals, make The Wolf of Wall Street official

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprioFans of the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio partnership need not wait much longer for another picture from the duo. After months of speculation, Scorsese and DiCaprio, who last worked together on 2010’s Shutter Island, today officially signed on to make The Wolf of Wall Street, marking their fifth collaboration. The New York production will begin shooting in August.

The film, based on the popular memoir by Jordan Belfort, tells the tale of a greedy Wall Street broker with an excess-driven personal life. The tagline for that book, to give you a flavor of what the film will be, is “Stock market multimillionaire at 26, federal convict at 36,  I partied like a rock star, lived like a king, and barely survived my rise and fall as an American entrepreneurial icon.”

Scorsese is, of course, no stranger to stories about organized crime and corruption, having garnered his lofty reputation with films like Goodfellas and Casino. It seems that the material will be told in that style, too, as the memoir has been adapted by a routine scribe of crime stories, Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos). Certainly, the systemic nature of Wall Street corruption is a highly topical subject, and begs to be examined by a fiction director in a more skillful way than Oliver Stone did in his recent Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

We here at Critic Speak hope that Marty and Leo can keep this from becoming a left-wing political treatise designed to support Occupy Wall Street, and instead opt for a more balanced and intimate look at one man’s story and how it directly applies to Wall Street’s recent problems. As they showed with The Aviator, these two know how to tell the story of a larger-than-life figure with more than a few demons in his closet.

Source: Deadline