Scenes Not Safe for Work, Even for the Film Editor
By MELENA RYZIK
Here’s the one thing that is certain: Martin Scorsese’s epic retelling of the story of Jordan Belfort, the infamous financier who built an ill-gotten empire on penny stocks, clocks in at two hours and 59 minutes — down from his original cut of nearly four hours. That’s two movies’ worth of Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Mr. Belfort, and Jonah Hill, as his right-hand man, behaving badly — very, very badly, nearly NC-17 badly — often in unscripted ways.
The Bagger caught up with Thelma Schoonmaker, Mr. Scorsese’s longtime editor, at a party recently, and she explained why the movie is Mr. Scorsese’s lengthiest, and why it took so long to finish.
“The improvisations were so brilliant, it muscled up to four hours,” she said. “I love improvisation. I mean, it’s hard to edit, because things don’t necessarily fall together — you have to find ways to give it a dramatic scope, shape. But it’s so much fun. I was roaring, just at the dailies. My assistants came in and said, ‘Are you all right?’”
“There’s still some wonderful improvisations that I wish we had in, but we were able to shave it down,” she continued. “We didn’t have to cut off our legs. In a lot of movies, like ‘After Hours,’ we cut out my favorite scene, Marty’s favorite scene — we had to, to make the film work. But here we didn’t lose too much. We shaved it down, that’s what took so long.”
Though Mr. Scorsese’s recent films — like “Hugo” and “The Aviator” — were faithful to their scripts, it’s not the first time he’s experimented with spur-of-the-moment dialogue. “‘Raging Bull,’ “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “King of Comedy,” they were all heavily improvised,” said Ms. Schoonmaker, 73, who edited all of them.
What was new for her was the near-pornographic raciness: “This is a lot of sex and a lot of drugs,” she said. “It was a bit of a shock at first. Sometimes people would come in the editing room and there’d be some outrageous image on the screen and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute, let me move that off.’”
The film was recut in part to avoid an NC-17 rating. “Marty wanted to make it very obvious where the censorship is,” Ms. Schoonmaker said, “so when you watch it you’ll see that things feel a little short at certain times,” where Motion Picture Association of America guidelines necessitated a snip to get an R rating.
“But it all works well,” she said, then added of the “Wolf of Wall Street” characters, “These guys were out of their minds.”
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