The Wolf of Wall Street

DiCaprio, Scorsese Named Producers on Wolf of Wall Street

Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio at a press conference on Dec. 15, 2013 | Paula Schwartz Photo

In the last few years, the producing credits on motion pictures have included armies of people, which has created a dilemma for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which insists the credits be whittled down to three or four names max.

READ: Nominations for the 2014 Academy Awards

Yesterday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has determined the individual nominees for “The Wolf of Wall Street” in the Best Picture category for the Oscars are producers Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland and Emma Tillinger Koskoff.

This is the second film DiCaprio has executive produced with Martin Scorsese, the first being the Howard Hughes biopic, “The Aviator,” in 2004.

READ: Oscar 2014 Nominee Reactions

“The Wolf of Wall Street” star deserves the producing credit since it was his obsession to bring the story to the big screen that brought it all together. At the press conference for “The Wolf of Wall Street” in December, he spoke about how he picked up Jordan Belfort’s’s book about six years ago and couldn’t get it out of his mind.

“I felt like it was really a reflection, his biography was a reflection of everything that’s wrong in today’s society,” he said. “This hedonistic lifestyle, this time period in Wall Street’s history, with Jordan basically giving in to every carnal indulgence possible and was obsessed with greed and obsessed with himself essentially. He was so unflinching in his account of this time period and so honest, so unapologetic in his biography, I was compelled to play his character for a long period of time.”

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He added, “We almost got the financing during ‘Shutter Island,’ and the film fell apart but I was obsessed with having Marty direct this film. Terry Winter wrote an incredible screenplay that I think really catered to Marty’s strength and his style, and so it was a long waiting period to get this film financed and finally our friends here at Red Granite said, ‘Look, we want to take a chance on this film, we want it to be a grand American epic of greed and pull no punches, push the envelope and go the distance with it, so I re-approached it and brought it back to Marty, ‘Look we don’t really get opportunities like this very often, these things really don’t come out of the studio system and, thankfully, he agreed to do the film, again, and here we are.’”

The movie is a long shot for best picture since “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity” seem to be frontrunners, but it must be sweet for both of them to share producing credits on a film that was such a passion project.

For those of you who didn’t score a ticket to the big event, the Academy Awards will air Sunday, March 2, 2014 on ABC.

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