The Wolf of Wall Street: Schoonmaker Talks Longer Cut

Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" certainly had an interesting post and pre-release.

The story is based on the Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) penned memoir that tells of his days as a hard partying, drug addicted stockbroker who was indicted in 1998 for security fraud and money laundering and served a 22-month federal prison stretch.

Back in the Fall it was announced that the film would avoid getting the dreaded NC-17 rating after Scorsese and his long time editor Thelma Schoonmaker spent weeks re-cutting the film to get it down to a marketable 2hr 59min theatrical cut now in theaters. The original cut contained a more graphic depiction of sex.

 

Schoonmaker spoke with HitFix the about the earlier cut and she confirmed that the film ran a full hour longer.

It seems that people loved the four-hour cut, and that became a huge problem since everyone acknowledged it had to be shorter, but it was hard to figure out what should go. They even considered a "Kill Bill"-style two-volume sulution:

"Well, we thought about it. We did. But the film doesn't work split in half. It has to have a certain arc. We did think about it, believe me, because people loved the four-hour version... It would've been horrible if we had it cut out whole scenes."

They didn't cut out scenes so much as trim some of their length:

"We just shaved things down and did three or four screenings and kept going and kept going and finally we got there. And I would never have believed we would have done it. So it was fortunate because it would've been disastrous if we hadn't. I mean you can't distribute a four-hour movie."