“Marty said to me early on, ‘No matter the genre, no matter what kind of movie, people respond to the honesty in the characters,’ ” adds DiCaprio. “We weren’t interested in sentimentalizing Jordan. We aren’t painting a portrait of someone we want people to feel sorry for. Later in the film, when his life starts breaking apart, people are going to think he’s making the wrong decisions constantly. That’s not to say that people won’t be rooting for him, because he’s a likable guy.”

“Marty is brilliant at many things, but one of them is showing people doing things that are morally corrupt and still making them enjoyable to watch,” says Hill. “You root for them and adore them in some way—it’s cool and exciting to be doing something wrong.” And the same, Hill realized, applies to the guys in Wolf. “Leo and I had numerous conversations while our characters were doing really despicable things. I was disgusted by what I was doing!” Hill laughs.

“It’s an old story, really: People can take their identification with movies and novels to some alarming places,” says Scorsese.

“Jordan was a brilliant guy in a world where there may be no morality ­whatsoever,” says Scorsese. “He got caught at what a lot of people didn’t get caught at.”

. “The book personified ­America’s addiction to obtaining wealth at all costs, and that hasn’t changed,” says DiCaprio, who found in Belfort a micro-tale of corruption and greed. “He was a small fish in a gigantic pond, and he’d motivate his guys by telling them they were heroes for taking on the big houses. Un­regulated Wall Street was like the Wild West.”

Click here to read the entire interview from Vulture.