When things start heading south for Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, he demands that his yacht sail through a monstrous storm that, shocker, sinks his boat. The scene has almost nothing to do with the plot and everything to display the lengths of desperation and unearned confidence the cheating money man has stuffed in his pockets. It turns out all the money in the world can’t stop nature from sending your luxury party barge to the bottom of the sea. It also turns out that we almost never got to see the absurdist comeuppance because unnamed powers that be were interested in cutting the thing altogether to bring down costs.
According to screenwriter Terence Winter, Martin Scorsese fought to keep it in, much to the delight of schadenfreude connoisseurs.
“Because [the script] was so long, you know, the fear was there were going be things that we were gonna have to cut — like the sequence where the boat sinks and they get rescued at sea,” Winter said. “It was on the chopping block for the longest time because it was so wild and so expensive. To his credit, Marty just kept fighting and said, ‘We have to have that. I have to have that.’”
He makes a great point! There are a multitude of bizarre and shocking things in the movie, but nothing on such an epic scale. It’s the rug that really ties the room together.
Now if we could only get that four-hour cut…
(via The Hollywood Reporter)