'Wolf' a greed joy ride for Leonardo DiCaprio - Boston Herald

NEW YORK — Limping with a cane, Leonardo DiCaprio takes the few steps to the dais at the Mandarin-Oriental Hotel slowly.

“I sprained my ankle on a floorboard. Nothing as exciting as maybe you’d hoped it would be,” DiCaprio, 39, said with a smile.

His appearance here is a big contrast to his exuberant tour de force as Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese’s three-hour “The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on Belfort’s memoir of the same name. There DiCaprio is in perpetual motion — doing drugs, having sex, cheating investors, insulting the FBI and cheerleading his loyal troops.

“With this movie we were trying to depict a modern-day Caligula with all the debauchery that comes with it,” DiCaprio said.

“It was a fun process because there was really no limits to what we could do. Jordan’s biography depicted stuff that we could never have imagined and Terry (Winters, the ‘Boardwalk Empire’ screenwriter) captured it all.”

DiCaprio was hooked when he read Belfort’s book about the Wall Street broker’s self-indulgent spree that ended with a fraud conviction.

“It’s a fascinating read simply because his biography is really a reflection of everything that’s wrong in today’s society: This hedonistic lifestyle and time period in Wall Street’s history where Jordan basically gave into every carnal indulgence possible and was obsessed with greed and himself essentially.

“He was so unflinching of his account of this time period, so honest and so unapologetic, that I was compelled to play this character and I was obsessed with having Marty direct this film.”

But finding the money for such edgy material was a hurdle until Red Granite, an L.A.-based finance and distribution company, stepped up.

“They said, ‘We want it to be a grand American epic of greed and pull no punches, push the envelope and go the distance with it,’ ” DiCaprio said.

“The truth was we wanted this whole film to feel like and to be this hallucinogenic ride, this roller coaster in the life of two schnooks” — Belfort and his buddy Donnie (Jonah Hill) — “who took way too many drugs.

“A lot of my research came out of watching this one video called ‘The Drunkest Man in the World.’ It’s a man who tries to get a beer but his body doesn’t quite work, he’s rolling on the floor for hours. That was a huge inspiration.”