Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street turned Jordan Belfort’s memoir into one of the most talked-about films of its decade. But how much of it really happened? In this clip from his 2019 London Real interview, Brian Rose asks Belfort to separate the facts from the Hollywood storytelling.
His answer is surprising in both directions. Some of the wildest scenes were toned down, while one of the most quoted ideas in the film is, he says, simply wrong.
What the film got right
Belfort says the sales side is “super accurate”. Leonardo DiCaprio’s fired-up sales meetings were real, and they happened every morning and every afternoon at Stratton Oakmont. Brian asks why twice a day. Belfort’s reasoning is that motivating a sales floor now and then isn’t enough. What you tell salespeople every day is what keeps them emotionally positive and their skills sharp.
The overall feel of the film was right too, he says: the camaraderie and the insanity.
“Let’s go rip people off” was never said
What Belfort objects to is the idea that the firm openly set out to fleece its clients. He says nobody on Wall Street would ever say that out loud. In the early days, the pitch was that clients would make money on speculative stocks in companies helping to build America. He admits it became a sham and corrupted over the years, but he insists it didn’t start that way.
He understands why Scorsese did it. The real crimes, which he lists as manipulation, free-riding and parking stock, are technical and hard to dramatise. In a three-hour film it was easier to show brokers ripping off customers. He says he didn’t like how that made him look, but you take the good with the bad.
The biggest inaccuracy
For Belfort, the biggest departure from reality is the scene where he’s about to resign, hand the firm to his partner Danny, then changes his mind on stage and stays. He says that never happened. He actually stepped down and ran the firm from behind the scenes. He wasn’t, as he puts it, “that crazy, that deluded yet”.
Other events were real but moved around. The yacht did sink and a plane did crash, but a week apart, not with him watching from the deck. Even the trip to Switzerland was rearranged: his Aunt Patricia’s death and the yacht sinking were unrelated. He says he sat down with DiCaprio to work out how to fit the yacht into the story, and that’s how the two were joined.
The drugs were worse
When Brian asks about the drugs, Belfort says the film was accurate, and that the reality was “much worse”. He explains what quaaludes were: a sleeping pill that people discovered gave an intense high if they fought off sleep for the first few minutes, and which became one of the most abused drugs of the 1970s.
He describes how his use escalated, one weekend night at a time, until he was taking them every day. Cocaine was added to stay awake, then Xanax for the anxiety, then more to sleep, then morphine for his back, until he says he was on 22 different drugs.
It’s a candid account of how addiction builds slowly, and it isn’t told for laughs. If you’re struggling with drugs or alcohol, speak to your doctor or a local support service.
Who is Jordan Belfort?
Jordan Belfort is a former stockbroker and the author of the bestselling memoir The Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1990s he ran Stratton Oakmont, before pleading guilty to securities fraud and serving 22 months in prison, where he began writing his book. Today he teaches sales and persuasion through his Straight Line system.
In his full 2019 London Real episode, he talks with Brian Rose about money, drugs, prison and rebuilding his life. He has since returned to talk about cryptocurrency and investing.
See everything Jordan Belfort has done with London Real on his guest page: Jordan Belfort on London Real.
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Transcript
Transcript: Jordan Belfort – The Wolf Of Wall Street: What The Movie Got Right And Wrong
0:00 Brian Rose: So what in the movie is super accurate, and what was missed in the movie?
0:03 Jordan Belfort: Super accurate is the Straight Line selling stuff. DiCaprio’s got it, doing the sales meetings. I’m pumping people up.
0:10 Brian Rose: That’s a big part of your culture, right?
0:12 Jordan Belfort: Every morning and every afternoon we did that.
0:14 Brian Rose: That was crazy. Why did you know you had to do that twice a day?
0:19 Jordan Belfort: Because what you say to salespeople every once in a while doesn’t matter. It’s what you say to them every day. The sales will go up and down; it’s this constant. Keeping them emotionally positive, keeping their skills honed and training at the highest level.
0:35 Jordan Belfort: I’ll tell you what was really accurate: the overall feeling that you got from the movie, the camaraderie, the insanity. That was accurate. What was not accurate, and you’ll probably really understand this, is that we never, ever would say, “Let’s go rip people off.” That’s never uttered on Wall Street. That’s the dirtiest thing, because who would want to be part of it? It was always “we”, and we really did try to make the money. It’s just that it’s really hard to do it. We never said, “Let’s sell them the big stocks and then the dog s***.” You never would say that, so it wasn’t like that at all.
1:12 Jordan Belfort: It was always, “Let’s tell them we’re going to make money on these speculative stocks, these great companies that help build America.” That was sort of the vibe of it all, and in the beginning we were true to that. Then at the end, yes, it got sort of a sham and corrupted over the years. But in the beginning the message was very much like that. It was never, “Let’s first sell them the big stocks and then sell them the dog s***.”
1:32 Jordan Belfort: I understand why Scorsese did it, because over three hours it’s a very easy way to move the audience emotionally. Even in the movie, Leo says, “At 12 o’clock I bought back a million shares of this…” and “You don’t really give a s***, right?” He looks at the camera and goes, “The point is, we made 15 million.” Like, who cares what we did? Rather than trying to explain the crime with the actual technical problems, which was manipulation, free-riding, parking stock, all right, no one cares. So it was much easier to say, “Let’s rip off our customers,” because it made it easier. So I didn’t like that. To me it looked like I was just trying to rip people off, and it was not like that. But you take the good with the bad. That was one thing.
2:12 Jordan Belfort: I think the biggest inaccuracy of the movie is the scene where I’m about to say, “I’m resigning, I’ve got to go, Danny’s going to take over,” and then I say, “F*** it, I’m not leaving,” and the show goes on. That did not happen. I actually left. I wasn’t that stupid. Danny took over and I ran the firm from behind the scenes, but I didn’t publicly say, “I’m staying, screw everybody.” I wasn’t that crazy, that deluded yet. Give it a few years later.
2:46 Jordan Belfort: So that was one major inaccuracy, and then from that a lot of things that were inaccurate flowed. But even the things that flowed from there all happened, just at different times. I took the yacht, sunk the yacht, crashed the plane, but I wasn’t sitting on the boat looking up while the plane crashed. It happened a week later. The yacht sunk, and then the plane crashed coming to get me.
3:07 Brian Rose: I feel like the whole super yacht sinking incident, the book was much better than the movie. That was one thing the movie didn’t really…
3:14 Jordan Belfort: Yeah, it didn’t do a good job. What happened was, I was complicit in this, in the sense that we were trying to figure out a way, because we were running out of time. It’s three hours long. So how do we get you to Switzerland? Aunt Patricia did die. Everything happened, but they were completely unrelated stories. Aunt Patricia died, I had to go there and get things moved around, and it had nothing to do with the yacht sinking. But they wanted to include the yacht sinking in the movie. So me and Leo sat down to try to figure out how we could do this, and Leo said, “What if she died? Would you have to…?” I said, “Well, theoretically, if she died…” That’s how.
4:01 Brian Rose: That’s storytelling, right?
4:02 Jordan Belfort: That’s very common. That’s why some of the events are like that. They all happened independently, but they were moved around to serve the narrative.
4:11 Brian Rose: What about the drugs?
4:13 Jordan Belfort: The movie is very accurate. The quaaludes. I was much worse than that.
4:17 Brian Rose: Worse than what the movie showed?
4:19 Jordan Belfort: Much worse.
4:20 Brian Rose: What does that mean? How can it be worse?
4:21 Jordan Belfort: It was so insane. I don’t know if you’ve ever been addicted to drugs.
4:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was, actually. I started with the drinking, then the coke came out, and then when I was downtown on Wall Street, the heroin came out. That’s one thing I never really got into, thankfully. I got painkillers, not heroin.
4:38 Jordan Belfort: So I don’t know how bad you got, but I was talking to my head of sales, who’s been sober now for a bunch of years, and he was saying the human body can become accustomed to taking so many drugs that a lay person thinks, “That can’t be possible. You can’t take that many drugs and be living.” Yes, you can. You get tolerance, and you have to take more and more and more. It didn’t start off that way, but by the end I was taking… You probably remember quaaludes from back then?
5:16 Brian Rose: Barely. They weren’t really around by the time I got there.
5:21 Jordan Belfort: We’re pretty much the same age. How old are you?
5:24 Brian Rose: I’m 48.
5:26 Jordan Belfort: I’m older. 56.
5:28 Jordan Belfort: For people who don’t know what a quaalude is: it’s a sleeping pill that was designed to be an easy, soft way to fall asleep. And then they found that if you fight it for the first 10 minutes, you get the best high ever. Very quickly, in the ’70s, it became the single most abused drug ever. You think OxyContin was bad? This was like that on steroids, times a thousand. For every legitimate quaalude prescription, there were a million phony ones. People would line up for them.
6:02 Brian Rose: It was a barbiturate?
6:04 Jordan Belfort: A barbiturate hypnotic. It would make you feel very euphoric if you could just get over the sleep part of it. You could balance it out with a little coke, or simply be awake and walking around. You’re really drunk, but drunk with euphoria and no hangover. You go from massive intoxication to straight in like three minutes. I could be slobbering like an idiot, and you’re like, “What’s wrong with that guy?” Then I go to the bathroom, I come back: “All right, now what were you saying?” It wasn’t like alcohol, where you feel it the next day. You would go from being stoned to being straight.
6:52 Jordan Belfort: So I could wake up at 6 o’clock and take four ludes. One lude would knock out a Navy SEAL for like eight hours, a 200-pound man, and I could take four and walk around. I’d do that at 6 in the morning, and my wife would come down, and I’d say, “Honey, I’m already sobering up.” Then I’d go to work and be normal.
7:15 Brian Rose: And you could function at work with all these drugs? Because I’d assume you wouldn’t do them while at work.
7:19 Jordan Belfort: Well, in the end we did, and then it spiralled out of control, just like everything else. It started with lunch that became a little extended lunch. It started with me taking them only on a Friday night, because I had the whole weekend to recover. Then I said, “Well, I could take them on a Friday and Saturday night, because I’d have Sunday.” Then, “I’ll take them on Sunday before noon.” Then Sunday night. Then you take them seven nights a week, four times a day. And then you say, “I’m getting really tired,” so I’ve got to do coke to balance that out. Then I get really anxious from the coke, so let me take some Xanax. Then I can’t sleep, so something to help me sleep. My back hurts, so some morphine. And I was on 22 different drugs at the end.
