'The Wolf Of Wall Street' Featurettes And Interviews Explore Scorsese's Latest

Martin Scorsese's new film, The Wolf of Wall Street, is turning into one of the biggest firebrands of late 2013 as it provokes conversations about glorification versus excoriation of the film's central character, and about our national obsession with getting rich. You won't see too much of that in the official marketing, which is aimed squarely at getting across how much fun these characters have screwing people over. But it's still there, and then when Scorsese and his collaborators have a chance to talk about the material it all starts to come out. Below we've got a couple official behind the scenes fluff pieces, and a couple of longer interviews that are much more in-depth.

If there isn't as much meat in these featurettes as you might like, Scorsese's constant editor Thelma Schoonmaker sat down for a long talk with HitFix, eventually discussing a few points about Wolf of Wall Street. One is a teasing glimpse of what might have been, when the idea of releasing a two-volume version was vaguely considered as a means of preserving an early four-hour cut of the film. "Well, we thought about it," she says. "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."

Trimming an hour wasn't a matter of losing whole scenes, but trimming things across the board.

...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.

Here are the two studio-made looks at the making of the film:

And if you want a lot more, here's an encore presentation of almost two hours of conversation between Charlie Rose and Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and (in a shorter solo interview) Jonah Hill. These interviews are about a week old, but they ran before most people had a chance to see the film. Note: These embeds are from Hulu, which means they might be region-locked to viewing only in the US.