“A number of people have asked me, what if you had stated your position [about] the morality [in The Wolf of Wall Street]. It’s a bad thing [that] they behave this way, not behaving just in terms of the drugs and the sex [but] the violence of the ‘confidence man,’ taking your confidence and your trust. That’s one guy here and perhaps other guys, or it could become the entire financial establishment. That’s happened many many times in history. So you take this as a microcosm, this kind of thinking is what it’s about. It’s obscene. You say, okay, fine, you go home and you feel you’ve done your duty by watching a film that has an obvious moral statement, you know it’s there, and forget about it. In the meantime, I wanted to get deeper and provoke it, provoke the audience. It came out of just frustration. Frustration and anger about this situation in 2008. Go back and there’s more and more. People get thrown out of their houses, people sleeping in the street, people killing themselves. Why? So you can have a plane ride and have sex on a plane? That is the thinking that disturbs me. Saying, what you do with your private life is up to you. But when it’s affecting people the other way and nobody goes to jail or nobody is really stopped, I don’t understand. Anyway, that’s my reason for doing it this way.” — Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese to interviewer Paul Thomas Anderson and audience during a 12.15 q & a in Century City, recorded and transcribed by Award Daily‘s Sasha Stone (whom you can hear chuckling through the video).