Contrary to earlier reports, Ridley Scott will not be directing the film adaption of Jordan Belfort’s 1990 best seller The Wolf of Wall Street at Warner Bros. Instead, Vulture has learned exclusively, the project has left the studio, and Scott has left the project. Replacing him: Director Martin Scorsese, who’ll shoot his fellow Boardwalk Empire executive producer Terence Winter’s script as an indie this summer, with Leonardo DiCaprio starring.
The vaunted project had been set up last year at Warner Bros., with Scott directing, but Vulture hears that Rick Yorn, DiCaprio’s manager, has secured indie financing, and even though Scorsese is just now finishing The Life of Hugo Cabret, Wolf of Wall Street could go before cameras as early as June 2012. (Scorsese next shoots Silence based on the book by Shusaku Endo, starring Benicio del Toro.)
For those unfamiliar with the book, Wolf follows a drug-, alcohol-, and sex-addicted brokerage firm operator’s rise and fall — from multi-millionaire twentysomething in the go-go eighties to federal-convict thirtysomething banned from the securities business for life in 1994.
More details as we gather them …