Martin and Leonardo DiCaprio

In what will be their fifth time collaborating on the big screen, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will reunite for The Wolf of Walk Street based on Jordan Belfort’s 2008 memoir. The Hollywood Reporter puts to rest rumors that have been flying for a while about Scrosese and DiCaprio working together again, and confirmed last week that The Wolf of Wall Street was a go.
Belfort’s memoir talks about his days as an investment banker on Wall Street, and DiCaprio will step into Belfort’s shoes. Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland of Red Granite Pictures, owner of the rights to the book, will produce along with DiCaprio and Jennifer Killoran of Appian Way. Sikelia Productions (Scorsese and Emma Koskoff’s company) and Alexandra Milchan of EMJAG Productions will also produce. Irwin Winkler and Georgia Kacandes are stepping in as executive producers.
Aziz states: “Everything about this film plays to Martin Scorsese’s genius and visionary storytelling,” said Aziz in a statement. “At its heart, The Wolf of Wall Street is about the rise of new ‘modern’ gangsters in New York. Wall Street gangsters that redefined excess, greed and arrogance. We’re excited to see Mr. Scorsese take the reins of this visceral, tumultuous ride.”
Production for The Wolf of Wall Street will begin in New York in August with the screenplay adapted by Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire).

Leonardo DiCaprio Love Animals

Leonardo DiCaprio is speaking out against private ownership of exotic animals. The Amazing actor went on Twitter and Facebook to voice his disapproval of people in the U.S. keeping exotic animals as pets. He urged his Twitter followers to sign a letter to members of Congress to prevent another Ohio tragedy from happening. Read on for the actor’s own words, and to take action. — Global Animal

Leonardo, james cameron, Kate winslet

TITANIC’S Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, singer Celine Dion and director James Cameron supported a 2009 request by Irish author Don Mullan to financially support the last survivor of the sinking.On the centenary of the ship’s maiden voyage he has written to them again — with a new humanitarian plea

Dear James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Celine Dion and the powerful companies you are associated with:

ONE hundred years ago the Titanic was undertaking its maiden and tragic voyage. Three years ago you very kindly joined me in supporting 97-year-old Millvina Dean, Titanic’s youngest passenger and the last living survivor of the tragedy, who was then trying to pay her private nursing home bills through the sale of her autograph.

It seemed immoral that the last human being associated with the tragedy was, literally, drowning in debt when her own tragic history was part of a story that had generated enormous profits. I am writing now, on the 100th anniversary, to ask for your support again, now that your movie has been re-released to mark the centenary of the tragedy.

I am asking you to support me in honouring the memory of the only black man on the ship, who perished on the night of 15 April 1912: Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche, from Haiti. Joseph Laroche was the nephew of the then president of Haiti, Cincinnatus Leconte. He graduated as an engineer in Paris but had difficulty in finding work because he was black. Consequently, he was returning to his native Haiti with his French wife, Juliette, and their daughters Simonne and Louise, boarding Titanic at Cherbourg, as second-class passengers.

They had originally been booked as first-class passengers on the liner, La France, but because of the company’s strict policy of refusing children access to the dining quarters, they switched ships. Like Millvina’s father, Bertram Dean, Joseph Laroche realised quickly that Titanic was in trouble shortly after it hit the iceberg on the night of April 14 1912.

He roused his wife and together they carried Simonne and Louise on deck where he managed to get all three on to a lifeboat. Both Bertram Dean and Joseph Laroche perished with the ship and their bodies were never found. I am currently helping the Irish humanitarian organisation HAVEN to build 10,000 homes for the people of Haiti before the end of 2014. Through HAVEN (www.havenpartnership.com), Irish builders, from Belfast to Cobh, Britain and the USA, are building homes for Haiti. We have already built 2,200 homes since the 2010 earthquake.

I am writing to ask you to match the Irish and world public, euro for euro, up to €5m, from profits realised from the re-release of Titanic the movie. With €5m we can build 1,000 homes in Haiti (at a cost of €5,000 per home). Hopefully with your help and the worldwide public, we can double that, and reach towards the halfway point of our overall target of 10,000 homes. On the week of May 7-11 2012, almost 50 Irish, British and American builders, including myself, will travel to Haiti to help with the building project.

We Still love Titanic

The centenary “celebrations” of Titanic’s sinking have set sail with almost as much fanfare as the doomed ship. Next week a pounds 100 million museum is opening in Belfast, one of more than 200 around the world. Next month, James Cameron’s epic pounds 120 million, 194-minute film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, is returning to cinema screens in 3D. And for those who can’t wait that long, tomorrow (Sunday) sees the first episode of a much-heralded four-part drama on Britain’s ITV, a relative minnow with a budget of only pounds 11 million.

Not that there is anything corner-cutting about the ITV production of Titanic. Julian Fellowes, the Emmy and Bafta award-winning creator of Downton Abbey, is the writer. A cast of more than 80 includes Linus Roache, Geraldine Somerville, Toby Jones, Sophie Winkleman and Jenna-Louise Coleman. And the rights have been sold to 86 countries.

You’d be hard-pushed to escape the attendant publicity drive. Last summer ITV welcomed a junket of journalists to the giant studios they’d hired on the outskirts of Budapest (the Hungarian government offers generous tax breaks for production companies). Built in 10 weeks, the complex housed a 150ft replica of the ship (including cabins and a dining room plus the crockery), the largest water tank in Europe, and hundreds of actors and extras (one of which was a panting Pekingese) pretending to shiver on the Atlantic deck under the stiflingly hot studio lamps.

Peeking behind the scenes of a film set is a fascinating experience. We learnt, for instance, that the fact that the Titanic sank at night saved the production half its budget, as they could shoot onto a simple black background, limiting the use of expensive CGI equipment. The water was heated and filtered for the actors to comply with health and safety laws. And, because only one side of the ship was filmed (the other wasn’t even built, to reduce costs), the costume department had rapidly to switch items around, including buttons, whenever they needed to make it look as if they were filming from the other side.

“It’s lovely to visit,” says Fellowes, who spent a few days here seeing his script come alive. “I’m not a Titanic maniac, but I’ve always been interested in it.”

Fellowes was originally approached by Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer, who had been impressed by his work on Gosford Park. Coincidentally, Fellowes had just finished writing the opening scene to the then untested Downton Abbey, in which the heir to the estate dies on the Titanic. He said yes straight away.

“As a disaster, it has everything,” says Fellowes. His love of the Edwardian period is well known – and you couldn’t find a better symbol of that era than the Titanic. He talks of a sense of a society “on the brink”, the innocence of a proud country unaware of the Great War around the corner, the dramatic possibilities of a time when many resisted change with the same fervour that others embraced it.

“What you need in drama is the tension of someone being prevented from doing something,” he says. “That’s much harder to do now: there’s nothing to stop a boy meeting a girl and going upstairs straight away.”

In the Titanic disaster, as he said this week, we see the world shrunk into a bottle. Tragic weight is added to almost every line of dialogue by virtue of the audience knowing what the characters do not: that their time may soon be up. “It still haunts us,” he told me. “It taps into a fundamental fear. It is part of the national narrative. No one says, ‘Oh, Titanic? Remind me’.”

Of course, that the story is so well known poses its own challenges. It is, as one crew member said to me, “as much of a television staple as Nazis and sharks”.

Fellowes hopes to have navigated this particular iceberg by introducing an ingenious dramatic structure. His script follows different classes of passengers in each of the first three episodes, sinking the boat at the end of all of them. The final episode – broadcast around the world on April 15, the 100th anniversary of the disaster – will show who lived and who died.

Previous dramatisations have featured graceful aristocrats in first class, jig-dancing revellers in third and little in between. One of the best, A Night to Remember, in 1958, revolved around the officers. Fellowes’s Titanic, on the other hand, includes the squeezed middle – notably a lawyer in second class, played by Toby Jones, and his disgruntled Irish wife, played by Maria Doyle Kennedy (who will be familiar to many as Mrs Bates in Downton Abbey). It also features a smattering of real characters – including the chairman of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, the businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, and Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon.

Fellowes rejects any suggestion that this is Downton-at-Sea or an “Updeck, Downdeck” alternative to the BBC’s latest revival.

“I don’t think it is about class relationships,” he says, a little incongruously for a writer whose novels include Snobs and whose screenplays include The Young Victoria as well as Gosford and Downton. But he concedes that a significant attraction of writing about the Titanic is that “every aspect of Edwardian England was on that ship”.

His skill lies in interweaving the multiple stories: our “horrible fascination” with those in first class “whose hands had never seen anything harsher than a suede glove” suddenly fighting for their lives; the pathos of those in steerage who bought one-way tickets in the hope of a new life. “It is unbearable that all that optimism and hard work should disappear,” he says.

Of course, the pounds 11 million question for those viewers who will tune in for their Sunday night comfort blanket is: is it any good? Will we be glued to the screens for an hour? Will we tolerate the lengthy ad breaks? Or will we have that sinking feeling that, like the ship itself, the hype has failed to deliver what it promised?

Without wishing to spoil it for you, the first two episodes have not won me over. But perhaps that’s because I watched them on a weekday lunchtime with 500 other people, instead of on my sofa with a glass of wine.

No matter. There certainly won’t be a sequel. And Downton Abbey will be back before long.

Leonardo DiCaprio will be working with Martin Scorsese once again. It will be DiCaprio’s fifth time working with him. He has previously teamed up with Scorsese for movies, such as, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio fifth project

After some stops and starts, it seems that Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is in full “go” mode with his longtime leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, locked in to star.

According to Deadline, the film has yet to nail down a timeline for when it will shoot and get distribution, but DiCaprio and Scorsese felt that now was the right time to get cracking on the flick. The two have been trying to get it into production since 2007, but they separated to work on their own high-profile projects before deciding to work together again.

At one point, Ridley Scott had been attached to direct the film, but that later shifted back to Scorsese.

The film is based on the tell-all memoir written by Jordan Belfort, a drug-, sex- and alcohol-addicted stockbroker who landed in prison for refusing to cooperate in a 1990s securities fraud case. It’s a steamy story of his fall from a 20-something multimillionaire to a 30-something federal convict banned from the securities business for life. The film would focus on Belfort’s relationship with an FBI agent and his attempt to make him into an informant.

In addition to their roles as director and actor, Scorsese and DiCaprio will also serve as producers on the film. Writer Terence Winter, known for his work with “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire,” is reportedly cleaning up the script before the film goes to production.

This marks the fifth collaboration for Scorsese and DiCaprio, who have worked together in the past on “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator,” “The Departed” and “Shutter Island.”

Leonardo DiCaprio Enjoying Nights with New Model Girl Friend

Just a month after a totally romantic getaway in Mexico, Leonardo DiCaprio and his model girlfriend Erin Heatherton are still enjoying their relationship. The pair are still incorporating sweet little moments, such as during the cute date they had in Hollywood during a launch party recently. According to E! Online, DiCaprio kept his arms around Heatherton’s waist, PDA that anyone would find sweet.

J. Edgar (2011)

Challenges drives people forward and propels them to reach for that rope that will take them higher in life. Leonardo DiCaprio is a classic example of an actor who has travelled through many travails of life but prefers to stand out from the crowd by essaying roles that few would dare to portray. Riding on the recent successes of Inception and Shutter Island, DiCaprio joins hands with premier director Clint Eastwood to pull off a remarkable biopic on J. Edgar Hoover, one of the most feared and respected directors of the FBI

The movie has been told in a flashback style and opens with J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), aged with gray hair and sitting in his office thinking about his yester years. The audiences are taken back to the year 1919 when Hoover starts working at the Justice Department under the aegis of the Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer. An assassination attempt on Palmer fails and takes the movie forward where Palmer loses his job in the heat of countless unsuccessful and unwarranted raids on anti radical groups. At the behest of the new Attorney Generals instructions, Hoover is made the director of the Bureau of Investigation that goes on to become the iconic FBI years later. In the course of swift storytelling, Eastwood lays bare some of the policies of the iconoclastic FBI director in cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the capture of the high profile robber John Dillinger. During this time, the audiences are introduced to the characters of Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), Hoovers private secretary and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) a lawyer and Hoovers partner in many of his adventures. Hoover is portrayed as a person emotionally controlled by his mother, played by Judy Dench with whom .

He shares private moments such as discussing how he feels uncomfortable dancing with girls.