Robert de Niro in Heat says he wants to run away to somewhere where he'll never be found - New Zealand. Patrick Swayze's 1991 Point Break includes a scene where his character is about to surf huge waves in the 100-year storm and says "Hell, I'm not going to paddle to New Zealand".
Others include: Oliver Stone's 1992 movie JFK included a scene around the Christchurch Star newspaper breaking the news to some spooky American that John F Kennedy had been assassinated that day. Wolf of Wall Street is not the first Hollywood movie to include a throwaway-but-defining line about New Zealand. However, the quiet period should be ending in the near future", she said. The Sunday Star-Times requested an interview with Belfort but his assistant, Liv Tylutki, said while he was "very interested" in doing an interview "at this time, Paramount has asked him not to give any interviews. Online news website Salon describes the Auckland scene as "slippery and ingenious".
"The film pans over a rapt crowd of new victims enthralled by the character delivering a snippet of a histrionic speech viewers had seen earlier in the movie, when Mr Belfort used the device to teach his brokers how to rip off innocent investors."Īs for Belfort's real advertising logo being used in the Auckland scene: "I suppose the film-makers' point is that there perpetually remain audiences for fraudulent scams."Ĭohen said some might think "putting the artist and his muse together on a stage for a final scene" in Auckland was a cute conceit but "to his victims, it is beyond an insult.Īnd for anyone who is enticed to pay Mr Belfort to hear his recordings and speeches, it aids and abets this unrepentant character in possibly duping others yet again." "For reasons I don't understand, the film-makers and screenwriter opted as their final word to use the real Jordan Belfort to introduce the character played by Mr DiCaprio," Cohen wrote. He said until the end of the movie he had accepted "it is hard to truly feel the proper degree of disgust for charmingly portrayed by Mr DiCaprio".īut with the Auckland scene, Cohen says his reaction changed.
He told the Wall Steet Journal the blurring of reality and fiction in the last scene "rubbed me the wrong way" especially the way the film "advertised the real Jordan Belfort's current business".Ĭohen, who said Belfort defrauded "tens of thousands of people of hundreds of thousands of dollars", also voiced his concern on the opinion pages of the New York Times. What has angered former prosecutor Joel Cohen is that the final scene features Belfort himself, playing the a cameo role as an MC, as well as actual advertising for Belfort's new business. and ended up in Auckland where Scorsese shows him at the Auckland Event Centre, complete with the Sky Tower and the city's name behind him. Once out of jail he turned to motivational speaking.