Jonah Hill interview

[arnzilla]

www.mtv.com/videos/movies/867173/jonah-hill-calls-wolf-of-wall-street-a-white-collar-goodfellas.jhtml

[nas78]

Thanks Arnz for this...

''It`s 80`s douchebag wallstreet cockhead scumbags'' ;D

[arnzilla]

www.vanityfair.com/video/2013/03/jonah-hill-on-the-wolf-of-wall-street-and--showing-scorsese-the-ropes-_2213022884001#page=1&plid=2112657098001

[arnzilla]

www.airingnews.com/articles/184624/Jonah-Hill-Sits-Down-for-His-Most-Revealing-Interview-Yet-No-Joke

“He has that quality of affability, along with a remarkable wit, daring, inventiveness, transgression, and truthfulness.”
—Martin Scorsese

Things got so difficult for Hill while filming True Story that his mother flew out and sat with him on set every day. “She didn’t leave,” he says. “Marty told me that his mom would be on set all the time and cook for everybody, and that always resonated with me.”

“Marty” is, of course, legendary auteur Martin Scorsese, who directed Hill in the forthcoming The Wolf of Wall Street, another reality-rooted tale based on Jordan Belfort’s memoir about corporate greed in the gogo ’80s. The genesis of their relationship started in, of all places, Cancun. In April 2012, Hill flew to southeastern Mexico for Summer of Sony, the studio’s annual event to toast its successes and promote its upcoming projects. Hill used the occasion to announce that he’d begun writing the sequel to 21 Jump Street. While there, he also arranged a meeting with Quentin Tarantino, who cast him in a small part in his slavesploitation bonanza, Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Between drunken, late-night ocean dips with Tatum, Hill sat down with DiCaprio, who had already signed on to topline The Wolf of Wall Street, to discuss possibly collaborating on the project. Hill insisted that he was the right choice to play Donnie Azoff, an amoral and hedonistic entrepreneur inspired in part by Danny Porush, who was incarcerated in the ’90s for a $200-million “pump and dump’’ stock fraud. The role called for Hill to change his voice, appearance, and thought process—to totally disengage from his own solid moral code. “Even though it’s about excess, it’s really about the darkness of money and greed and drugs and power,” Hill says. “I knew that I was being considered among a list of other actors, but not my contemporaries—Andrew Garfield or Joseph Gordon-Levitt—people who are usually up for the same stuff as me. I was hearing names like George Clooney.” When Hill was done selling himself, DiCaprio said, “‘Now it’s up to Marty.’ And then we partied. And then Channing and I partied. It was a blast.”

Hill was in New Orleans shooting This Is the End when his agents phoned to tell him that Scorsese had agreed to meet him. “I said, I don’t want to meet him. I want to audition for him. I want to show him what I can do.” He flew to New York and told Scorsese what he told DiCaprio: “I’m meant to play this part. That’s just the way it is.” He read three scenes, one of them twice, and left without getting a single note from the director. “That walk home was the craziest walk of my life,” he says. “I was like, Fuck it. Even if I don’t get this, Scorsese called me in to meet with him and I didn’t pussy out.” Two weeks later, back in New Orleans, Hill received a call from a blocked number. “It was Leo,” Hill says. “‘Marty just called me,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this shit.’”

[will]

Hill is great on talk shows. He'll be a good addition for the film's promotion.

arnzilla,
thanks for the backstory on how he got the part.
It says he changed his voice, too. Is Porush high-pitched?

[arnzilla]

In the trailer, Hill's voice sounds a bit deeper.

[will]

Raspy, too.

[nas78]

Jonah said this on Marc Maron`s WTF podcast...

79.14 ''Leo. i think he`s the best actor i`ve ever worked with. He`s just fucking brilliant.
He can just transform himself immediately and i`ve never seen anything like it.''

82.40 ''I got to act in a Martin Scorsese movie. We finished in January. It`s a 90`s wallstreet movie. I play a scumbag. I don`t know if anything will be sympathetic about this guy. To even meet Martin Scorsese is like the craziest thing ever. And i got to be in the movie a lot. To get this i feel my luck is gonna run out really soon.''

U can hear the whole thing here...
www.wtfpod.com/

[nas78]

www.salon.com/2013/06/25/jonah_hill_whatever_man_scorsese_thinks_i%E2%80%99m_awesome/

Jonah Hill: “Whatever, man. Scorsese thinks I’m awesome”

You can dis me all you want on a blog, or write whatever you want in this magazine and I’ll just be like, ‘Whatever, man. Scorsese thinks I’m awesome.’ [Laughs.] He hired me and didn’t fire me, so I can kind of not care now. It really did give me personal assurance that I’m doing the right thing and that I’m talented in certain ways because he’s so important to me.

BOOM!!!...

[arnzilla]

Excerpted from Elle - October 28, 2013

Working with Hill was an “exciting experience,” says Scorcese. “Jonah has an excellent range as an actor, but he’s also brave, edgy, inventive, and terribly funny.”

His best work is a delirious blend of brutally dark and brutally funny—which can also be said for Scorsese. “I don’t like things to be categorized,” says Hill, whose favorite movie (“the funniest movie ever”) is Goodfellas, which he first watched at the tender age of nine. “His movies have every possible thing in them, sometimes in the same minute.” Wolf—which Hill calls, no hyperbole intended, “the greatest experience I’ve ever had”—therefore offered a dream scenario: the chance to work with his all-time favorite director and his new BFF, DiCaprio, plus license to enact Joe Pesciesque levels of depravity, all while sporting a set of huge, blindingly white prosthetic choppers. (Hill’s own teeth are, by Hollywood standards, refreshingly imperfect.) “He’s an animal,” says Hill of his character, a stockbroker named Donnie Azoff. “My first eight minutes on-screen are some of the most offensive eight minutes you’ll ever see. As far as outlandish behavior goes, it may be the most shocking thing Scorsese has ever made.”

“There’s more improvisation in Wolf than in any of Marty’s other films,” says Emma Tillinger Koskoff, the director’s longtime producer. “In every scene, Jonah and Leo did something that wasn’t on the page, and that has a lot to do with Jonah.”

If Apatow and Rogen are Hill’s comic spirit guides, Scorsese and DiCaprio represent a sort of dramatic lodestar, though obviously one with a wicked appreciation for humor. Hill, who knows his share of funny people, claims that DiCaprio is “just truly, truly” one of the funniest guys he knows. He also apparently plays rough. “When we would do physical scenes, he would beat the crap out of me,” says Hill, who is planning to direct his first feature film next year, with Scorsese’s blessing. “He’s very strong, and in this scene where we’re smoking crack, he had to smack me on the back—so hard that when I think about it I get phantom pains. Each take, and he knew I was in pain, he smacked me harder. But I got him back so badly.”

In Hill’s favorite scene in the film, Wolf’s emotional climax, their characters eat take-out sushi in their glossy office. “The line in the movie has me saying, ‘Hey pal, take the last piece of sushi,’ ” says Hill, who made the most of the opportunity. “We do a hundred takes, and Leo has to eat a hundred pieces of raw fish. By the end of the night, Leo was vomiting in a trash can. He was so sick. I was like, ‘That’s right, motherfucker, that’s what you get for kicking my ass for six months.’ Everyone was worried about Leo, ‘Oh, my gosh, are you okay?’ But Marty, who has the best laugh I’ve ever heard, was laughing so hard. We were on the floor, we were so happy. That’s true love.”

[peanut80]

Arnz

Thanks for Jonah's comments about working with Scorsese & DiCaprio

[nas78]

Jonah on the AMERICAN WAY mag
hub.aa.com/en/aw/jonah-hill-celebrity-movies

Few actors can hopscotch between raunch comedy and award material as deftly as JONAH HILL. His latest role, in Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, already has the Academy buzzing. But whether or not his efforts yield Oscar gold, he already feels as if he’s hit the jackpot.

Almost two decades later, in a gag required of his role as a hedonistic financial wizard-cum-criminal in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Wolf of Wall Street, Hill had a goldfish relieve itself in his mouth. And the Oscar-nominated, 29-year-old actor was thinking the same thing: “I am so lucky. Like, beyond-belief lucky.”

If Hill was ready to endure such a scatological nightmare for Scorsese, it’s probably because the legendary helmer is the young actor’s favorite director and his crackling gangster yarn Goodfellas is Hill’s favorite film. “I was completely honored to even meet Martin Scorsese, let alone work with him,” Hill says. “I can easily say Wolf of Wall Street was the most gratifying experience of my life. I don’t know if anything will ever top it. It was weird when it ended. I was in this place for a while where I was, like, ‘Nothing’s ever going to be this cool in my life ever again.’ ”

Margot Robbie, who shares a number of high-octane scenes with Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street, says he is fully capable of anything he wants to achieve on screen, naysayers be damned. “It’s hard sometimes for actors because people just want to pigeonhole and label them,” Robbie says. “It must be frustrating for Jonah to be labeled ‘the funny guy,’ like that’s all he can do. What’s great about working with Martin Scorsese is you can show all of your sides. You can destroy the labels. You’ll see everything in this film. Jonah’s so funny in this film, but he’s also quite scary.”

For Hill, the role — more dramatic than the fare for which he’d become famous overnight — was exactly what he’d been looking for. “I love when you can sort of straddle that line between terror and hilarity,” he says. “That’s why Martin Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker, because there’s a real danger to his movies. It gets really dark and then it gets really funny and then it gets really dark again. To me, the best movies are all of those things in one. It doesn’t have to be so separate, like, ‘This is a serious movie, and this is a funny movie.’ Life’s not like that.”
Cyrus paved the way for Moneyball, in which Hill gave a sly, understated, Oscar-nominated performance as a baseball number cruncher, which in turn led to his Wolf of Wall Street audition. Hill was ecstatic at the opportunity but revealed it to no one, figuring the job would go to another actor.

On the day of the meeting with Scorsese, Hill — who hadn’t auditioned for a film in six years — was incredibly nervous. The pair met in Scorsese’s New York screening room, where the air conditioner had recently conked out, leaving Hill an “anxious, sweaty mess,” he recalls. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be a disaster.’ ”

Moving the audition to Scorsese’s much-cooler office, they punched through a number of scenes together. The actor relished every last moment. “I walked all the way back to my hotel in New York — like, 70 blocks — just feeling like this is the most amazing experience in my life,” he says. “I never expected to get the part, and if it had ended there, I was still the luckiest guy in the world.”

But a month or so later, Hill received a phone call from Wolf frontman Leonardo DiCaprio saying the part was his for the taking. A few days later, Scorsese sent Hill an iPod loaded with music from the film’s ’80s-era soundtrack to help him get into character. “You don’t forget the day the delivery guy brings you an iPod from Martin Scorsese,” says Hill, almost giddy at the memory.

Hill dove into the work, devouring Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same name about Reagan-era Wall Street excess, on which the film is based; hanging with ­traders; and researching the Caligula-like behaviors of the era’s financial robber barons. Hill’s character, Donnie Azoff, is a composite of several real-life characters given to deeply unbalanced behavior. The experience was a challenge for Hill, but a liberating one too. “This guy’s desires overcome any sense of morality. He is basically an animal — completely unhinged,” Hill says. “Nothing was inappropriate for him. When I looked at the character objectively, from my own perspective, I could never respect or endorse his choices. But playing it, anything goes. Sometimes at the end of the day, I’d think to myself, ‘Man, what did I do today?’ ”

To get into character, which required a distinctive patois and tone of voice, Hill resorted to one of his time-tested, if unconventional, acting techniques: prank phone calls.

“I don’t know if other actors do this or not — it probably sounds idiotic or insane — but it’s one of the best ways for me to find my character and figure it all out,” Hill confesses. “Real-life conversations are the greatest form of improvisation to me, so I’d get into character as Donnie and call these guys at Best Buy in Hawaii or wherever and talk to them about computer equipment and televisions and stuff, working out my voice and accent and everything. I was never mean, but it helped me so much. I know it sounds weird.”

Whether Christopher Plummer, who nabbed the Oscar (for Beginners) over Hill two years ago, practices through prank phone calls is anyone’s guess, but early Wolf howling suggests that Hill should prepare some mantel space come awards season.

“I would never, ever say that,” Hill says sincerely, finishing his drink. “All I can do is be thankful for the incredibly good luck I’ve got. I mean, if I wasn’t having the time of my life right now, I’d be very upset with myself. I really can’t imagine being any luckier than I am right now.”

[will]

thanks, nas.
So, the goldfish was real? I thought it would be cgi.

[will]

Jonah Hill interviewed at the Honorary Oscars thing:

[nas78]

Will i can`t watch the video. Is this interview?
watch.accesshollywood.com/video/jonah-hill-on-the-wolf-of-wall-street:-ive-never-been-so-proud-of-anything-in-my-entire-life/2846959571001