Martin Scorsese has veered off course slightly by focusing his lens on the financial underworld

Martin Scorsese is fiddling with his phone. He's looking for an email he needs to quickly answer before our interview, but he can't find it.

Scorsese: wily fox of Hollywood

MARTIN Scorsese is fiddling with his phone. He's looking for an email he needs to quickly answer before our interview, but he can't find it.

"Oh, I don't know how to use it," he exhales. "I can do the texting, but that's about it."

Indeed, there's something sort of wonderful about the man behind such iconic films as Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Goodfellas having an issue with technology. Eventually he gives up and throws the offending device on to the table.

"I'm of a different generation," he says. "I can't even watch television news, because it's all these short clips and I don't know what the hell is going on."

He may not be able to master current technology, but when it comes to directing films, he is the undisputed king.

Best known for tackling stories of the underworld ("I grew up on the streets of New York - of the Bronx and Harlem. That's what I've always known"), Scorsese has veered off course slightly by taking the reins on The Wolf Of Wall Street, based on the memoir of disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort.

Scorsese has always had a soft spot for gangsters and crooks who do battle with each other, but Belfort's crimes (he fleeced investors, many of them working class people, out of some $300 million) are on a whole other level.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Jordan Belfort, says he saw the film as a story about the "financial underworld", and knew it had to be Scorsese at the wheel. The Wolf Of Wall Street marks the pair's fifth collaboration.

"From the start, I couldn't stop thinking of Marty for this," says DiCaprio.

Despite DiCaprio badgering him to do it, Scorsese says he wasn't interested.

"It made me wonder about myself," he says. "I could recognise parts of myself in Jordan Belfort. It's not just about taking advantage of people with money. You could be taking advantage of your family, you could be taking advantage of people you love.

"It opened up all sorts of issues for me."

He finally relented when he started looking at the story from a different perspective. Indeed, the man who has directed some of the silver screen's most violent films, found himself drawn to the book's different kind of cruelty.

"What I liked about it was the lack of any kind of moral landscape - there was just none," he says. "The ability to take advantage of other people, and relish it and enjoy it. It's a cruel entertainment, and the cruelty of it was really what was interesting to me."

At 71, Scorsese admits that the demands of filmmaking have started to wear on him.

"Just physically it's a lot more difficult for me," he says. "But I have a lot of good people with me and we try our best."

SEE: The Wolf Of Wall Street is now showing.