In 2013, Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” quickly became renowned for its vulgar language and sexually graphic content. The film became the iconic director’s highest grossing movie and was touted as having more uses of the word “fuck” than any other movie ever. This accomplishment had supposedly been previously held by “Casino”, another Scorsese film.
A year earlier, Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” grew infamous for its controversial use of racial slurs, and is considered the movie with the most instances of the N-word. Tarantino and Scorsese are both known for the adult content of their films. CNS sought to find out whose movies had the foulest language.
Online counts inconsistently report the number of times these vulgarities appear in each film, and which movie holds the record for most vulgarities. CNS used scripts available online to determine a count of curse words in each film.
The number of utterances of words in the script may differ from the movie, because of on-set improvisations or changes later on in the filmmaking process. Not every movie was written by the person who directed it. These graphics show the foul language in scripts chosen or written by iconic directors.
Of the nine directors measured, Tarantino, Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and the Coen Brothers have directed three movies with more than 100 curse words. Scorsese contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg have both used far less curses than the “Wolf of Wall Street” director.
Scorsese’s “Casino” and “Wolf of Wall Street” rank first and fifth in terms of f-bombs dropped on screen. Tarantino and the Coen Brothers each had one vulgarity-filled movie that managed to make the top 5 list. CNS also compared the directors of the dirtiest movies by word.
Tarantino tends to use more curses in general, but Scorsese is more fond of the word “fuck.” Tarantino uses the n-word far more often in his movies, particularly in “Django Unchained.”
“Django”, a movie about slavery in the antebellum south, is definitely a contender for the most uses of the N-word.
The word “fuck” has grown more popular, and its frequency rises in eras when crime movies are popular.
The early 1980s were dominated by Spielberg’s films, like “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” and the Indiana Jones franchise. The 1990s were a more popular time for crime movies, like “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Natural Born Killers” and “Pulp Fiction”. When these movies were out, the number of curses per movie increased.
Tarantino and Scorsese have the most foul-mouthed movies. Scorsese doesn’t always choose to direct curse-heavy movies, but when he does he goes all out and uses f-bombs left and right. Tarantino–on the other hand–constantly drops a high, steady number of curses in each of his movies.