The island setting was perfect for Scorsese. Martin in the Caribbean to do a final pass. After that, Winkler sent Scorsese and De Niro to St. “Schrader gave us the structure - the biggest problem was the structure,” he said. ** Screenwriter Mardik Martin did the first draft of the “Raging Bull” script but it was “Taxi Driver” scribe Paul Schrader who “cracked it,” De Niro recalled. The audience of movie buffs swooned at the mention of two other bona fide classic films. “Then I had to do ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ” De Niro said. De Niro recalled that he was working on Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” when he first read La Motta’s biography. Scorsese and De Niro first began talking about it in 1974 but it took Scorsese some time to understand the character, and both of them were busy. ** “Raging Bull” was a long-gestating project. Here are seven more things we learned from revisiting the majesty of movies via “Raging Bull.” “It’s late in New York, Ben,” Scorsese chided at one point. So Mankiewicz could be forgiven for holding the “Raging Bull” quartet on stage while he had them. (And yet, Joe Pesci nearly steals the picture with his prowess as Joey, La Motta’s brother-manager.)
Scorsese’s take on the highs and lows of 1940s “Bronx Bull” boxer Jake La Motta endures as masterpiece, a blend of grit, arthouse, matchless fight sequences and an Oscar-winning performance by De Niro that stands as a high-water mark for an actor’s transformation into a character. The movie demonstrated its own legend by screening to a nearly packed (and vaccine-screened) house. 11.As the “Raging Bull” foursome shared memories of making the movie and perspective on its impact after 40-plus years, Mankiewicz couldn’t help going over (by a lot) his allotted Q&A time. Then again, in a film where Donald Sutherland headbutts a cat to death, you have to do something fairly spectacular to get noticed. (One compensation: he gets to wear some terrific suits.) Nowhere is De Niro’s willingness to commit to the part more evident than in the explicit, religion-revealing scene where he and Depardieu are given simultaneous hand relief (a “ski pole”, if you will) by a prostitute (Stefania Casini) who is then plied with drink by De Niro whereupon she has an epileptic fit. Naturally, he visited Italy to learn the language and dialect, but he also accepted the somewhat thankless role of Alfredo, born on the same day as the peasant Olmo ( Gérard Depardieu) but forever in his shadow – a cowardly, privileged, none-too-subtle representation of the landowning bourgeoise. The huge weight gain De Niro underwent to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull is regularly and rightly cited as indicative of his intense commitment to the craft, but De Niro’s fearless, if in this case, perhaps slightly misguided, pursuit of excellence is equally evident in Bernardo Bertolucci’s five-and-a-half-hour epic 1900.
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