De Niro: A Life (38 page)

By early 1979 he was the spitting image of a younger professional fighter: he had scores of photos taken in traditional prizefight poses, and it’s hard to believe that this was the same fellow who had played the gaunt Travis Bickle or the withered Monroe Stahr just a few years prior. He was toned and thick in the stomach, all muscle, without a cup of fat on his body. In and of itself it was a feat. And the transformation wasn’t just in the body: he sat patiently for makeup that would provide him with a semblance of Jake LaMotta’s mashed nose and ears and of the bruises, swellings, and other wounds accumulated in the ring, and he experimented with different ways of fixing his long, straight
hair into something more like LaMotta’s sloppy halo of ringlets. He watched home movies of the LaMotta family (some of these would be reproduced exactly for the film) and a rare film clip of LaMotta walking casually through his training camp (“It was only 25 seconds long,” De Niro remembered, “but it was a big help”). And he worked on a bit of physical business that was never mentioned in the script but would be immediately familiar to anyone who knew the real man: Jake LaMotta was nearly deaf in one ear, so De Niro practiced leaning in to hear in such a fashion so as not to reveal the embarrassment of his hearing loss but still hear as much as possible.

In addition to his lengthy interviews with and observations of Jake, he spent time with Joey LaMotta, Vicki LaMotta (who had remarried but still often used her first husband’s name), and Pete Savage, who had disappeared from the script but remained connected to the film—albeit at a remove—as a producer. (De Niro kept ongoing lists of questions to ask them all.) He took trips to the zoo to watch animals move; he listened to LaMotta’s tape-recorded voice again and again to pick up its timbre and rhythm. He had every bit of spoken dialogue from the book
Raging Bull
transcribed so that he could acquire a full feel for Jake’s idiom. (As proof of his mastery of LaMotta’s argot, De Niro would take credit for a famous line in a scene in which LaMotta warns his first wife not to overcook his steak because “it defeats its own purpose.” “I knew it didn’t make sense,” he said, “but in a way it did—it was like a double negative of some sort.”)

As he always did, he annotated his script with monkish devotion, filling the margins with reminders about what to think, how to read a line, what gestures or facial expressions might create the effect he was after. Some of this work had begun before the final script was created. While making
The Deer Hunter
, he kept a notebook of thoughts, ideas, questions, and chores related to
Raging Bull
:

But then, as each day’s work presented itself, he kept up a running account of his thoughts about the man he was playing and the scenes he was filming:

While De Niro built this uncannily thorough physical and psychological portrait, Scorsese prepared to shoot the fight scenes with almost heroic creativity and energy. The film may not have as much boxing action in it as, say,
Rocky
, but it had more than a lot of fight films; as a result, Scorsese planned to shoot inside the ring for ten weeks, a stretch necessitated partly by the intricate motion and cutting he planned to execute, partly by the exertions being asked of the actors in each take, each of which would be repeated multiple times (De Niro got into the habit of attacking a heavy bag just before the cameras were set to roll so that he’d look appropriately sweaty and pumped), and partly because he and his crew had to jerry-rig harnesses, dollies, and cranes that would allow them to get the images he saw in his head.

It was grueling, sometimes comically so—at least to Scorsese, who wasn’t inside a boxing ring under hot lights pretending to fight all day for months. “
It was really funny,” he said. “I was talking to Bob two
days in a row, and he said, ‘What do I do in this shot?’ I said, ‘In this shot, you get hit.’ And we went on to the next one. I got that one all worked out, and then he said, ‘What about this one?’ I said, ‘In this one, you get hit!’ ” (Later Scorsese admitted, “It was excruciating for me to watch him because of the way we worked—every agonizing detail he’d go through, I’d feel for him.”)

Throughout this period, Scorsese established a visual style for the picture: garish, close-in, unblinking. The prevailing metaphor came in the exaggeratedly loud and blinding pop of photographers’ flashbulbs, which burst around LaMotta like firecrackers. There was frequent use of speed changes, with the imagery alternately slowing down (“I had to shoot the punches in slow motion or you wouldn’t see them,” Scorsese explained), and speeding up to give a sense of the adrenalized heat of battle. He had learned quite a bit of his arsenal of cinematic ideas by studying the films of the English director Michael Powell (especially
The Red Shoes
and
Tales of Hoffman
), and he shared some of the fight scenes he shot with the older filmmaker, who provided him with an artistic epiphany. Watching some early footage of De Niro in the ring, Powell remarked to Scorsese, “There’s something wrong: the gloves shouldn’t be red.” In fact, he said, the scenes shouldn’t be in color at all. At first Scorsese balked at the idea: “This from the man who had red all over his own films, which was where I’d got it from in the first place!” But after conferring with his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, who acknowledged that he felt that the color photography seemed drained of detail somehow, Scorsese got the permission of his producers to shoot the film in black and white.
^*3

B
EFORE THE SHOOT BEGAN
, De Niro bided his time in New York, socializing with actors (along with Al Pacino, he attended a party at Lee Strasberg’s house at which the Japanese Grand Kabuki troupe was feted), and he agreed to appear in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to accept
the annual award of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club (“I’m a little unhappy there’s no pudding in this,” he quipped while accepting his brass prize). In April he went to Los Angeles for nearly three months of shooting boxing sequences. By mid-June he was back in New York to spend a similar amount of time shooting scenes of life outside the ring during LaMotta’s boxing years. In Los Angeles, LaMotta was an almost daily presence on the set, reminding De Niro about fighting strategy, attitude, posture. But when they went to New York, LaMotta was asked not to follow them. “
When we did the acting stuff in New York, we didn’t want him around,” De Niro explained. “He understood, because you don’t want the guy to come over and say, ‘That’s not the way I did it.’ You feel his presence and all your energy is drained. You feel like you’re doing it for the approval of someone else.”

Instead, he had two other people to work with, actors who had been discovered for the film from almost literally out of nowhere and who would play the roles of Joey and Vicki. It was the Jake LaMotta story, but, following Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro had built the movie around three characters, and these actors would wind up sharing virtually every scene with De Niro that wasn’t set in the ring.

At times it seemed like the roles would never get filled. Casting director Cis Corman was put on the hunt for likely types and found nothing. It was De Niro, in fact, who turned up an actor who might play Joey. Watching a little-seen mob movie from 1975 called
The Death Collector
, he was struck by a fiery actor playing the lead role. De Niro couldn’t know it, but the fellow had actually been a child TV star in the 1950s, then a professional musician in the 1960s (he played guitar for Joey Dee and the Starlighters), and then, until appearing in
The Death Collector
, half of a Martin-and-Lewis-inspired comedy duo. He had only made the one film, it hadn’t done anything, and he had finally quit showbiz altogether and was running an Italian restaurant in the Bronx. His name was Joe Pesci. Near the end of 1978, not very long before shooting commenced, De Niro and Scorsese called him to find out if he was interested in auditioning for the part of Joey LaMotta.

“
How they found me in that restaurant, I don’t know,” Pesci said. He had truly given up chasing a career as an entertainer, he explained to De Niro in that first phone call, and he didn’t feel that he was up to
the job. “I told him I didn’t think I wanted to do it, that I wasn’t interested. He said he’d come and talk with me.” They had dinner at Pesci’s restaurant, Amici’s, and De Niro brought along the script. “Robert told me, ‘It’s a good role, not a great role,’ ” Pesci recalled, “and I told him I didn’t want to go back to acting unless I got a part that proved I was good.” He was grateful for the opportunity, of course, but he was still reluctant: “I figured they should give it to a working actor who really wanted it.”

But it turned out that they wanted him, and as soon as he was on board, Pesci began helping the production in ways nobody could have imagined. He helped them cast the role of Salvy, the wannabe neighborhood gangster charged by the local Mafia boss with putting the squeeze on the LaMotta brothers. Pesci persuaded Scorsese and De Niro to audition his old comedy sidekick, Frank Vincent, a pompadoured guy from Boston who was also a former lounge musician and who had also appeared in
The Death Collector.
In their nightclub act, which they performed as Vincent and Pesci between 1969 and 1975, “
I would abuse the audience, and Joe would abuse me,” Vincent remembered. And, in fact,
Raging Bull
depicted a brutal beating of Salvy by an enraged Joey LaMotta.
^*4
But real life lent a hand here: the former partners hadn’t broken up amicably, so there was some genuine mistrust and sour emotion for them to draw upon in their scenes.

And then Pesci solved another problem for his new bosses. Cis Corman and her team had been working for long months to find someone to play Vicki LaMotta, who first met Jake when she was a neighborhood girl of fifteen and he was a married man some ten years her senior. Within a few short years they married, and she bore him three children during their time together, which coincided with his rise, his ascension to the title, his decline, and eventually his imprisonment. Vicki, who lived in Florida and was cooperating with the production, was still a bombshell in her late forties, and Corman had been charged with finding “a young Lana Turner” to play her. But she was getting nowhere.

One night Pesci walked into Hoops, a discotheque in Mount Vernon,
New York, just north of the city, and he saw a picture of a girl on the wall that startled him: “a dead ringer for Vicki,” he later said. He found out she was a nineteen-year-old Yonkers girl named Cathy Moriarty who was working as a model in the garment district, and he tracked her down.

“
He wanted a picture of me for Marty for the film,” Moriarty remembered, “and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ thinking it was one of those modeling jobs where all they really wanted was for you to take your clothes off.” She agreed to meet the director and star at their midtown offices, and after she made a favorable impression, they asked her to continue coming in. “I would go down to the city and read for them,” she recalled. “It was like taking private acting lessons. They never once said that I had the part or anything, and I know they were seeing other actresses, too.”

It would be a huge risk, giving such a big part in a major studio production to someone who had never acted professionally, but De Niro was particularly struck with her. “
She had a feeling and an aura you will seldom find in professionals,” he said. “Sometimes amateurs are better to work with because of their instincts.… If you’re doing a theatrical play, it gets difficult. But for a movie you can repeat the scenes.” They tried all sorts of things to test her range and focus, and she never faltered. “She was totally natural even if we were doing nothing,” De Niro remembered. “She was comfortable,” Scorsese added. “She was so at ease it was incredible.” They screen-tested her in February 1979 and hired her the next day.

C
OMBINED, THE BLACK
-
AND
-
WHITE
cinematography, the post–World War II setting, the stifling lower-class milieu, and the unknown faces (which included even De Niro’s, remade by his fitness regimen and the discreet prosthetics) imparted a neorealist quality to
Raging Bull.
The footage seemed almost to have been captured without the camera (and, of course, the audience) being noticed by the people on the screen. The craft that went into it was exquisite and exact, but there was a rawness and immediacy that made it feel almost like an invasion of the characters’ privacy.

De Niro, taking advantage of the greenness of his co-stars, coaxed them into startling, unrehearsed displays of emotion. During a scene in which Jake, off-camera, confronts Joey with an accusation that he’d slept with Vicki, De Niro wasn’t provoking the energy he sought from Pesci, so he came at him with a twist, changing the line “Did you fuck my wife?” to “Did you fuck my mother?” and startling Pesci into a genuinely confused and immediate response. (“When you see the film again,” Scorsese laughed, “look at Joe’s reaction!”) He would get Pesci riled by repeatedly interrupting his takes with questions about trivial details until, Pesci remembered, “I’m hot, I’m ready to go.”