In that pause, the viewer is left to wonder whether he’s hesitating, meditating or just waiting. Scorsese articulated his admiration for his longtime muse by singling out one moment’s choice from the production, when De Niro’s gun-toting psychopath Travis Bickle stops for a moment before going to kill a pimp played by Harvey Keitel. Their shared background made De Niro a logical choice once Scorsese started casting their joint breakout Mean Streets, the film-maker explaining that “you knew the people I was writing about – the names, the behavior, the clothes they wore.” A tender trust soon flowered between them, solidifying as they undertook the “hot and crazy” street shoots for Taxi Driver soon afterward, during which their own extras would blend in and vanish among the real-life Times Square sleazeballs they were supposed to be imitating.
“We were just kids, hanging around,” Scorsese said. Though they weren’t all that tight, they had a mutual friend who “ran with both crews” while they were making mischief around the Alto Knights, a “quote-unquote ‘social club’” frequented by “wiseguys” back in the 50s.
Though that story really begins years before either one would step on set, when “Marty and I knew each other as kids in different areas of Little Italy”, as De Niro recalls it. They all seemed energized by the thrill of movie-making as De Niro and Scorsese took us through the full lifespan of Raging Bull, from the project’s earliest conceptualization to its legacy decades out. “The kind of thing we were doing was too much trouble for, ah, what they would reap from it.” De Niro clarified: “Money.”īut the mood was jovial overall, both on Battery Park’s well-manicured Oval Lawn in New York as well as the Oklahoma function hall where the three heavyweights conducted their back-and-forth, a brief jaunt from the shooting location for their upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. “Our way of making movies went down,” Scorsese proclaimed, citing the massive financial failure of the pricy Heaven’s Gate that same year as a sign that the party was over for creative talents in search of studio carte blanche. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.Īt this year’s closing night for De Niro’s own Tribeca film festival, during an hour-long pre-recorded conversation that preceded the evening’s screening, there was a slight hint of the rueful in the way he and dear pal “Marty” discussed the experience with emcee Leonardo DiCaprio. In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days.
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