De Niro: A Life (39 page)

Moriarty, too, confessed that “
some of the scenes with Bobby actually made me nervous,” particularly those in which Jake comes at Vicki with violence; De Niro would play them differently each time. “I began concentrating so much on not getting hit or how to go with punches that I thought, ‘I’m never going to be able to say my lines,’ ” she said. The resultant fear and confusion she conveyed were, naturally, exactly what the moments called for. Scorsese and company also pointedly kept Moriarty from meeting Vicki LaMotta, who visited the set a few times, until after the production was done. “Marty didn’t want us to get together,” the actress explained. “He was afraid she’d influence me.… It was difficult to play a woman I had never met, and knew very little about, but even more difficult to play a character seen entirely through Jake’s eyes”—which, of course, was just what De Niro and Scorsese wanted.

They shot the domestic scenes in New York from mid-June to mid-August, and then they stopped—not because they were done but because De Niro was about to undergo another radical physical and psychological change for the part. He had chiseled himself into an uncanny simulacrum of a boxer, and now, following LaMotta’s story, he was going to let that exquisite body go to hell. The production would shut down for four months so that he could put on fifty to sixty pounds and portray the retired, slovenly, heedless older LaMotta.

“
I just can’t fake acting,” De Niro said. “I know movies are an illusion, and maybe the first rule is to fake it, but not for me. I’m too curious. I want the experience. I want to deal with all the facts of the character, thin or fat.” It was another stunning commitment to a role,
another stupendous transformation, and it was an important aspect of his attraction to the material to begin with. “To see that deterioration and to capture it on film was really interesting to me,” he said. But he wouldn’t take Hollywood shortcuts such as using padding or fat suits or makeup; he would turn himself, in a matter of months, from an Adonis to a slob, just as LaMotta had, albeit over a span of years. “
I needed to feel Jake’s shame at getting fat,” he said. “To feel my feet hurt with the extra weight, to know what it’s like to be short of breath and not be able to bend down to tie your shoes.”

He’d always been skinny, but not because he was a picky eater: he was just cut out that way, lucky bastard. But now he was going to have to make work out of eating, and eating specifically to gain weight fast. “
At first it was fun,” he admitted. “I ate ice cream and everything I wanted—it’s like part of the fantasy that one has about eating
everything.
I took a tour through France, from Paris to the Riviera, stayed in inns and ate. And for two weeks I was miserable, because as good as the food was, it’s rich—you could eat only one big meal a day and then lie there, digesting it.” But before long he had to go beyond the limits of comfort and
force
himself to eat: “After 15, 20 pounds, it was hard work. I had to get up early to eat a full breakfast and digest that in order to eat a full lunch and digest that in order to eat a full dinner. And lots of Di-Gel or Tums.”

Aside from the unpleasantness of feeling constantly overstuffed, there were aspects to his new size that he hadn’t anticipated: “
I began to realize what a fat man goes through,” he said. “You get rashes on your legs. Your legs scrape together. You feel your weight on your heels when you stand up. It was like going to a foreign land.” But, he said, the results could not have been achieved any other way: “The internal changes, how you feel and how it makes you behave—for me to play the character, it was the best thing I could have done. Just by having the weight on, it really made me feel a certain way and behave a certain way.” (Ironically, as De Niro was bulking up to play the gone-to-pot Jake, Pesci, who would appear in a later-life reconciliation scene between the brothers, had to thin out a bit to play the older Joey. They shared a meal at Pesci’s old stomping grounds, Amici’s, during the production hiatus, and while De Niro gorged, Pesci skimped.)

Production resumed for one day in the autumn so that they could get some intermediate shots of De Niro’s weight gain; then he went back to overeating until December, finally topping the 215-pound mark that he’d been aiming for. Scorsese had planned to shoot the later sequences in Los Angeles, doubling for Florida, and he quickly learned that he was no longer dealing with the same sort of actor he had had in front of the camera earlier in the year when they created the boxing sequences there. “
Bobby’s weight was so extreme that his breathing was like mine when I’m having an asthma attack,” Scorsese said. “With the bulk he put on he wasn’t doing forty takes, it was three or four takes. The body dictated. He just became that person.”

The film wrapped just as the year ended. Scorsese took a break to energize for the six to eight months of editing, sound work, and scoring he would undertake for the film, and De Niro set about regaining his usual form—a daunting process. On a visit to Long Island, he put his son, Raphael, on a bathroom scale. “
He was 30 pounds,” De Niro said, “and I remember thinking that I had to lose two of him.” He learned that he couldn’t lose the weight as quickly as he put it on. “I couldn’t go back to eating the way I normally did,” he said, “because I would then feel sick. I had to let myself down gradually.” When he showed up at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards at Sardi’s that winter, he conspicuously ate but a small cube of steak for dinner; we know because the press were dutifully recording his diet, partly a testament to how much his personal commitment to the role captivated the world. For years, in fact, movie audiences would scrutinize each new photograph and film appearance to see if he had lost his
Raging Bull
fat, and it took him a decade and another severe physical transformation, this time for
Cape Fear
, to show the world that he’d done the trick fully.

A
S HARD AS
De Niro had worked in making the film happen and in becoming—there really was no other word for it—Jake LaMotta, Scorsese would replicate his commitment and endurance in assembling the footage they’d shot into a film. Much of the editing was done by Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker—who had worked with him on his student film
Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
and who would cut every
one of his feature films after
Raging Bull
—in all-nighters in a cramped, makeshift editing room in Scorsese’s apartment. They came up with certain aspects of the finished film’s structure there, such as the slow-motion shots of De Niro dancing in the ring in a leopard-skin robe that ran over the title sequence and the concept of beginning the film with the older, fat LaMotta preparing to recite from, among other things, Budd Schulberg’s script of
On the Waterfront
as part of a cabaret show (“De Niro playing Jake LaMotta playing Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy,” Scorsese noted)—revealing the end, or really the aftermath, of the story right at the outset.

United Artists executives had felt that surprising the audience with De Niro’s weight gain would have more impact if it happened later in the film. But publicity about it had begun to leak out even while they were still shooting, and when the studio bosses finally got to see the film, in an unpolished but basically finished cut in July 1980, they saw the genius in the choice that Scorsese and Schoonmaker had made.
“Scorsese,” Steven Bach admitted, “had been right. He had feared that publicity about De Niro’s weight gain would be too widespread and that audiences would sit through the film not seeing, not hearing, waiting only to see ‘the fat man.’ He undercut that voyeuristic fascination at the start, replacing it with curiosity not about an actor’s stunt but about a man’s life.”
^*5

That first screening of the finished film would become legendary for the reaction of Andy Albeck, the Russian-born (of Danish stock) film distributor who had made a personal fortune in the movie business in Asia before spending thirty years climbing the corporate hierarchy at United Artists, where he reigned as president at the time
Raging Bull
was made. He was a neat and punctilious fellow, a vigorous athlete, a stickler for protocol. If young, hip executives such as Bach and David Field had a hard time swallowing
Raging Bull
, even in a version tempered from Schrader’s vision, they feared that Albeck would have a visceral reaction against it. When the film ended, Bach recalled, “the
lights came up slowly in a room full of silence, as if the viewers had lost all power of speech.” Bach saw Scorsese in the back of the room, cringing against a wall. “Then Andy Albeck rose from his seat, marched briskly to him, shook his hand just once, and said quietly, ‘Mr. Scorsese, you are an Artist.’ ”

Indeed he was, but an exceedingly temperamental one, and ever more so as the long process of finishing the film dragged on. As the film’s November debut approached, Scorsese was working day and night, literally, and becoming lost in the details of production. Near the very end, he threatened to remove his name from the film entirely because he didn’t feel that the drink order of a background actor (played by the director’s father, in fact) was audible enough. Irwin Winkler, who was deprived of the opportunity to throw a proper premiere for the film because Scorsese was taking so long to polish it, had had enough.
“I said, ‘People are going to look at this picture one hundred years from now and say that it’s a great, great movie,’ ” he remembered. “Because you can’t hear ‘Cutty Sark,’ which, by the way, everybody else says they can hear, you’re taking your name off?’ And he says, ‘Yes, I’m taking my name off the picture.’ I said, ‘Okay, if you want to take your name off the picture, it’s off, but meanwhile, the picture’s going in to the lab.’ And that was it. Obviously, he was a little emotional at the time.”

In time, Scorsese would level out, and he would always feel that what he and De Niro had achieved in
Raging Bull
went beyond anything they’d ever done or ever seen in a film. “Look,” he said soon after the release,
“there’s no way to do it unless you do it right. What other people might call ‘honest,’ we call ‘right.’ And that degree of honesty is highly painful. We had a similar idea in mind on
Raging Bull
, but I cannot verbalize that idea. The point is I’m standing there naked in this film, and that’s all there is to it.”

Raging Bull
premiered on a single screen in New York, and the critical and public responses were an almost unanimous acknowledgment of the genius of it accompanied by widespread repulsion at the pith of it. (Among the viewers startled by the brutal tenor of the film was Jake LaMotta himself. After seeing
Raging Bull
for the first time, he said to his ex-wife Vicki, who was also at the premiere, “That wasn’t me. I wasn’t like that.” “No,” she replied. “You were worse.”)

T
IME HAS LED
us to believe that the foremost acting achievement in
Raging Bull
is the fact that its leading man put on fifty or so pounds to play the final portion of the film. But to be fair, putting on weight, even in a binge, isn’t as hard as what De Niro did with his body
before
filming began, namely, building the scrawny frame of Travis Bickle and Monroe Stahr into a body indistinguishable from that of a professional fighter fifteen years younger than himself. In his Everlast shorts and old-timey gloves, the muscles in his belly, arms, and legs as hard and sleek as marble, De Niro is every bit the picture of the prizefighter: lithe, chiseled, not a cup of fat on his body, a thoroughly credible fighting machine.

When he moves in the ring—and Scorsese films the action in slow and fast motion almost as often as at regular speed—De Niro doesn’t only move like a fighter (and, specifically, like Jake LaMotta) but
acts
like a fighter: focusing like a laser on his opponent, trying to strategize while engaged in combat, absorbing and meting out punishment with a genuine sense of pleasure, relishing the challenge of the bout, playing broadly to the crowd, too adrenalized and battered and in the moment to absorb the things his cornermen are telling him. Not a decade before, De Niro played a baseball player of limited gifts and could barely pass as a simulacrum of the real thing; in
Raging Bull
, he is one of the most plausible movie-screen boxers ever filmed.

And yet, as ugly as things get in the ring—busted noses, eyes spinning after blows to the head, blood filling water pails and dripping from the ropes—it is
outside
of it that LaMotta and his story are at their most feral, ugly, and horrifying. Even when he tries to understand himself, LaMotta cannot separate one type of violence, one type of threat, one type of fight from another (not for nothing, by the way, does the film open with him staring at himself in a mirror, the first of several such moments). In the first non-fighting sequence set in the 1940s, LaMotta and his wife squabble viciously in an apartment no bigger than a boxing ring, and he explodes, throwing over the table, dinner and all, taking time to yell threats out the windows at the neighbor and his dog. Soon he goads his brother into punching him in the face, hard,
without making any effort to defend himself. It’s a remarkable, unblinking vision of masochism, a thirst for punishment and abuse made especially awful by the cockeyed grin De Niro sports throughout. He’s proud that he can endure pain, even—maybe especially—outside of the professional setting in which it’s expected.