The Fighter Nobody Wanted to Film
It is 1974, and Robert De Niro is holding a book he cannot put down. He has just won his first Academy Award for playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, he is Hollywood’s brightest rising star, and the book in his hands is a battered autobiography by a forgotten middleweight boxer from the Bronx named Jake LaMotta — a man whose claim to fame is that he was never knocked down in the ring but managed to knock his own life down anyway. De Niro reads it, rereads it, and decides he must play this man. There is only one problem: he wants Martin Scorsese to direct it, and Scorsese wants absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is the story of Raging Bull — a film that took nearly five years to get started, shut down its own production for months so its star could eat himself into oblivion, lost money at the box office, polarized the critics, and then, against every expectation, became the film that defined Robert De Niro. If method acting has a Mount Rushmore, this is the mountain the face is carved on.
Five Years of “No”
When De Niro first brought Jake LaMotta’s memoir Raging Bull: My Story to Scorsese, the director’s answer was, in essence, a shrug. Scorsese was not a sports fan. He found boxing boring. He had just come off the punishing shoot of Taxi Driver and the commercial disaster of New York, New York, and the last thing he wanted was to spend two years of his life inside a boxing ring with a man he could not relate to. De Niro, who had already played boxers in his mind a thousand times — he had wanted to play a fighter since he was young — kept pushing. A year went by. Then two. Then more. It would take him almost five years to wear Scorsese down.
What finally changed the director’s mind had nothing to do with boxing at all. In 1978, Scorsese ended up in the hospital, his body wrecked by cocaine addiction, his career in free fall. He has said he felt he was going to die — and that De Niro came to visit him and told him, in effect, that if he was going to go down, he should go down making something that mattered. Scorsese finally read the script again, and this time he saw something he had missed: it was not a boxing movie. It was a movie about a man destroying himself, about guilt and redemption, about the violence men carry home from the ring and inflict on the people who love them. He decided this would be his last film in America — his cinematic testament — and he threw himself into it with a convert’s fury.
Learning to Be Jake
De Niro’s preparation for the role has passed into legend, and for once the legend is mostly true. He spent a year training as a boxer under LaMotta himself at Manhattan’s Gramercy Gym, sparring, running, taking punches for real. LaMotta, Joey LaMotta’s brother in the film’s universe and De Niro’s tutor in this one, reportedly told the actor he was good enough to turn professional. De Niro even entered three genuine amateur boxing matches in Brooklyn — and won two of them. He spent hours interviewing the real LaMotta, tape recorder running, studying not just the man’s words but his breathing patterns, his tics, the way anger lived in his shoulders. The makeup team took a cast of LaMotta’s actual nose so De Niro could wear it as the older Jake. Nothing about this performance was going to be faked — least of all the body.
Because here is the part of the story that still stuns people. Raging Bull is a film of two halves: the lean, ferocious young Jake in his prime, and the bloated, broken, middle-aged Jake doing a sad stand-up act in a Miami nightclub. De Niro refused a fat suit. He refused camera tricks. Instead, production shut down — cast and crew paid, sets struck, everyone sent home — for nearly four months while De Niro flew to Italy and France and ate. Pasta, cheesecake, vanilla milkshakes, everything rich he could stomach, no gym in sight. “The first 15-20 pounds, you know, you eat and overindulge, to say the least,” he later told CBS News. “And then after that, it’s just pure drudgery, work.”
He gained sixty pounds — taking his frame to around 215 pounds — and it nearly broke him. His breathing grew labored, his speech thickened, his health deteriorated to the point that Scorsese had to hurry the remaining shoot along just to relieve him of the physical punishment. There was no fat suit in 1980, no CGI, no shortcut. When you see the older Jake LaMotta on screen, swollen and gasping through his nightclub routine, you are watching a man who did that to himself on purpose, for art.
Inside the Ring
Scorsese, for his part, was solving problems no boxing film had ever solved. Before Raging Bull, fight scenes were shot from outside the ropes — the audience watched boxing the way you watch it on television, at a remove. Scorsese wanted the opposite. He had the ring lengthened and widened to give himself room, then put the camera inside it, so every fight unfolds from Jake’s point of view: the flashbulbs popping, the ropes looming, the blood hanging in the air. Cinematographer Michael Chapman shot the fights at varying speeds — some punches in dreamy slow motion, others in staccato bursts — so that violence on screen feels less like sport and more like memory, the way a fighter remembers getting hit.
The sound took six months to mix. Every punch, every flashbulb, every gasp of the crowd had to be balanced against the dialogue, and the film moves between gritty realism and stylized expressionism the way LaMotta’s own mind moved between the ring and the bedroom. And the decision to shoot in black and white — made partly to separate the film from the Rocky pictures its producers were also making, partly for timelessness — turned out to be the film’s masterstroke. In monochrome, the blood doesn’t look like a slasher film; it looks like ink. It looks like guilt.
The production was not a happy one. Scorsese was still fragile, De Niro was obsessive, and the material was brutal — a story of a man who beats his brother, terrorizes his wife, and ends up alone in a jail cell, weeping. De Niro, staying in character between takes, kept a punching bag in the ring and would work it until his muscles glistened, then step back into the shot. Joe Pesci, then a near-unknown De Niro had spotted in a low-budget film and insisted on casting as Joey, improvised whole scenes with him. Cathy Moriarty, an eighteen-year-old discovered through an open casting call, held her own against two of the most intense actors alive. There were clashes, exhaustion, and a director who genuinely believed he was making his last picture.
The Box Office That Wasn’t
And then, after all of it — the five years of persuasion, the year of training, the four months of eating, the exacting shoot, the painstaking edit by Thelma Schoonmaker — the film came out and almost nobody came to see it.
Raging Bull premiered in New York on November 14, 1980, and went wide on December 19. It cost $18 million and grossed just $23.4 million — a lukewarm return that, once marketing costs and theater shares were counted, meant the film lost money. The critics were split down the middle: De Niro’s performance and Schoonmaker’s editing were almost universally praised, but the film’s violence repelled plenty of reviewers, and audiences who had cheered for Rocky had no interest in a boxer you couldn’t love. United Artists had no idea how to sell a black-and-white art film about a wife-beating middleweight. Scorsese, who had already bombed with New York, New York, walked around convinced his career was over and that no studio would ever finance him again.
The Academy, though, knew what it had seen. The film was nominated for eight Oscars — tying The Elephant Man as the most-nominated film of the year — including Best Picture and Best Director. It lost those big prizes to Ordinary People, but on Oscar night Robert De Niro won Best Actor, his second Academy Award, and Thelma Schoonmaker won for editing. De Niro’s acceptance was the capstone on a transformation the industry had never witnessed before and would spend decades trying to imitate.
Jake Watches Jake
There is one audience member whose reaction mattered more than any critic’s: Jake LaMotta himself. The real Bronx Bull watched the film about his life — the beatings, the jealousy, the nightclub act, the jail cell — and, as the story goes, turned to his ex-wife Vikki and asked whether he had really been that terrible. She told him yes. Friends said the film shook him; for the first time, he saw himself the way the world had seen him. De Niro, who had spent a year in gyms with the man and recorded his voice and studied his breathing, had not made a monster out of whole cloth. He had held up a mirror, in black and white, and the mirror did not flinch.
The two men stayed friendly. LaMotta, who had done a real-life nightclub act in his washed-up years — the very act that frames the film — understood what De Niro had done for him, too: turned a forgotten middleweight into immortal American mythology. And consider the film’s opening, before a single punch is thrown: LaMotta alone in his dressing room, shadowboxing in slow motion, wrapped in his leopard-print robe, while Pietro Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana swells on the soundtrack. It is one of the most beautiful title sequences ever filmed — an aging gladiator preparing for a battle that is already lost. Scorsese, who had to be dragged to this project, opened it like an opera. Because by then he understood: this was never a boxing movie. It was a tragedy in ten rounds.
The Film That Wouldn’t Die
Here is the beautiful irony of Raging Bull: the film that nearly ended Scorsese’s career became the film that saved his legend. It found its audience slowly — on cable, on VHS, in film schools, in critics’ polls — until it was no longer a box-office disappointment but simply, as the American Film Institute would later declare, the greatest American film of the 1980s. The weight gain became the most imitated method-acting stunt in history. The fight scenes became the textbook for how to shoot violence. And De Niro, who had dragged the project into existence through sheer will over five years, had proven something about what an actor could demand of himself.
There is a famous rumor from the set that De Niro once knocked out a Golden Gloves boxer in sparring. He has always denied it — the truth, that he won two of three real amateur bouts, is impressive enough without embroidery. He didn’t need the myth. The film is the myth: a man who wanted to play a fighter so badly he learned to be one, then wanted to play a ruined man so badly he ruined his own body to do it. When the older Jake LaMotta stands in his dressing room mirror, bloated and alone, rehearsing Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront, you are watching the most committed performance of its era — and the moment Robert De Niro stopped being a great actor and became a legend.
Decades later, people still ask him about the weight. Every interview, every retrospective, someone brings up the sixty pounds. He answers patiently, the way a man answers questions about a war he survived. He knows what it cost him. He also knows what it bought: immortality, of a kind no fat suit could ever provide.
Leave a Reply