Raging Bull has tons of repressed sexuality. The love scene where she gets him to a point of desire and he pours ice water on himself. That’s interesting sexually to me.

-Excerpts from Martin Scorsese: A Journey 

Thelma Schoonmaker wins Oscar for Best Editor (“Raging Bull’), pictured with presenters Richard Pryor and Jane Seymour at The 53rd Academy Awards. 

Raging Bull by ~blunderbuss78

On Location, Raging Bull.

Raging Bull Photo Illustration for TIME by Sean McCabe

Raging Bull (1980)

“Raging Bull” also represented something new to me: an acceptance of where I came from. Having made “New York, New York,” a film that was not received well, I went through a rough period in my life. I came out the other side, and I said to myself, Wait a minute, I can’t deny who I am or where I came from. So I embraced my parents again, and they became a part of my life in the films, too. My father’s in “Raging Bull.” My mother acted in a lot of the films. They were on the set to help me remember who I am and where I’m from. So I’d been harboring a lot of anger and rage, and I think it just explodes in “Raging Bull.”

Excerpt from Conversations with Scorsese, by Richard Schickel.

Paul Schrader’s heavily marked-up outline for “Raging Bull” for which he shared writing credit with Mardik Martin.

“It’s part of the oral tradition,” Mr. Schrader said of his process. “Rather than writing my way through an outline, I tell my way through, and then each time I tell it, I re-outline it.”

As the “Raging Bull” outline shows, Mr. Schrader had the thrust of each scene, as well as key lines of dialogue (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win.”) already worked out before he sat down to write. (Alas, we couldn’t tell from this image how much of Jake La Motta’s helpful description of how to cook a steak had been composed at this stage.)

Mr. Schrader also gave an estimated page length for each scene as well as a final count and a running tally of total pages, which he said was crucial for pacing.

“It’s very important to calibrate these events and when they’re happening,” he said. “Somebody says, ‘I don’t know why this scene doesn’t work,’ and you say to them: ‘It’s very simple. It should have happened 10 pages earlier. Then it would have worked.’”

The final shooting script for “Raging Bull” was “more or less” what was submitted, Mr. Schrader said, though Mr. De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese made further changes during filming. “The only way you could get a final draft of that screenplay,” Mr. Schrader said, “would be to transcribe it from the screen. As opposed to ‘Taxi Driver,’ which is actually quite close to the script.”

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(via lentecreativo)

Raging Bull Criterion Poster

Scorsese’s sketches for The Sugar Ray Robinson-La Motta fight in Raging Bull

“That was based on the shower sequence from Psycho. I designed corresponding shots of what it would be like in the ring.”

nigga-whaat:

Robert De Niro receiving the Best Actor Oscar for Raging Bull in 1981

(Source: strangebook)

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

J  JAKE LA MOTTA

If Mean Streets’ Charlie (Harvey Keitel) made up for his sins on the streets, Raging Bull’s tormented boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) does it in the ring, slowly pulping his handsome features and early promise in a series of punishing middleweight bouts. A film about self-loathing and self-abuse with glorious operatic peaks - the balletic first-person slo-mo elevates the brute thud of fists in black-and-white into a thing of beauty - it took all De Niro’s persistence to get Scorsese involved at all. With the help of Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader’s first draft, he found a story that had obvious personal resonance.

By Scorsese’s own admission, his “kamikaze” approach to the shoot was close to debilitating - the eight minutes of boxing scenes took ten weeks to film - but the result is generally hailed as one of the greatest films of all time.

Empire Online