10 Things I Learned: Raging Bull

Production Notes—

Aug 25, 2022

1.

The first time Robert De Niro showed his good friend Martin Scorsese a copy of boxing champion Jake La Motta’s autobiography Raging Bull: My Story (cowritten with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage) was in 1974, when Scorsese was directing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. De Niro thought the material would make for a good collaboration, but Scorsese never cared for sports and wasn’t interested in directing it. It wasn’t until 1978, after the critical and commercial failure of his musical New York, New York, when Scorsese was fighting his own demons to stay alive, that he finally found a way into the story of La Motta’s self-destructiveness.

2.

Scorsese chose to shoot the film in black and white in part because of color film stock’s tendency to fade, something that deeply concerned him. There were also several other boxing movies due to come out around that time, all of which would be in color. In addition, black and white was truer to the look of the televised boxing matches, and most of the movies released, during La Motta’s prime of the 1940s and ’50s—as well as reminiscent of Weegee’s crime-scene photos, an influence on the cinematography of Raging Bull.

3.

De Niro was the one who suggested Joe Pesci, an actor he’d noticed in the 1976 movie The Death Collector, for the part of Jake’s brother and manager Joey. Pesci, in turn, recommended his good friend Frank Vincent for the role of small-time mobster Salvy. Pesci and Vincent first met when Pesci joined the band Frank Vincent and the Aristocats in the sixties, and had more recently performed as the comedy duo Vincent and Pesci.

Frank Vincent and the Aristocats,
featuring Vincent, Pesci, and Jason Cane

4.

Cinematographer Michael Chapman purchased numerous vintage Speed Graphic cameras, the kind members of the press would use in the forties and fifties and whose flash lingers for a longer time than modern equivalents. The Speed Graphics were flashed during several fight scenes, and it was Chapman himself who moved around outside the ring setting them off for the film’s iconic opening credit sequence.

5.

Jake’s walk from inside his dressing room down the halls and into the arena, ending with him climbing into the ring, was shot with an early model of the Steadicam. The Steadicam was invented in 1975 by Garrett Brown and had been used for Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, and Rocky. This was Scorsese’s first time using one. The extended, choreographed Steadicam tracking shot would go on to become a signature move in his films, perhaps most memorably in Goodfellas (1990) when Henry Hill and his new girlfriend Karen enter the Copacabana.

6.

According to sound-effects supervising editor Frank Warner, the impact of each landed punch was made up of seven to eleven different sounds, often including those of water, saliva, bones breaking, and a side of beef being hit.

7.

One of the fight scenes involved placing a flame bar directly below the camera lens to distort the image, an effect that Scorsese first saw in Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet. Filmmaker Spike Lee used a similar technique in Do the Right Thing to show the oppressive heat of a Brooklyn summer.

8.

The color home-movie footage of Jake and Vickie La Motta (Cathy Moriarty) was based shot for shot on the real La Mottas’ home movies. Chapman began by shooting this material himself, but as he recalled, “I wasn’t able to frame the action badly enough.” He ended up giving Super 8 cameras to teamsters and other crew members to capture the action. Scorsese himself scratched the actual camera negatives to make the footage look aged.

9.

Because film labs at the time were no longer processing black-and-white film with any great frequency, Scorsese asked Jim Henry, MGM’s onetime lead black-and-white film timer (the person who supervises the process of developing the original-camera-negative film into a positive element), to step out of retirement and oversee the timing of Raging Bull.

10.

Scorsese worked out the final Jake La Motta–Sugar Ray Robinson fight like a horror scene by reviewing the storyboards for Psycho’s shower scene, designed by director Alfred Hitchcock with the help of graphic designer Saul Bass. But it was Samuel Fuller who suggested to Scorsese, “Put the lens in his fist.”

A slowed-down, picture-only version of a series of punches from the fight

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Abbey Lustgarten is a producer at the Criterion Collection.

10 Things I Learned: Raging Bull

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