Strangely, I didn’t rewatch the film for many years-even after the start of what I consider the Scorses-aissance, the astounding outburst of creative inspiration that followed “The Departed” (more specifically, his Oscar for “The Departed”) and has marked his past decade of films, from “Shutter Island” to “The Irishman.” Finally, this week, I did. I was a recent college graduate on my first job (in commercials) and a Scorsese-phile on the basis of the three films of his that I’d seen: “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” and, above all, “New York, New York,” none of which prepared me for the blend of austerity and fury, abstraction and physicality in “Raging Bull,” which I’ve considered, ever since, a high point of Scorsese’s work.
“Leoooo?” The Rih-venant actor stood up and gave the crowd a wave.The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” at the Ziegfeld, in the fall of 1980, thanks to a friend with connections. After a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street played onstage, Scorsese and De Niro wondered aloud whether its star was in the audience. In theory, it seemed like an interesting thing to do, but could it have been really done is another story.”Īn unlikely cameo at the Beacon theater Sunday afternoon: Five-time Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio, hiding in the orchestra under an L.A. “It was tough enough to get the script right. But it was just the logistics of it, and then wearing a fat suit. We actually talked to the studio about that, and I think they would have gone along with it if it could have been possible.” Scorsese recalled the idea: “We were crazy - 32 or 33 or something like that - ‘Hey, yeah do it! If you’re that age, there’s that will, the energy of going from the movie set to the stage, you feed off that.” Ultimately it was nixed because it was logistically tricky. “Shooting it in the day, and doing the play at night. “I had a thought about doing it as a play, doing like a one-man show,” De Niro told an audience at the Beacon Theater Sunday afternoon. Oh, the stamina of your early 30s! When Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese were working on Raging Bull 40 years ago, the actor had an idea that maybe he could pull double duty, playing middleweight champion Jake LaMotta on Scorsese’s set during the day, and on stage at night. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival