Raging Bull

An irrational battle of a boxing champion (who was a prototype of the famous Jake LaMotta) in his struggle for inner peace. Though never a fan of sports, Scorsese agreed to direct the picture after his near-death heroin overdose. Robert De Niro, while visiting the director in the hospital, tried to persuade him to never use drugs again and expressed the wish that Scorsese would make a film about the boxer. With an emphasis to form, not only did Scorsese come to see boxing as a tool to identify and dissect violent tendencies in man but he also began relating very personally to the story of LaMotta seeing now that the boxing ring can be “an allegory for whatever you do in life”, which for him paralleled filmmaking, “you make movies, you’re in the ring each time.” What is also quite peculiar is that there are a number of phrases cited and some scenes recreated from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) since LaMotta greatly admired Marlon Brando’s hero from the film and used to quote him often. For Raging Bull, Robert De Niro received an Oscar for his perfect performance, and Scorsese's permanent editor Thelma Schoonmaker got another for Best Editing.