Mr. Scorsese

Do you think if you don't take yourself to the limits

physically and mentally,

it may have some sort of effect on your work?

Because you do push yourself a lot.

Yeah, to a certain extent, I think that's true. I think it's true.

In the '70s, between New York, New York, the opening of that,

and the opening of Last Waltz was '78,

I was not able, ultimately, with chemicals that I was putting in me,

not being able to function, really.

There were these parties... and they were quite something.

For me, the sin is enjoyable.

I enjoyed when I was bad, I enjoyed a lot of it.

Of course, then I collapsed.

I was spending a lot of time with Robbie Robertson from The Band.

When we were living together and everything,

we were very conscious of work.

We weren't trying to get crazy

but it was really unhealthy.

And Marty got so run down, so run down.

You know, they call it "bottoming out."

I did see Marty pretty wired up.

It wasn't like one foot over the precipice.

He was like Wile E. Coyote. He was in the air, like this.

At some point, I'm not sure exactly the timing,

but maybe you were still living together, when he ended up in the hospital

and almost died because he was taking so much cocaine.

Yeah, it was in New York.

Were you married when he was in the hospital?

No, but we were together.

I think I was 24 or 25 years old when I met Marty.

And I was working for Italian television, and I was doing interviews.

So I interviewed him for The Last Waltz, that just came out.

I knew that I was in the presence of somebody that was exceptional,

but Marty did have a problem with drugs.

And then Marty, one morning woke up,

and he was all black and blue as if somebody has beaten him.

I called the parents, he ended up in a hospital, and he was dying.

The doctor came in and he looked at me,

he said, "Is this your blood?" I said, "Yes."

"You're coming with me." I said, "No, I have work to do."

"No, you're not, you're gonna have a brain hemorrhage any second."

I was bleeding internally everywhere. I was going to die, basically.

My mother and my stepfather sat me down

and they said, "It's very bad, like he could die, it's that bad."

And I said, "I don't want to go.

I'm scared." It was more I was scared.

The strangeness of it was that I did not accept the fact that I was dying.

Yet, it was like

a very, very major part of me wanted to.

Why?

I didn't know how to do the work anymore.

I didn't know how to create anymore. Simple.

A friend of mine took me to the emergency ward,

and left me there, basically.

And I was in there ten days and nights, pumped me full of cortisone.

And then Bob came to the hospital.

We had been taking a break.

I had said, "Where are we going as a collaboration?

What stories do we want to tell?"

Can you remember coming to the hospital?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean...

...I was worried about him.

And... I...

I was starting to work on Raging Bull.

While we're doing New York, New York,

Bob carried around the Raging Bull book with him all the time.

It was about Jake LaMotta, a really tough, tough guy,

and, you know, really questionable character. And I'm being kind.

Bob kept pushing him, saying, "Come on, let's make this movie"

and Marty kept saying no.

Driving me crazy with doing this boxing movie.

You know, I don't do sports.

I couldn't imagine anybody else doing it. It had to be him.

So Bob is there at the hospital.

It was a question that I was thinking that maybe he won't do it.

I said, "You know, this is...

This is something to do."

And looked at me and said,

"What the hell do you wanna do? You wanna die like this?" You know.

"You wanna die?"

It was a low point, and I said, "Marty..."

"You're right for this picture. You should do it."

You know, so I said-- I looked at him, and I said, "Okay."

Bob insisted we go to Saint Martin.

And that's where we created the film.

Paul Schrader had already written the script

and then told us, "Now, you guys take it."

We went over the whole thing and changed the dialogue

and came up with, "I thought of this, I could do this here, what about that?"

We would sometimes improvise our dialogue together on audio tapes.

And then I'd write it all longhand. Each scene.

We just finished up the script, came back,

called Irwin.

I read it and I liked it a lot.

And then we had to get the money, so we had a meeting

with the two heads of production at United Artists.

So, Bob is there, and the two guys come up and...

they ask these questions. We sensed something was wrong.

They said to Bob, "Why would you want to play this cockroach?"

De Niro was standing in the doorway of the kitchen

and he looked over and he said,

"He's not a cockroach."

We left and it looked like we weren't gonna make the picture, but I knew

that they wanted to make Rocky II.

I produced Rocky, and it had been this phenomenal success,

and they wanted to do a sequel.

So we told them the only way we'd do Rocky II

is if they agreed to do Raging Bull.

Basically said, "You want Rocky II, you're going to have to do Raging Bull."

I had to figure out how to design the boxing scenes.

I'd never seen a real fight.

I mean, I saw on television, but I couldn't tell what was happening.

The two little figures, I didn't know.

In any event, in Madison Square Garden, there was a night of five different bouts

and we were in, like, the third row.

And that's the night I saw the blood on the ropes.

And I saw the blood in the sponge.

On the back, they squeeze the sponge.

And also, being close up, thrust of an arm.

You actually feel, it's like a car going by.

I started to get-- I said, "All right."

I just stayed alone in my bedroom, and I played the video they gave me

of Bob working out each fight.

And so I just would stop it, design shots by myself.

The sequence in the last Sugar Ray fight where he gets beaten to a pulp,

I drew the shots based on the shower sequence in Psycho.

Translated, reinterpreted,

and it kind of kicked off a lot of images.

Often surreal, because a lot of the bloodletting is not realistic.

But I told Bob, "This is gonna be special,"

I said, "the fight scenes. And I'm gonna need your patience."

And he said, "No, okay."

Everybody quiet and that's it, ready? Okay.

You cannot imagine how long it took to shoot all the fights.

To get all the blood right and the perspiration.

De Niro was unfailingly patient.

Marty had the blood spurting from elaborate devices

that are hooked at the back of De Niro's head.

And he's not actually being hit here, but he's moving his head perfectly

as if he has been.

A shot like this could take an hour.

Often, we'd only get maybe one or two shots a day.

Because of the rigs that had to be built,

and because when you change the speed of the camera,

you also have to change the iris.

So there had to be one assistant here, one here, and then there's the cameraman.

And if you're moving, they have to move with you.

And you'll have seen in certain scenes

where it's normal speed, then suddenly goes into slow motion, then comes back.

I mean, that was all done with three or four people on one Arriflex.

You know, so...

With Raging Bull, when you worked with Thelma,

was it a very different experience suddenly working with Thelma?

We hadn't seen each other for nine years.

After Woodstock, we didn't connect at all.

I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,

working on this ridiculous movie about the Supreme Court.

I got this call and I couldn't believe it, really.

I didn't know whether I could believe it.

She said, "I don't know how to-- I never cut a feature before."

I said, "Just-- It's no different," I said, "from what we used to do."

Originally, with Marty, with me, it was trust,

he felt that we wouldn't have to indulge in ego battles over which cut was better.

"Keep the director out of the editing room,"

was something that I heard a lot.

Or at least this director.

She seemed to agree to work with me.

We were editing in Marty's apartment, in a bedroom.

We cut all night. I would start at, like, 9 o'clock at night

and work until dawn.

When the birds started to sing, he wanted to stop.

He would start editing with Thelma at 9:30, 10

and work till 8 o'clock the following morning.

I woke up, had breakfast,

he had dinner, he went to sleep, I did my day, and then they started again.

When Thelma was editing, she would find what she called

the value of the shot itself.

Which means just because you shot this image in this way,

and it was meant for a certain place in the film,

it may work somewhere else that has nothing to do with it.

Robinson, apparently tired...

Now, this is one of the most brilliant things Marty did.

You'll see in a moment. To have the lights go down.

The camera change speed.

During the shot, hardly any sound.

Probably another director might have had a thousand people yelling,

"Come on, come on, kill him," or "Come on, Jake!"

No. You just hear a little bit of an animal breathing.

And then it gets collapsed all into this dramatic cutting.

The one thing that we found was that Vickie, the wife of Jake LaMotta,

her reaction to what she's seeing

was something that we decided to build the whole sequence about.

She's just putting her head in her hands at the horror she's watching.

And those cuts to her are so important.

These are clean, whistling shots.

So it all became very visceral, like creating a sculpture.

No man can endure this.

He works extremely hard

to try and come up with something new or something at least visually arresting.

Sometimes he doesn't want to be visually arresting.