更新时间:2010-07-07

踏雪飞鸿 • 愤怒的公牛:Raging Bull in Scorsese on Scorsese

摘自《Scorsese on Scorsese》一书中，Scorsese对这部电影的回顾。
Scorsese began working on a new script with Jay Cocks entitled Night Life, about a fraternal rivalry. But by the end of 1978 his marriage had broken up, he was in poor health and in a severe state depression. It was at this jucture that Raging Bull, the life story of former boxing champion Jake La Motta, offered a way out of his crime and personal impasse. It became, as Scorsese later acknowledged, a means of redemption.

When I was doing Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, De Niro gave me the book Raging Bull.... In this book, they tried to give a reason for everything Jake did in his life, for his guilt and for his violence. It was very bad,

Right after New York, New York, during those two-and-a-half years from 1976 yo 1978, I went through a lot of problems. The film was not successful, and I was very depressed. I finally came out of it when I was in hospital on Labor Day weekend 1978, and De Niro came to visit me and he said, 'You know, we can make this picture.' There were three or four scripts which had been written in the meantime, and they had all been rejected. I didn't like any of them and didn't pay much attention, because I was in pretty bad shape. And Bob said, 'Listen, we could really do a great job on this film. Do you want to make it?' I found myself saying, 'Yeah.' I understood then what Jake was, but only after having gone through a similar experience. I was just lucky that there happened to be a project there ready for me to express this. The decision to make the film was made then.

I was fascinated by the self-destructive side of Jake La Motta's character, his very basic emotions. What could be more basic than making a living by hitting another person on the head until one of you falls or stops?

I put everything I knew and felt into that film and I thought it would be the end of my career. It was what I call kamikaze way of making movies: Pour everything in, then forget all about it and go find another way of life.

…So on this island Bob and I were looking at each other, and he said that On the Waterfront was our iconography, not Shakespeare, so why don’t we use it?

I pointed out that this would mean De Niro playing Jake La Motta playing Marlon Brando Playing Terry Malone! The only way to do it was to make it so cold that you concentrate on the words and you feel him finally coming to some sort of peace with himself in front of that mirror. And that’s the way we did it, in nineteen takes. Sometimes Jake himself would really act it out in a very strong way which was quite heartbreaking, and Bobby did it that way three times. It was the last day of shooting, and I think used take 13 in the end. One reviewer in America wrote that it’s the most violent scene in the film. When he says in the mirror, ‘It was you, Charlie,’ is he playing his brother, or putting the blame on himself? It’s certainly very disturbing for me.

Bob got to know Jake well and he worked with him a great deal just to be with him. I think he actually took care of Jake. When we shot the boxing scenes we had Jake there for ten weeks. After they completed, Bob looked at him and Jake said, ‘Yeah, I know, goodbye.’ Bob said, ‘That’s right.’ The dramatic scenes bear little attention to what actually happened.

I always find the antagonist more interesting than the protagonist in the drama, the villain more interesting than the good guy. Then there’s what I guess is a decidedly Christian point of view: ‘Who are we to judge, to point out the speck in our brother’s eye, while we have a beam in our own eye?’ Jake La Motta acted much tougher in real life than he appeared in the film. The script originally showed much worse things about him, but I found it impossible to show them – you could over twenty years, but in the space of two hours there is a risk of forcing them out of context. Nevertheless, I find these characters fascinating. Obviously, I find elements of myself in them and I hope people in the audience do too, and can maybe learn from them and find some sort of peace.

… I was never a fight fan. I saw two fights at Madison Square Gardens for research and the first image I drew was the bloody sponge. Then the second time I went, I was in the fifth row from the front, and I saw the blood coming off the rope. As the next bout was announced, no one took any notice of it.

I felt that Jake used everybody to punish himself, especially in the ring. When he fights ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson, why does he really take that beating for fifteen rounds? Jake himself said that he was playing possum. Well, that may be Jake in reality, but Jake on the screen is something else. He takes the punishment for what he feels he’s done wrong. And then he’s thrown in jail, he’s just faced with a wall, and so with the real enemy for the first time – himself. Jonathan Demme gave me a portrait of Jake made by a folk artist and around the edge of this piece of slate war carved, ‘Jake fought like he didn’t deserve to live.’ Exactly. I made a whole movie and this guy did it in one picture.

Bob is a very generous actor and he will be even stronger when the other guy’s in close-up. Often I steal lines from the speeches we film over his shoulder, because some of them are so good. And he really gets other actors to act to his scenes. For example, when Jake asks Joey, ‘Did you fuck my wife?’ I had written a seven-page scene, the only full-length dialogue scene in the film. When he asks the question, you see Joey asking him back, ‘What, how could you say that?’ I told Bob I wasn’t getting enough reaction from Joe Pesci. He told me to roll the camera again, and then said, ‘Did you fuck your mother?’ When you see the film again, look at Joe’s reaction! I like that kind of help. You have to throw your ego out of the door: you can’t take it into the rehearsal room and you can’t take it on the set.

…De Niro’s not really a student of any particular method of acting.