But I found myself saying yes to the revised script from LaMotta’s own book immediately. “Also I was very ill before I made the film – the result, shall we say, of emotional and psychological as well as chemical and toxic problems. With Raging Bull, he adds, he tried to complete a kind of cycle in personal terms, to complete what he was beginning to say in Mean Streets. I’ve never gotten over the ritual of Catholicism, but I guess it is the same type of feeling someone else might get from taking an acid trip.” “The whole idea of faith fascinates me,” he says “I say ‘I have faith in this project I have faith in that person.’ Now these are material matters, and you could view them concretely. It also shows, because it has some close parallels to Scorsese’s own emotional life, that he can’t for long get away from it either. The story of LaMotta, who eventually went to prison, broke his hands against the walls of his cell and was found by Scorsese working as a bouncer in a strip joint on Seventh Avenue (owned, incidentally, by United Artists, who are putting out the film), shows how much the film-maker still owes to the Church. He is no longer a practising Catholic, but Raging Bull proves that Jesuit teaching remains for him both inspiration and albatross. Born in 1943 of devoutly Catholic blue-collar parentage, he began preparation for the priesthood at grade-school level but failed Fordham College’s divinity programme. Scorsese’s background has already been vividly documented in his films, particularly in Mean Streets, which was also about New York’s Little Italy. It’s about guilt, sin and trying to find some sort of salvation so that you can be at peace with yourself, so that you don’t either kill yourself or other people.” The idea was a kind of rebirth, the possibility of redemption. “My picture’s really about that process, not boxing. The ring is a kind of madness, and it seems to me that the man had to go back through his mother’s womb again in order to achieve some kind of sanity. But it gave me a clue how to make the picture and it made me see things more clearly. Maybe it just means not sufficiently insane. “Don’t ask me what that means,” says Scorsese, “perhaps it has sexual undertones, perhaps it hasn’t. “No, you couldn’t,” said LaMotta, “You’re not sufficiently queer.” He recalls a time when he was with LaMotta in a bar and horsing around with him.
Norman Mailer, for whom the fight game holds much more fascination, says that LaMotta, who went from down-and-out to world champion and back to down-and-out, was underrated both as a fighter and as a man.
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