“I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it, until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own. I came out the other side and woke up one day alive … still breathing.”
As a journalist, cough, sorry, lowly blogger, one must and should always feel envy of the access these kinds of stories afford you. The time and research that allows for building and crafting such a narrative is a real luxury. And obviously the access is unparalleled.
So did you read Richard Schickel’s Vanity Fair story on the making of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull”? If you haven’t you should.
Essentially, the story is that it was actually a Robert DeNiro project, not a Scorsese one, and the filmmaker was absolutely not interested in making it, didn’t understand boxing one iota or the character, but eventually changed his mind when he had a near death experience during a trip to the 1978 Telluride Film Festival — the air being very thin, the filmmaker, a sickly asthmatic all his life and a cocaine addiction slowly wearing down his body, became deathly ill (his then wife Isabella Rossellini had to leave his bedside for a film project and assume she would never see him again).
It’s also interesting to note that while Paul Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver,” is credited with the screenplay, it was actually Scorsese and DeNiro who rewrote the script several times to get it to the place they needed to start shooting (Schrader’s version was deemed “too cold” and without humanity; incidentally can you believe he’s never been nominated for an Oscar of any kind, not even writing?).
Anyhow, it’s a fascinating read and a great story. Give it a whirl when you have some time to sit down with it.