![Raging Bull: Sixty Pounds And A New Editor](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/0/a/90aef66b-3539-4c56-aa97-cb520675930f.webp)

# Raging Bull: Sixty Pounds And A New Editor

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/raging-bull-sixty-pounds-and-a-new-editor)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/0/a/90aef66b-3539-4c56-aa97-cb520675930f.webp)

## Raging Bull (1980)

De Niro trained as a boxer then ate his way to the third act, and Scorsese found the collaborator of his career.

## Not A Boxing Film

The fights occupy perhaps ten minutes and are shot nothing like sport. Scorsese put the camera inside the ring, changed the size of the ring between bouts, fired flashbulbs, pumped in smoke and sprayed blood onto the ropes, because the point was never the boxing. The subject is jealousy as a permanent condition: a man who cannot believe anything good belongs to him and destroys it to prove himself right. Everything else is ordinary life in the Bronx, filmed in flat black and white, in kitchens and living rooms where the real damage happens. Scorsese made it while recovering from a collapse and has said he approached it as a film he might not survive to follow up.

Runtime

129 minutes

Director

Martin Scorsese

Budget

$18 million

Box office

$23.4 million worldwide

Editing

Thelma Schoonmaker

journey·6 Entrys

# Watching Raging Bull

Tone

/

Entry

The Dressing Room

Rehearsing

"A heavy man in a dinner jacket practises a stage routine into a mirror in 1964, and the film jumps back twenty years."

> I'm not an animal.

De Niro trained with LaMotta for a year, fought three real bouts in Brooklyn, then gained about sixty pounds during a production shutdown to play the later scenes.

Thelma Schoonmaker won her first Oscar for this and has edited every Scorsese feature since, making it the longest director and editor partnership in American cinema.

Reviews in 1980 were divided and it lost Best Picture to Ordinary People, a verdict that has not aged well. The film's standing rose through the eighties until it became the default answer to the best American film of the decade, and its influence is visible in every sports film that treats the arena as psychology rather than spectacle. LaMotta himself said watching it made him realise how bad he had been to the people around him.

[Raging Bull on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081398/?utm_source=slatesource)