Over the course of the hour and a half long retrospective chat-in which De Niro acted as de facto moderator (though, in typical De Niro style, he didn’t talk much)-the pair ran down the highlights of Scorsese’s career, showing clips of films like Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, and Casino. A year after that, the film was nominated for eight Oscars and ultimately picked up two statuettes: best actor for De Niro and best editing for Thelma Schoonmaker. A year or so later, Winkler revealed, the producers were actually on their way to cancel the film. The pair laughed at the old memory before Scorsese continued. At the time, the filmmaking duo thought it was a normal check-in to see if all was going well on the production. Producer Irwin Winkler was also having doubts when he visited De Niro and Scorsese one day with another producer. It wasn’t just Scorsese who was having trouble getting a handle on the film. “I suddenly realized, ‘This is overwhelming,’” he said. Scorsese, a lifelong asthmatic who is admittedly not athletic (“If there’s a ball involved, forget it,” he quipped at one point), couldn’t get a handle on the sport. “When the time came to do Raging Bull, I resisted for a while-for a few years, actually-because I didn’t understand boxing,” Scorsese said in a wide-ranging conversation with De Niro on Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival. Though the film is now considered one of the director’s many classics, he was incredibly close to not helming the film, which had become something of a passion project for De Niro. Much has been written about Martin Scorsese’s incredibly fraught path to making Raging Bull, the 1980 black-and-white drama starring _Robert De Niro _ as boxer Jake LaMotta.

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