A Quote by Thelma Schoonmaker
In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.
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I won the Oscar for 'Raging Bull' for those fight sequences. If you look at those fight sequences, those were so incredibly storyboarded and shot in an incredible way - that is the conception a good director has to bring.
I just shot my first dramatic movie in France, and for those dramatic scenes that I shot, I would not want to look at those. There's a certain mindset you have to put yourself into for those scenes, and looking at the monitor would just take you out of it.
When I go to throw a punch, actually, my intention is to hit somebody. That's just second nature to me. So you have to just rewire yourself. It's not something where you have to sit and subconsciously think about it, but you kind of have to just put yourself in that mode and go with it. Learning the fight scenes, I've never had to learn choreography before, so learning the fight scenes was like learning a dance or something like that. I had a little bit of influence in the fight scenes and I tried to put as much influence there as I could, but I had fun doing it.
'Raging Bull' was badly received at first. It took 10 years for it to be recognised.
Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.
I was a pretentious teenager, so of course I had, you know, 'Raging Bull' posters and all of that. 'Raging Bull' is not a pretentious movie, but me having the poster was a pretentious action. I even grew a goatee and had a Knicks cap, because I thought I wanted to be like Spike Lee.
By the time I got to 'St Vincent,' I had shot so many scenarios I was ready for anything - I've shot kangaroos, I've shot dogs, cats, crowds, fight scenes, stunts, comedy, drama, handheld, dolly, helicopter, crane - I just felt that there was nothing I was unprepared for.
'Raging Bull' was just a dream to work on, but it took a lot of work to get all those fights to work right and incorporate them properly into the story.
There are certain scenes in the edit you're playing with it and certain scenes don't put back together the way you imagined. Sometimes they're better and sometimes they don't have that thing, so it's never foolproof. But you certainly get an idea that here we've got enough and we've got to move on because you're always against time and money there. Whatever the budget is, you have to get practical about it.
Fight scenes are like learning a dance. You learn it move by move, and then you put it all together and it looks awesome when you edit it together. It's great!
I don't want to do 85 scenes in a film that has no head or tail.
I have a great relationship and the highest respect for Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. But working with De Niro has been simply incredible. While I was editing 'Raging Bull,' I was literally unable to take my eyes off him.
In my head, scenes are shot from certain angles; there are camera pans, all of that kind of stuff. Converting those visuals to comic format was mostly a matter of adapting them to the rhythm of paneling.
The way I work is, I always compose a shot list before I talk to anybody, including my DP. So I'll spend a couple months basically creating the movie in my head, so I have a very solid film in my head, where I know every shot, and I know what the transitions between scenes are.
I wanted Raging Bull. I wanted Casino. I got Rocky and Bullwinkle. But that's OK, because I still get to tell people I've worked with Robert DeNiro.
We used to have a bull. A real bull. At that time, Jennifer Lopez was my neighbor. God bless her, she took it. But other neighbors did not like it, that we have a bull.
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