One masterpiece Martin Scorsese 'never wanted to make' - and dark reason why

Today, Raging Bull (1980) is hailed as one of Martin Scorsese's crowning achievements - a ferocious, black-and-white portrait of boxer Jake LaMotta, brought to life by Robert De Niro in an Oscar-winning performance. The film frequently ranks near the very top of "greatest films of all time" lists, was preserved by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1990, and is often described as the definitive sports movie. Yet behind its reputation lies a surprising truth: Scorsese never wanted to make it.

What eventually pushed him into the director's chair wasn't a newfound love of boxing, nor the lure of prestige. Instead, it was a near-fatal drug overdose - a dark turning point that forced the filmmaker to rethink his life, his career, and ultimately his art.

The project began not with Scorsese, but with Robert De Niro. Fresh from their collaborations on Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and New York, New York (1977), De Niro came across Jake LaMotta's memoir Raging Bull: My Story. He saw in it the kind of raw, self-destructive character that had always fascinated him and believed it would make an ideal film.

When De Niro brought the book to Scorsese, however, the director was unmoved. Speaking years later at the Tribeca Film Festival, Scorsese admitted: "I wasn't affected by the book at all. Nothing against sports, but I'd been very sheltered as a child with severe asthma - no running, no team games, no boxing. I couldn't connect with it."

In fact, he openly admitted to finding boxing "boring," describing the sport as something he couldn't and wouldn't grasp. For a time, it looked as though De Niro's passion project would remain just that - a passion unfulfilled.

Everything shifted in 1979. Scorsese, exhausted and spiralling after the commercial failure of New York, New York, suffered a drug-related overdose that left him hospitalised. De Niro visited him in recovery and, once again, pitched the story of Jake LaMotta.

This time, something clicked. Scorsese recognised in LaMotta's violent self-destruction an echo of his own struggles with addiction. "I was lost in a way," he later confessed, "so I had to start all over again."

Directing Raging Bull then became not just another job but a way of channelling personal chaos into art, of grabbign back control through filmmaking.

One of Scorsese's biggest creative hurdles remained the sport itself. Boxing films up to that point - including the Oscar-winning Rocky (1976) - had largely placed the camera outside the ropes, mimicking the view of a spectator. Scorsese wasn't interested in reproducing that distance.

Instead, he treated the fights like operatic dance sequences, choreographing each punch with balletic precision and putting the camera inside the ring.

This innovation came at a cost. The fight sequences were complex, time-consuming, and expensive to shoot, pushing the production far over schedule.

Getting the script right was another ordeal. Scorsese's long-time collaborator Mardik Martin delivered an early draft, but neither De Niro nor United Artists executives were impressed. Paul Schrader, who had penned Taxi Driver, was brought in to rewrite it, producing a darker, more explicit version that nearly landed the film an X rating.

At one point, producers and executives nearly cancelled the film altogether, questioning why anyone would want to make a movie about such a deeply unlikeable man. But De Niro and Scorsese fought back, arguing that LaMotta's story was precisely compelling because of its brutality and honesty.

Ultimately, Scorsese and De Niro personally reworked parts of the script, softening some edges without compromising the film's intensity, and their uncredited efforts helped secure the green light, though the project continued to teeter on the edge of collapse throughout production.

When Raging Bull finally hit cinemas in December 1980, it was far from a runaway success. Box office returns were modest, and reviews were divided. Some critics found it too bleak, too punishing, while others hailed it as a bold artistic statement.

Ultimately, the film earned eight Oscar nominations but won only two: Best Actor for De Niro and Best Editing for Thelma Schoonmaker.

Over time, however, its reputation grew. Roger Ebert declared it the best film of the 1980s. In 2005, Time magazine listed it among the 100 greatest movies ever made.