MM: To what extent was LaMotta himself involved as a consultant? How did you as the director and he as the real-life subject understand his role as a consultant? How did he inform the characterization of the lead role and guide your degree of faithfulness to his book?
MG: There was minutia that he was very sensitive about. For example, we were shooting the fighting sequence in the 1930s in the alley and Mojean [Aria] was throwing punches. Right during that first take, we heard somebody scream, “Cut!” It certainly wasn’t myself or anybody on the crew, it was Jake. I ran over to Jake’s chair and said, “Is everything OK?” And he said, “No, he’s holding his left fist wrong,” and that only had to do with the height at which the fist was being held but also how he was actually placing his thumb around his fist. It was not the way that Jake would do it. So we took a pause for a little clinic [laughs] on how to throw the left.
A similar thing happened when we were shooting the senate judiciary hearings sequence. William Forsythe was having it out with one of the congressman, and Jake, again, said, “Something’s wrong.” We stopped everything and there was a detail: When he was at those judiciary hearings back in the ‘60s, he had actually been handed a napkin that asked him to keep his mouth shut, and he didn’t see that napkin. He couldn’t see it on the set, and he didn’t see William look at a napkin and he didn’t see anybody hand him a napkin. He wanted that to happen. So, there were little things to create the factual authenticity of his life. It did make a difference, and it was quite the good fortune that he was alive to experience this.
MM: What are some tips you’d share with indie filmmakers who are aspiring to make fight sequences themselves—how best to shoot them, what to avoid, etc.—, or who are adapting a “real-life story” while working with the subject of that story as a consultant?
MG: Biopics inspire from an organic space. They more often than not have a timeless effect, more so than an original story. It’s not that an original story can’t, but a true story more than likely will enter the pop culture phenomenon, as the Jake LaMotta story has. The key is to uncover not only the emotional journey but the psychological journey. The four components that makeup a biopic are not unlike the four components that make us up as human beings: the emotional, the intellectual, the physical and the spiritual. It’s really important to capture those elements when telling a true story, because those are all the aspects of what we’re made of that gets affected by the journey. Pay attention to those four items.
William Forsythe as Jake LaMotta in The Bronx Bull
It’s key in a biopic to have an actor in the lead role who’s extremely passionate and obsessed with the character that he or she is portraying. They need to be obsessed. Tone is key, because if you’re making a psychological thriller, a comedy or an action picture, your tone is going to be dictated by camera moves. When you’re doing a human journey in the form of a biopic, it’s very hard to pick a genre. It’s almost as if you’re meshing all the different genres into one, because your biopic is going to have a combination of all those different genres meshed into one. When telling a biopic story, it can go left when you think it’s going to go right, and that will help the unpredictability in the story. Creative license doesn’t necessarily exist unless it happens in the moment.
MM: What do you mean when you say “creative license happens in the moment”? At what point when making a biopic do you recognize a moment that allows an opportunity for creative license?
MG: It’s an emotional tickle. You recognize it because it moves you. It’s important to allow it to happen and, in certain instances, nurture the actors to continue in that direction, even though its considered creative license. As long as it plays in line with the natural habitat and nature of the character being portrayed, it becomes an acceptable part of that character’s arc. Even if it might not have happened in the actual story, it’s happening in this story which is recreating that moment. For all we know, it might have happened, but it was just not in the context, or in the subtext, or in the syntax of the screenplay, so it became part of the creative process. It comes from the air and hopefully the camera’s rolling when that happens. Sometimes those things happen in rehearsal. I try not to rehearse. On this particular project, we were shooting the rehearsals, which was great because we didn’t have time to rehearse. In most cases we’d say, “Let’s shoot this in one.” The line was, “Let’s shoot the rehearsal.”
Young Jake LaMotta (Mojean Aria) takes a fight out of the ring in The Bronx Bull
MM: Why avoid rehearsal?
MG: Well, not always. Depends on the material. But in most cases, it’s this: The production designer and the DP have delivered the textures on set so an actor can walk in and do their thing. After blocking or having a sense of where the actions are going to take place, everything else is extremely spontaneous on the first take. It’s natural, so there’s very little thought process going into it.
I love first takes. If you don’t get it in the first take, you may have to wait ’til take 12 to get that same… I hate to use the word, but that carefree concept that is so great in the first take—a freshness. There’s something to be said about getting it right in take two and three only, only because you’re in a groove, you’ve found that rhythm. That’s the key. It’s an arbitrary moment.
As a filmmaker, I pay most attention to the timing and the tempo of a scene. To me a three-act story being told in cinema is a series of beginning, middle and ends. Each scene should have a beginning, middle and end. Each scene should have its own arc. So, if you’ve got 90 or 100 or 110 little short stories in one big film, that’s kind of emulating life, which is what the art form is all about. MM
The Bronx Bull was released on DVD February 2017 and is currently available to stream on Amazon Instant Video, courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
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