Naturally, he visited Italy to learn the language and dialect, but he also accepted the somewhat thankless role of Alfredo, born on the same day as the peasant Olmo ( Gérard Depardieu) but forever in his shadow – a cowardly, privileged, none-too-subtle representation of the landowning bourgeoise. Just another instance that shows how committed the legendary actor is to his craft.The huge weight gain De Niro underwent to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull is regularly and rightly cited as indicative of his intense commitment to the craft, but De Niro’s fearless, if in this case, perhaps slightly misguided, pursuit of excellence is equally evident in Bernardo Bertolucci’s five-and-a-half-hour epic 1900. Amazingly, during the principal photography for Raging Bull, De Niro gained 27kg so that he could depict LaMotta’s later boxing career. Marty had his own reasons, and both of us just came together on the project.”ĭe Niro successfully gained the weight required to portray LaMotta in different phases of his life, which is why he claimed that the film was one of the hardest (yet most rewarding) that he had to prepare for. “I thought, ‘I’d like to see if I could gain that weight and do it.’ That was my interest in it. “And I thought just the graphic difference of being out of shape and being a young fighter, that was interesting to me,” De Niro added. I said, ‘Jesus, look what happened to him from then to now.'”

He’d be standing right out there, and I’d be on the sidewalk, and he was overweight and this and that. I remember I used to see Jake LaMotta he used to work in a kind of strip place right on 7th Avenue in the 1940s.

He said: “I kinda wanted to do a certain thing. De Niro had a particular biographical reason for wanting to portray LaMotta.

Robert de niro boxer movie