Forever driven to fight against himself

The film is the quintessence of the cinema of alienation. Screenwriter Paul Schrader describes Bickle in a quote from Thomas Wolfe as ``God's lonely man''. Travis observes without taking any part. He despises the pimps and the junkies and the prostitutes; he welcomes the rain that will sweep the city clean of their filth. But although he has the freedom to take his cab anywhere, at the same time he is drawn to them because they are freak-show outsiders like himself. He haunts the streets around Times Square as he begins a mesmerising descent into his own personal hell.

Schrader wrote Taxi Driver when he was at his lowest ebb and much of its content reflects his own feelings about life at that period.

``At the time I wrote it I was very enamoured of guns,'' he said. ``I was suicidal, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is and all of those elements are upfront in the script. Obviously some of them are heightened - the racism of the character, the sexism. Like every kind of underdog, Travis takes out his anger on the guy below him rather than the guy above.

``In fact, in the draft of the script that I sold, at the end all the people he kills are black. Marty and the Phillipses and everyone I showed it to said, `No, we just can't do this, it's an incitement to riot.' But it was true to the character,'' he explained.

Travis Bickle is a man who is in emotional pain throughout the film. His method training would have encouraged De Niro to bring his own pain to the part. The actor stayed in his trailer for most of the shoot, away from the rest of the crew. Even director Martin Scorsese asked permission before disturbing him. But De Niro still contributed a number of ideas to Bickle's character. The pain and isolation that lingered from his childhood and which the therapy had not been adequately able to deal with would manifest themselves in a portrayal that is as uncomfortable to watch as it must have been to play.

His anger at his mother and her boyfriends may have led to De Niro's feelings of frustration around women when he was a young man. Shelley Winters recalls a party she gave which an actress De Niro was keen on was due to attend. He was visibly on edge as the evening wore on and she had not appeared. When she did eventually arrive she scarcely looked in his direction. De Niro got up and fled into a bedroom. Winters followed and found him punching the wall in frustration. Having lived with that sort of emotional intensity for his whole life provided De Niro with a deep well of private anguish from which to draw the character of Travis Bickle. And since Bickle's relationships in Taxi Driver are almost exclusively with women, it seems logical to assume that his own emotions would have played a part in defining his role.

De Niro is always reluctant to discuss his characters and how he arrives at them. With Travis Bickle the reluctance borders on paranoia.

``There are underground things about yourself that you don't want to discuss,'' he said obliquely when asked about Travis. ``Somehow these things are better expressed on paper or on film.''

The pain and torment that De Niro endures on screen as Travis appears to go beyond simply acting. Any therapist would confirm that to understand the pain and play it so convincingly De Niro would have had to have endured at least some of it. Travis Bickle is plainly the grown-up version of the little boy from Greenwich Village, the little boy who couldn't even go home to his father, and had no wish to turn to the man living with his mother. De Niro's cryptic comments certainly suggest that there are many hidden and tortuous depths to Travis Bickle.

Schrader had partly based his story on Arthur Bremer, the psychopath who stalked and finally shot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972. The Secret Service have since come up with a psychological profile of a would-be assassin which they refer to as ``the Bremer type''. To prepare for playing the role of Travis Bickle, De Niro and Schrader read Bremer's diaries into a tape recorder. He would then play the tape over and over again. Schrader is at pains to point out that the Bremer diaries were published after he had written the script.

De Niro felt he had to earn the right to play Travis. He acquired a probationary taxi driver's licence, had his fingerprints taken by the police as the law required, and drove a cab on the New York streets for several weeks. Despite money not being important, he managed to make $100 a week, including tips. No-one recognised him except a fellow actor who had innocently flagged down his cab.

``Jesus,'' said the actor, according to Martin Scorsese, who tells the story with glee, ``you won the Oscar and now you're driving a cab again.'' De Niro explained that he was only doing research, to which his fellow thespian replied: ``It's okay, Bobby, I've been there too.'' Whether he believed him or not, his former colleague gave De Niro a dollar tip for his trouble!

There were lessons to be learned for both De Niro and Scorsese in Taxi Driver. In the most famous scene in the film, the one that will be shown for years to come in Scorsese and De Niro retrospectives, Travis contemplates his arsenal before beginning his rampage. He is wearing faded combat fatigues and has designed a complicated holster contraption which will allow him to draw and fire even faster. He is surveying his handiwork in a full-length mirror.

``You talking to me,'' he says as he spins and draws on a non-existent opponent. ``Are you talking to me!'' he continues, savouring the moment. ``Ain't nobody else here so you must be talking to me.''

It's a picture of a man on the brink of the abyss which is both chilling and comical. It has been imitated by any number of impressionists. Michael J Fox borrowed it in Back to the Future III and even Robin Williams' genie does a Travis Bickle in Aladdin. But the moment is entirely the creation of De Niro. Paul Schrader's script simply says, ``Travis looks in the mirror.'' De Niro experimented with various line readings and Scorsese rolled the camera. It is lightning in a bottle, a moment of genuine movie magic. It was also a technique that De Niro would come to employ in later years when he would give reading after reading in search of the one that felt most truthful.

Taxi Driver was a watershed in the relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. With Mean Streets De Niro had found a soulmate, someone who shared his view of the world. At that stage Scorsese was definitely in charge, but with Taxi Driver the balance of power began to shift. De Niro felt confident enough to make suggestions; most of the characterisation of Travis Bickle derives entirely from his efforts and his ideas. Scorsese plainly respected De Niro's talent, and by leaving his star to himself in his trailer he was giving him the space he needed to play a difficult role, ceding control to him.

Over the six other films they would make together the balance of power would swing back and forth. By Raging Bull and King of Comedy De Niro was plainly the dominant partner, coaxing and cajoling Scorsese. However, by the time of their later movies the collaboration would develop into an almost symbolic relationship of two men who are closer than brothers.

Scorsese describes Taxi Driver as a labour of love for him, for De Niro, and for Schrader. But speaking to the New York Times before the film's release, he revealed a darker reason for making the film. A priest who is a close personal friend of the director saw the film and described it as ``too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday''. With hindsight Scorsese would probably have to agree.

ALMOST as soon as he had made his Hollywood breakthrough, De Niro began to set in train the events that would turn him from an actor for hire into a major player. The journey that would ultimately end with the formation of his own TriBeCa film company and with him behind a camera on A Bronx Tale, began in 1974.

He had made an incendiary impact with Mean Streets and was about to win his first Academy Award for The Godfather: Part II. Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, was working on his first major Hollywood movie, Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More. De Niro was now reaching that stage in his career which all actors crave; he was now able to choose the work instead of the work choosing him. One of the choices he made was to work with Scorsese again. De Niro visited Scorsese while he was shooting Alice and gave him a book he had been sent while in Sicily filming the Godfather movie. The book was Raging Bull, the autobiography of boxer Jake La Motta.

There are those who argue that, pound for pound, La Motta was one of the greatest fighters who ever stepped into the ring. Fighting as he did in the forties, his middleweight status kept him away from the stuff of legend - the heavyweight championship of the world, held then by the great Joe Louis. None the less, he was in his day an awesome fighter. A violent man on either side of the ropes, his tactic was simply to rely on the sheer savagery of his punching and his ability to withstand more punishment than his opponent.

He became involved with the Mob in order to get a shot at the title, which he won in 1949, but that involvement was the beginning of his downfall. Ultimately, after a spell in jail, La Motta ended up as a bloated parody of himself reciting Shakespeare in a nightclub act. The autobiography written with Pete Savage and Joseph Carter is a rather self-serving piece in which he tries to justify the various reversals of his chequered life.

None the less, the book appealed to De Niro, who felt there was potential there for a film.

``I had liked the book originally because it had some good scenes,'' he recalled. ``A good scene is something that you think has a lot of dramatic possibilities and irony and humour and something that people can relate to, the way Marty and I relate to it. It could be the situation, the character in the moment. All these unexpected things. You just say: `This is a great scene.' You've never seen a scene like this. You want to do it. Or you have seen a scene like this, but you've never seen it done as well as it's done here. You can imagine it being done in a certain way. It could be terrific but then you have to worry about it being tied in to the rest of the film or the story.''

It is interesting that De Niro should reduce the triumphs and torments of Jake La Motta's life to ``a few good scenes''. Again it is an example of his single-mindedness. He did not really care about Jake La Motta as a person. When he refers to these few good scenes it is more likely that he sees the opportunity to express his own danger through them rather than sympathises with Jake's plight.

De Niro always knew what sort of story he wanted Raging Bull to be. It would not be the apology and justification for the life that the original book presented. One of the first things he did when he acquired the book was make a deal with screenwriter Mardik Martin, co-writer of Mean Streets, to turn it into a screenplay. Martin went away and worked on Raging Bull. Eighteen months later he came back with a script. When he saw it, De Niro did not like it and made his displeasure felt straight away to both Martin and Scorsese.

``What is this? What's going on here?'' he asked them. ``This is not the picture we agreed upon.''

By this time Martin felt that the project was getting too much for him anyway and the two men parted company amicably. The writing then passed into the hands of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Schrader went away and came up with a script which, although still very dark, was more acceptable to De Niro. This time, however, there were problems with United Artists, which was bankrolling the project. The studio was unhappy about a scene near the end of the film in which La Motta is jailed on a vice charge after following underage girls into his Miami nightclub. The scene, as envisaged by Schrader, would be the high point of the film. Alone in his cell, La Motta begins to masturbate as he recalls all the women in his life. However, he loses his erection as he remembers how dreadfully he treated people. Faced with literal and metaphorical impotence, in the end he blames his hand and smashes it against the cell wall.

For Schrader this three-page soliloquy is one of the finest scenes he has ever written. Neither De Niro nor Scorsese liked it. Schrader admits to being surprised, especially by De Niro's rejection. More importantly, the studio was horrified at the prospect of the scene being in the finished movie. United Artists could just about live with another scene in which a sexually aroused La Motta loses an erection by pouring iced water into his shorts so as to preserve his energy for the ring - apparently La Motta was prone to doing this in life - but the prospect of an Oscar-winning star masturbating in a prison cell was simply too much.

A meeting was arranged at Scorsese's apartment on 57th Street in New York between studio executive David Field, Scorsese and De Niro. Although neither De Niro nor Scorsese was aware of it at the time, this was in fact a crisis meeting that would decide the whole future of the picture. If Field was not convinced then United Artists would not be convinced and Raging Bull was dead in the water. With the costly failure of New York, New York, Scorsese's stock was not at a particularly high premium in Hollywood. De Niro, however, was an Oscar-winning actor who was emerging as a fully blown movie star, his name now enough to guarantee finance for a picture.

When they got round the table in Scorsese's apartment, the director may have had the reputation, but De Niro was the one with the clout. De Niro remained silent for most of the meeting, listening quietly to the studio's concerns as articulated by Field. Most of the issues were dealt with agreeably, even the idea of filming in black and white. But Scorsese recalls that at one point Field asked why anyone would want to make a movie about a man who was such a cockroach.

De Niro broke his silence.

``He's not a cockroach,'' he said simply.

The tone of his comment was flat and resolute rather than threatening, but the studio was left in no doubt about De Niro's commitment to the film, the subject, and the director. David Field left the meeting having agreed to underwrite a three-week trip to the island of St Martin in the Caribbean for Scorsese and De Niro to rewrite the script without the offending scene.

For Scorsese, whose idea of an island is Manhattan, the prospect of spending weeks in the Caribbean was anathema. De Niro convinced him, however. The actor virtually nurse-maided his director through this anxiety about being away from his beloved New York. He would wake him at 7.30 every morning with coffee, and the two men would then get down to serious work.

``Marty and I liked parts of Schrader's script but not others,'' according to De Niro. ``We still had to make it our own. So we revised the script and went over every scene.

``What we wanted with Jake was to have something that is very straight-out. Jake himself is primitive, he can't hide certain feelings. I worked with Jake, the real Jake La Motta. I would pick his brain. There are a lot of things going on in there. I admired the fact that he was at least willing to question himself and his actions. But what's he going to do? Should he be like a college professor and try to say: `Well, I think the reason that I did that was because of so and so?' He tried to talk that way at times but he was more cunning. He'd look at you deadpan, or he'd laugh about certain things. He would protect himself sometimes, but then he would say: `Aah, I was a son-of-a-bitch.' I always thought there was something very decent about him somewhere.''

At the end of three weeks on St Martin, De Niro and Scorsese had rewritten the entire movie. Characters had disappeared, others had been condensed, others still had been amalgamated. And, much to United Artists' relief, the masturbation sequence had disappeared. Neither De Niro nor Scorsese took credit for the rewrite. The script they delivered to United Artists had only their initials on the cover page. Final credit for the screenplay of Raging Bull still went to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin.

From their first collaboration on Mean Streets to their most recent on Casino, the relationship between Scorsese and De Niro had been unique. No other actor and director trust each other so completely, and that trust was distilled into an unbreakable bond on Raging Bull. Creatively they were able to commend themselves into each other's hands. It is debatable whether any actor and director of their status have worked as closely as these two on this film.

n Untouchable: Robert De Niro, An Unauthorised Biography by Andrew Dougan is published on Thursday by Virgin at #16.99.

TAXI DRIVER is the story of a Vietnam veteran who spends his life driving a cab through the seedy streets of New York. He prowls around 42nd Street and the New York Port Authority like an alien in a space capsule.

The film is the quintessence of the cinema of alienation. Screenwriter Paul Schrader describes Bickle in a quote from Thomas Wolfe as ``God's lonely man''. Travis observes without taking any part. He despises the pimps and the junkies and the prostitutes; he welcomes the rain that will sweep the city clean of their filth. But although he has the freedom to take his cab anywhere, at the same time he is drawn to them because they are freak-show outsiders like himself. He haunts the streets around Times Square as he begins a mesmerising descent into his own personal hell.

Schrader wrote Taxi Driver when he was at his lowest ebb and much of its content reflects his own feelings about life at that period.

``At the time I wrote it I was very enamoured of guns,'' he said. ``I was suicidal, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is and all of those elements are upfront in the script. Obviously some of them are heightened - the racism of the character, the sexism. Like every kind of underdog, Travis takes out his anger on the guy below him rather than the guy above.

``In fact, in the draft of the script that I sold, at the end all the people he kills are black. Marty and the Phillipses and everyone I showed it to said, `No, we just can't do this, it's an incitement to riot.' But it was true to the character,'' he explained.

Travis Bickle is a man who is in emotional pain throughout the film. His method training would have encouraged De Niro to bring his own pain to the part. The actor stayed in his trailer for most of the shoot, away from the rest of the crew. Even director Martin Scorsese asked permission before disturbing him. But De Niro still contributed a number of ideas to Bickle's character. The pain and isolation that lingered from his childhood and which the therapy had not been adequately able to deal with would manifest themselves in a portrayal that is as uncomfortable to watch as it must have been to play.

His anger at his mother and her boyfriends may have led to De Niro's feelings of frustration around women when he was a young man. Shelley Winters recalls a party she gave which an actress De Niro was keen on was due to attend. He was visibly on edge as the evening wore on and she had not appeared. When she did eventually arrive she scarcely looked in his direction. De Niro got up and fled into a bedroom. Winters followed and found him punching the wall in frustration. Having lived with that sort of emotional intensity for his whole life provided De Niro with a deep well of private anguish from which to draw the character of Travis Bickle. And since Bickle's relationships in Taxi Driver are almost exclusively with women, it seems logical to assume that his own emotions would have played a part in defining his role.

De Niro is always reluctant to discuss his characters and how he arrives at them. With Travis Bickle the reluctance borders on paranoia.

``There are underground things about yourself that you don't want to discuss,'' he said obliquely when asked about Travis. ``Somehow these things are better expressed on paper or on film.''

The pain and torment that De Niro endures on screen as Travis appears to go beyond simply acting. Any therapist would confirm that to understand the pain and play it so convincingly De Niro would have had to have endured at least some of it. Travis Bickle is plainly the grown-up version of the little boy from Greenwich Village, the little boy who couldn't even go home to his father, and had no wish to turn to the man living with his mother. De Niro's cryptic comments certainly suggest that there are many hidden and tortuous depths to Travis Bickle.

Schrader had partly based his story on Arthur Bremer, the psychopath who stalked and finally shot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972. The Secret Service have since come up with a psychological profile of a would-be assassin which they refer to as ``the Bremer type''. To prepare for playing the role of Travis Bickle, De Niro and Schrader read Bremer's diaries into a tape recorder. He would then play the tape over and over again. Schrader is at pains to point out that the Bremer diaries were published after he had written the script.

De Niro felt he had to earn the right to play Travis. He acquired a probationary taxi driver's licence, had his fingerprints taken by the police as the law required, and drove a cab on the New York streets for several weeks. Despite money not being important, he managed to make $100 a week, including tips. No-one recognised him except a fellow actor who had innocently flagged down his cab.

``Jesus,'' said the actor, according to Martin Scorsese, who tells the story with glee, ``you won the Oscar and now you're driving a cab again.'' De Niro explained that he was only doing research, to which his fellow thespian replied: ``It's okay, Bobby, I've been there too.'' Whether he believed him or not, his former colleague gave De Niro a dollar tip for his trouble!

There were lessons to be learned for both De Niro and Scorsese in Taxi Driver. In the most famous scene in the film, the one that will be shown for years to come in Scorsese and De Niro retrospectives, Travis contemplates his arsenal before beginning his rampage. He is wearing faded combat fatigues and has designed a complicated holster contraption which will allow him to draw and fire even faster. He is surveying his handiwork in a full-length mirror.

``You talking to me,'' he says as he spins and draws on a non-existent opponent. ``Are you talking to me!'' he continues, savouring the moment. ``Ain't nobody else here so you must be talking to me.''

It's a picture of a man on the brink of the abyss which is both chilling and comical. It has been imitated by any number of impressionists. Michael J Fox borrowed it in Back to the Future III and even Robin Williams' genie does a Travis Bickle in Aladdin. But the moment is entirely the creation of De Niro. Paul Schrader's script simply says, ``Travis looks in the mirror.'' De Niro experimented with various line readings and Scorsese rolled the camera. It is lightning in a bottle, a moment of genuine movie magic. It was also a technique that De Niro would come to employ in later years when he would give reading after reading in search of the one that felt most truthful.

Taxi Driver was a watershed in the relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. With Mean Streets De Niro had found a soulmate, someone who shared his view of the world. At that stage Scorsese was definitely in charge, but with Taxi Driver the balance of power began to shift. De Niro felt confident enough to make suggestions; most of the characterisation of Travis Bickle derives entirely from his efforts and his ideas. Scorsese plainly respected De Niro's talent, and by leaving his star to himself in his trailer he was giving him the space he needed to play a difficult role, ceding control to him.

Over the six other films they would make together the balance of power would swing back and forth. By Raging Bull and King of Comedy De Niro was plainly the dominant partner, coaxing and cajoling Scorsese. However, by the time of their later movies the collaboration would develop into an almost symbolic relationship of two men who are closer than brothers.

Scorsese describes Taxi Driver as a labour of love for him, for De Niro, and for Schrader. But speaking to the New York Times before the film's release, he revealed a darker reason for making the film. A priest who is a close personal friend of the director saw the film and described it as ``too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday''. With hindsight Scorsese would probably have to agree.

ALMOST as soon as he had made his Hollywood breakthrough, De Niro began to set in train the events that would turn him from an actor for hire into a major player. The journey that would ultimately end with the formation of his own TriBeCa film company and with him behind a camera on A Bronx Tale, began in 1974.

He had made an incendiary impact with Mean Streets and was about to win his first Academy Award for The Godfather: Part II. Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, was working on his first major Hollywood movie, Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More. De Niro was now reaching that stage in his career which all actors crave; he was now able to choose the work instead of the work choosing him. One of the choices he made was to work with Scorsese again. De Niro visited Scorsese while he was shooting Alice and gave him a book he had been sent while in Sicily filming the Godfather movie. The book was Raging Bull, the autobiography of boxer Jake La Motta.

There are those who argue that, pound for pound, La Motta was one of the greatest fighters who ever stepped into the ring. Fighting as he did in the forties, his middleweight status kept him away from the stuff of legend - the heavyweight championship of the world, held then by the great Joe Louis. None the less, he was in his day an awesome fighter. A violent man on either side of the ropes, his tactic was simply to rely on the sheer savagery of his punching and his ability to withstand more punishment than his opponent.

He became involved with the Mob in order to get a shot at the title, which he won in 1949, but that involvement was the beginning of his downfall. Ultimately, after a spell in jail, La Motta ended up as a bloated parody of himself reciting Shakespeare in a nightclub act. The autobiography written with Pete Savage and Joseph Carter is a rather self-serving piece in which he tries to justify the various reversals of his chequered life.

None the less, the book appealed to De Niro, who felt there was potential there for a film.

``I had liked the book originally because it had some good scenes,'' he recalled. ``A good scene is something that you think has a lot of dramatic possibilities and irony and humour and something that people can relate to, the way Marty and I relate to it. It could be the situation, the character in the moment. All these unexpected things. You just say: `This is a great scene.' You've never seen a scene like this. You want to do it. Or you have seen a scene like this, but you've never seen it done as well as it's done here. You can imagine it being done in a certain way. It could be terrific but then you have to worry about it being tied in to the rest of the film or the story.''

It is interesting that De Niro should reduce the triumphs and torments of Jake La Motta's life to ``a few good scenes''. Again it is an example of his single-mindedness. He did not really care about Jake La Motta as a person. When he refers to these few good scenes it is more likely that he sees the opportunity to express his own danger through them rather than sympathises with Jake's plight.

De Niro always knew what sort of story he wanted Raging Bull to be. It would not be the apology and justification for the life that the original book presented. One of the first things he did when he acquired the book was make a deal with screenwriter Mardik Martin, co-writer of Mean Streets, to turn it into a screenplay. Martin went away and worked on Raging Bull. Eighteen months later he came back with a script. When he saw it, De Niro did not like it and made his displeasure felt straight away to both Martin and Scorsese.

``What is this? What's going on here?'' he asked them. ``This is not the picture we agreed upon.''

By this time Martin felt that the project was getting too much for him anyway and the two men parted company amicably. The writing then passed into the hands of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Schrader went away and came up with a script which, although still very dark, was more acceptable to De Niro. This time, however, there were problems with United Artists, which was bankrolling the project. The studio was unhappy about a scene near the end of the film in which La Motta is jailed on a vice charge after following underage girls into his Miami nightclub. The scene, as envisaged by Schrader, would be the high point of the film. Alone in his cell, La Motta begins to masturbate as he recalls all the women in his life. However, he loses his erection as he remembers how dreadfully he treated people. Faced with literal and metaphorical impotence, in the end he blames his hand and smashes it against the cell wall.

For Schrader this three-page soliloquy is one of the finest scenes he has ever written. Neither De Niro nor Scorsese liked it. Schrader admits to being surprised, especially by De Niro's rejection. More importantly, the studio was horrified at the prospect of the scene being in the finished movie. United Artists could just about live with another scene in which a sexually aroused La Motta loses an erection by pouring iced water into his shorts so as to preserve his energy for the ring - apparently La Motta was prone to doing this in life - but the prospect of an Oscar-winning star masturbating in a prison cell was simply too much.

A meeting was arranged at Scorsese's apartment on 57th Street in New York between studio executive David Field, Scorsese and De Niro. Although neither De Niro nor Scorsese was aware of it at the time, this was in fact a crisis meeting that would decide the whole future of the picture. If Field was not convinced then United Artists would not be convinced and Raging Bull was dead in the water. With the costly failure of New York, New York, Scorsese's stock was not at a particularly high premium in Hollywood. De Niro, however, was an Oscar-winning actor who was emerging as a fully blown movie star, his name now enough to guarantee finance for a picture.

When they got round the table in Scorsese's apartment, the director may have had the reputation, but De Niro was the one with the clout. De Niro remained silent for most of the meeting, listening quietly to the studio's concerns as articulated by Field. Most of the issues were dealt with agreeably, even the idea of filming in black and white. But Scorsese recalls that at one point Field asked why anyone would want to make a movie about a man who was such a cockroach.

De Niro broke his silence.

``He's not a cockroach,'' he said simply.

The tone of his comment was flat and resolute rather than threatening, but the studio was left in no doubt about De Niro's commitment to the film, the subject, and the director. David Field left the meeting having agreed to underwrite a three-week trip to the island of St Martin in the Caribbean for Scorsese and De Niro to rewrite the script without the offending scene.

For Scorsese, whose idea of an island is Manhattan, the prospect of spending weeks in the Caribbean was anathema. De Niro convinced him, however. The actor virtually nurse-maided his director through this anxiety about being away from his beloved New York. He would wake him at 7.30 every morning with coffee, and the two men would then get down to serious work.

``Marty and I liked parts of Schrader's script but not others,'' according to De Niro. ``We still had to make it our own. So we revised the script and went over every scene.

``What we wanted with Jake was to have something that is very straight-out. Jake himself is primitive, he can't hide certain feelings. I worked with Jake, the real Jake La Motta. I would pick his brain. There are a lot of things going on in there. I admired the fact that he was at least willing to question himself and his actions. But what's he going to do? Should he be like a college professor and try to say: `Well, I think the reason that I did that was because of so and so?' He tried to talk that way at times but he was more cunning. He'd look at you deadpan, or he'd laugh about certain things. He would protect himself sometimes, but then he would say: `Aah, I was a son-of-a-bitch.' I always thought there was something very decent about him somewhere.''

At the end of three weeks on St Martin, De Niro and Scorsese had rewritten the entire movie. Characters had disappeared, others had been condensed, others still had been amalgamated. And, much to United Artists' relief, the masturbation sequence had disappeared. Neither De Niro nor Scorsese took credit for the rewrite. The script they delivered to United Artists had only their initials on the cover page. Final credit for the screenplay of Raging Bull still went to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin.

From their first collaboration on Mean Streets to their most recent on Casino, the relationship between Scorsese and De Niro had been unique. No other actor and director trust each other so completely, and that trust was distilled into an unbreakable bond on Raging Bull. Creatively they were able to commend themselves into each other's hands. It is debatable whether any actor and director of their status have worked as closely as these two on this film.

n Untouchable: Robert De Niro, An Unauthorised Biography by Andrew Dougan is published on Thursday by Virgin at #16.99.