The method, p.42
The Method, page 42
This process was many things, but it was not the Method as people understood it in 1973. De Niro had joined the Actors Studio, thanks to an introduction from Al Pacino, but he appears never to have seriously considered adopting Strasberg’s techniques. “Of course, you always bring something of yourself to a part,” he said, “but to me acting means playing different parts, trying to get as close to the reality of a character as possible, learning his lifestyle, how he holds his fork, how he carries himself, how he talks, how he relates to other people.” In other interviews, he labeled the Actors Studio “a cult of personality.”
De Niro pushed his preparatory process even further to play Johnny Boy, Little Italy’s Lord of Misrule, in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. In temperament and personality, Johnny Boy couldn’t be more different from Bruce Pearson. Bruce is a gentle soul, as slow-paced as his Georgia drawl, with a mind seemingly overgrown by kudzu. He’s a mark for multiple grifters, including his girlfriend, who wants to marry him for his insurance policy. Johnny Boy is Dionysian, a creature of pure chaos who gets off on getting away with as much as he can. Bruce and Johnny Boy even walk differently. Bruce’s walk is awkward, hesitant almost to the point of limping, as if he never knows where to go or what to do with his body. Johnny Boy’s walk is a tight, aggressive strut. He steps to the world, about to tell it a joke, or slit its throat, or both. Johnny Boy exists mostly to exert increasing pressure on the conflicted and loyal Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, who had studied with both Adler and Strasberg. But De Niro dominates the film, his performance a totalizing force that lingers even when he’s offscreen.
De Niro’s preparatory process shaped Mean Streets. In trying to master Johnny Boy’s unique speech patterns, he wrote new lines, many of which are in the final movie, and he demanded extra scenes to help establish his character and his relationship with Charlie. One of these, vital to the film’s success, is an argument between Charlie and Johnny Boy about the latter’s missed payments to various loan sharks. Johnny Boy lies about being up to date on his loans, then sketches out a barely comprehensible story involving a poker game with a man named Joey Clams. The scene is Charlie and Johnny Boy’s entire relationship in miniature. We see Charlie and Johnny Boy’s love for each other, but we also see their toxic codependence. Johnny Boy would have been dead a long time ago without Charlie there to steady his rudder, but Charlie, as the dependable “good son,” needs a chaotic failure to take care of and define himself against. Charlie can’t help but be amused at Johnny Boy’s lies, even as they bring his friend closer to his grave. The Joey Clams scene is giddily hilarious; in its “Who’s on First” rhythms and staccato vernacular we glimpse the origin of screenwriters like Quentin Tarantino. Even though it is nearly impossible to imagine the film without the scene, it was devised by Keitel and De Niro during rehearsal and filming, and it is likely based on De Niro’s attempts to determine the logistics of Johnny Boy’s debts while preparing the role.
These are not psychological performances. James Dean once told the New York Times that “acting is the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves.” De Niro, by contrast, declared that acting “is not about neurosis … It’s about the character, and about doing that first; the tasks of the character.” Adler instructed that a character’s task/problem mattered only if it could translate into physical action. De Niro, even more than Brando, is always doing something, always revealing character through movement or business with gum or tobacco. His performances have none of the feeling of withholding one gets from Al Pacino’s performance in The Godfather or Ellen Burstyn’s work in The Last Picture Show. We also do not get the sense in De Niro’s performances that we are seeing the actor play a heightened version of himself, as we would with Meisner pupils like Diane Keaton or James Caan.
De Niro’s approach did not always work. Later in his career, he struggled with playing normal people in films like Falling in Love, as if, when not called upon to craft a full transformation, he was unsure what to do. His process also required long lead times, and the willing participation of his collaborators in his search for truth. During the filming of Joe Pesci’s reaction shots during Raging Bull’s famous “You fuck my wife?” scene, De Niro ad-libbed “You fuck your mother?” to get a reaction he felt was suitably outraged. According to Jerry Lewis, during the filming of The King of Comedy, De Niro hurled anti-Semitic abuse at him, including “If Hitler had lived, he’d have gotten all you cocksuckers,” to provoke his co-star to an adequate level of rage. While De Niro denied doing more to Lewis than “bust his balls,” Lewis compared working with De Niro to “mak[ing] a deal with the devil,” because the actor “is no fool. He knows his craft,” and was willing to do just about anything to get results. During Midnight Run, De Niro requested that Charles Grodin wear real metal handcuffs, rather than prop rubber or plastic ones, for the sake of realism. Grodin, a student of Uta Hagen’s, acquiesced, and wound up with scars for his trouble. For Mike Nichols’s film of Neil Simon’s Bogart Slept Here, De Niro wanted to live on the set with Marsha Mason, the actress playing his wife (she demurred), couldn’t figure out how to make Simon’s highly technical comedy work, and tried to rewrite punch lines so they made logical sense within the imagined reality of his character. One week into filming, Nichols fired De Niro and shelved the project.
But all this lay in the future. When Mean Streets had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the crowd gave it a standing ovation, and Vincent Canby raved that it was “unequivocally first-rate” in the New York Times. Francis Ford Coppola cast De Niro as the younger Vito Corleone after Scorsese traveled to San Francisco with a print of the film to screen it for him. Ellen Burstyn was so impressed by the film that she hired Scorsese to direct Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. “There was only one woman in Mean Streets, and she had a very small part,” Burstyn said. “But my mission was to make a film from a woman’s point of view, and a certain level of reality in the acting was what I knew I wanted. I saw Mean Streets and said, ‘That’s it. That’s Studio.’ Meaning, that’s Actors Studio. That level of being real. That’s why I wanted Marty.”
In the early 1940s, De Niro’s versatility would have had little value. But the shift begun by Montgomery Clift in 1948 and continued by Brando in the 1950s was, by the time of Mean Streets, complete. Good acting now required demonstrating variety. Dustin Hoffman could have played any number of lost twentysomethings after The Graduate. Instead, he took the role of Ratso, a down-on-his-luck wannabe pimp, in Midnight Cowboy. In the first decade of Al Pacino’s career, he played a sensitive heroin addict, a mobster in bespoke suits, an undercover cop bewitched by the counterculture, a world-famous race car driver, and a queer bank robber. De Niro’s one-two punch of Bruce and Johnny Boy did not make him a household name, but it established him as an actor’s actor and helped him overcome the barrier of his pronounced shyness.
As his career grew, De Niro employed the process he developed for his 1973 roles again and again. As he grew in stature, he also gained the power to heavily influence the making of his films. De Niro’s most famous bit of acting—the moment in Taxi Driver where he stands in front of a mirror and asks, “You talking to me?”—appears in his copy of the screenplay as “mirror thing here?”—a note, written to himself, in its margins. By the time he worked on The Deer Hunter, he was choosing his co-stars, including relative newcomer Meryl Streep.
But the film that brought him the Oscar for Best Actor belonged in a different category entirely. Raging Bull originated with De Niro. He was its driving force, he chose Scorsese to direct it and, with Scorsese, did a full, uncredited rewrite of its screenplay. The resulting performance—terrifying, intense, and mythic in its proportions—also shifted how the public understood the Method.
Raging bull, based on the memoir of the same name, tells the story of Jake LaMotta, a brutish middleweight boxing champion who became a nightclub personality and standup comic in his later career. Peter Savage, one of Raging Bull’s co-authors, sent De Niro the book while he was filming 1900 in 1973. He didn’t think much of the book’s writing, but “there was something about it … a strong thrust, a portrait of a direct man without complications,” he said. “Something at the center of it was very good for me. I felt I could evolve into the character.” He called Scorsese, who was making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, to pitch him on the idea. Together, he said, they’d make the film. To act in it, De Niro would transform his body twice, first so he could convincingly portray a middleweight boxer in his prime, and then to play LaMotta in his dilapidated, middle-aged decline.
Scorsese resisted the project over the years, but De Niro kept pursuing him while they made Taxi Driver and New York, New York. Scorsese gave the project to his Mean Streets co-writer Mardik Martin, and Martin produced a screenplay that, in Scorsese’s words, “was like Rashomon. He got 25 different versions of the story because all the characters were still alive.” The problem Martin confronted, which would take all of Scorsese’s and De Niro’s talent to address, was that there was less to LaMotta than met the eye. As Paul Schrader, who wrote the next draft of the screenplay, put it, “we have to give Jake a depth, a stature he does not possess, otherwise he’s not worth making a movie about.” Schrader attempted this by focusing on LaMotta’s jealousy and sexual obsessions, and his fraught relationship with his brother, Joey.
Still, Scorsese didn’t want to make the film. Or perhaps he didn’t want to make any film. “It hit me, finally, when I was watching the end credits crawl of The Last Waltz,” his 1978 documentary about the Band. “I didn’t enjoy it anymore. There was nothing left. I knew when I broke up the second marriage—I had a child, I knew I was not going to see this child for a while—but I always had a bottom line: the work.” Only now he had lost sight of the work. He knew what he wanted to say in his other films, but he “didn’t know what the hell Raging Bull was about.” Then the bottom fell out of Martin Scorsese’s life. New York, New York flopped, and “I started living with [the Band’s] Robbie Robertson, and went through so many drugs I almost destroyed myself completely.” On Labor Day 1978, he nearly died, likely from an adverse drug reaction between cocaine and prescription pills, while attending the Telluride Film Festival. According to Mardik Martin, Scorsese “was bleeding from his mouth, bleeding from his eyes, ass. He was very near death.” De Niro visited Scorsese in the hospital, in part to urge his friend to get clean and in part to persuade him to do Raging Bull. “We can make this picture,” De Niro said. “We can really do a great job. Are we doing it or not?” Scorsese finally said yes, and the film was set up at United Artists. The two collaborators decamped for St. Martin and rewrote the script.
To prepare to play Jake, De Niro spent time with LaMotta, studying him and learning from the ex-champ how to box, getting good enough at it that he once knocked out LaMotta’s teeth. He spent a year recording LaMotta, asking him questions about his life, and spent time with LaMotta’s second wife, Vikki, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce him. De Niro packed on fifteen pounds of muscle. While filming the movie, he wore prosthetics to make his face resemble LaMotta’s, and he remained in character at all times. “He was very, very intense,” said first assistant director Allan Wertheim. “If you spoke to him, you had to address him as either Jake or Champ.”
Filming halted for four months so De Niro could eat his way through Italy and France, gaining sixty pounds in the process. The shift in physique changed everything. De Niro developed high blood pressure, began snoring, and had difficulty tying his shoes. He had rashes on his thighs, and his breathing became labored. For most people these physical consequences would be ample reason to reconsider their working methods, but De Niro claimed that “it was the best thing I could’ve done … Just by having the weight on, it made me feel a certain way and behave in a certain way.”
There is little within Raging Bull to make LaMotta sympathetic. Instead, Scorsese and De Niro thrust as deeply into the heart of his anger, his pain, and his self-defeating drives as they can. They do not try to explain LaMotta; the redemption they offer him is their investment of the totality of their craft in bringing his story to life. Raging Bull is not a movie about understanding what would come to be called toxic masculinity. It does not have a clear thesis and is not intellectual. This bothered Scorsese deeply while he considered making the film, but it is also the source of its power. As Tennessee Williams told Elia Kazan when they worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, not all art exists to make a point. Sometimes, art’s job is to poetically dramatize a truth about the human condition. Raging Bull is an experience of toxic masculinity, filled with indelible images and moments that linger years after a first viewing.
The film overtly places De Niro in a canon of American Method acting. To act in a black-and-white boxing film is to link oneself with John Garfield, who frequently played boxers. Raging Bull takes this one step further, visually referencing James Wong Howe’s cinematography for the Garfield vehicle Body and Soul. At the end of the film, we find LaMotta backstage at the Barbizon Theatre, about to perform a corny one-man show about his career. A sign outside advertises AN EVENING WITH JAKE LAMOTTA, featuring speeches from famous scripts. Other than Shakespeare, all of the writers on the list are affiliated with the Method: Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Budd Schulberg, and Tennessee Williams. De Niro’s final act as LaMotta in Raging Bull is to recite, almost ritualistically, Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront. If he was “slipping into Brando’s shoes” when he played the young Vito, here De Niro claimed Brando’s crown.
While the New York Times raved that De Niro gave “what may be the performance of his career,” past champions of Scorsese and his leading man like Pauline Kael at the New Yorker and Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice were perplexed by and disdainful of Raging Bull. Sarris argued the story lacked “the slightest moral resonance” and saw De Niro’s weight gain as “wreaking havoc on one’s own metabolism for the sake of shocking and depressing [the] audience,” while Kael wrote that “what De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly.” But neither critical controversy nor poor box office performance ultimately mattered. Robert De Niro won his second Oscar for Raging Bull, and by the end of the 1980s, the film topped many critics’ best-of-the-decade lists.
De Niro’s performance—and the esteem and awards it garnered—changed the American public’s understanding of what Method acting was. Ever since Brando’s ascension, there had been a private Method, comprising Strasberg’s teaching, and a public one, based on lore of how American actors worked. After De Niro, these two forms of the Method diverge almost totally. As elaborate tales of preparation, research, and physical transformation became a major component of media and award campaigns, the Method become synonymous with a baroque process by which an actor lives as a character, transforms their body, and refuses to stop acting once on set. When Spy magazine wrote an extended takedown of New York’s acting teachers in 1988, the writer, Jay Martel, listed dozens of examples of the Method’s excesses. All were versions of De Niro’s obsessive preparatory process and physical transformations. “Albert Brooks,” the article noted,
spent so much time looking over the shoulder of real Washington correspondents [for Broadcast News] that he started correcting their copy … shooting of Sid and Nancy had to be postponed a week while Gary Oldman recovered in the hospital from the starvation regime he had undergone to achieve a simulacrum of Sid Vicious’s physique … Mary Stuart Masterson wore boys’ underwear while playing the tomboy in Some Kind of Wonderful.
The list went on and on, example after example forming a litany of bizarre behavior at the supposed service of great art.
None of these practices have much to do with either Stanislavski or Lee Strasberg. Stanislavski caught cold while trying to live as Pushkin’s Miserly Knight, and he related the story in his memoir as an example of what not to do. The Group Theatre “took a minute” to summon their preparation prior to entering a scene, and it was meant to last sixty seconds. Over the decades, Strasberg stressed again and again that acting isn’t about the creation of literal reality. “You’ve heard actors say, ‘Hit me, hit me—if you won’t hit me, I won’t get it.’ ” Strasberg said. “Well that’s not acting. Sure, if I hit you, you’re going to fall down. What’s the acting in that? The whole point is that I seem to hit you, and yet the way in which I hit you is so believable … that you fall down and you are hurt and I haven’t even touched you.” Remaining in character at all times, which evolved as a work-around for maintaining your preparation in the hurry-up-and-wait atmosphere of a movie set, greatly distressed Strasberg. Speaking of Al Pacino, he said that “it’s not right that he carries an identity with him long after a role is over. It isn’t healthy. Al has not absorbed all the steps in the system.”
Strasberg wasn’t alone in this view. Members of the Method’s old guard like Eli Wallach greeted stories of De Niro’s work with great suspicion. “I’ve just been reading about De Niro, who’s a wonderful actor,” Wallach once said. But he was perturbed by De Niro’s process to play the catatonic Leonard Lowe in Awakenings. “Spending three months in this hospital and two months in that one,” he said, is merely “where all the hype and publicity is.”
As the public’s understanding of the Method changed, the way it mocked Method actors shifted as well. No longer did people make fun of the petulant layabouts picking their noses during takes. No longer did George Abbott respond to the question What’s my motivation? with Your job! Now the story people told about Method actors involved a conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man. In it, Hoffman explained—or perhaps bragged about—the lengths to which he would go to capture his character’s worn-out, paranoid emotionality. He had been staying up all night and running in order to look exhausted. In response, Olivier, exasperated by his younger male colleague, deadpanned, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”
