The license and the record

In the space of four years, working for the same director, Robert De Niro acquired two documents no other actor has: a New York City hack license, and an amateur boxing record.

For Taxi Driver, in 1976, he did not study cab drivers. He became one. Fresh off an Academy Award for The Godfather Part II, he obtained a real taxi license and drove twelve-hour shifts through the city, picking up actual fares for weeks. As the story is told, one passenger recognized him mid-ride and drew the only sane conclusion: the actor’s career had collapsed, and this is what happens to actors.

Four years later, for Raging Bull, the same transformation ran deeper. Around a thousand rounds in the ring with Jake LaMotta himself, and then, because sparring is not the truth, three real sanctioned fights against opponents who fully intended to hurt him. He won two. LaMotta, a man who had shared a ring with Sugar Ray Robinson six times, spent the rest of his life saying the actor could have turned professional, among the twenty best middleweights he had ever worked with, as Jake told it.

The commitment kept leaving marks. A real De Niro body shot cracked Joe Pesci’s rib mid-scene; the take is in the picture. And when the film needed the ruined older Jake, production stopped for months while he ate across France and Italy, adding sixty true pounds.

Martin Scorsese directed both pictures. He watched the same man drive the nights and take the punches, four years apart.

Somewhere there exist a taxi license and a fight record, both genuine, both his.