At a Tribeca film festival event, the director and his star Robert De Niro discussed the legacy of the greatest boxing movie ever made

In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.

At this year’s closing night for De Niro’s own Tribeca film festival, during an hour-long pre-recorded conversation that preceded the evening’s screening, there was a slight hint of the rueful in the way he and dear pal “Marty” discussed the experience with emcee Leonardo DiCaprio. “Our way of making movies went down,” Scorsese proclaimed, citing the massive financial failure of the pricy Heaven’s Gate that same year as a sign that the party was over for creative talents in search of studio carte blanche. “The kind of thing we were doing was too much trouble for, ah, what they would reap from it.” De Niro clarified: “Money.”