By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Praising Raging: "Scorsese was my hero"
Talented Dane director Per Fly (pronounced “Flu”) jabs at Marty but celebrates Raging Bull to the Telegraph’s Sheila Johnston: “In The Aviator, the magic is gone and very much so in Gangs of New York. It was a sad experience to see that film because, for part of my life, Scorsese was my hero.” But in Raging Bull, fly says, DeNiro is “fantastic at depicting a not very nice man whom we still want to watch and whom we can understand… Most people remember the boxing scenes and, yeah, they are good, but that’s not the most important thing about it. It’s a tough, mind-blowing film about the masculine way of thinking…. Jake La Motta will never move forward unless he can understand his own feelings and go into a relationship. He sees his whole life as a fight…”
Fly’s most recent film, Manslaughter, is “a stern, Nordic Lutheran film,” Johnston writes. While researching it, “Fly recalls reading an interview with an Italian Catholic priest. “As a young man, when people confessed, he would send them off to recite Ave Marias. But, as he got older, he would say, ‘Go to your grandmother’s house and paint her windows…. I love that practical, colourful way of dealing with guilt. You confess, do a penance and get absolution. The Protestant way is to keep it inside you; there’s no escape. When you look at Ingmar Bergman’s films, the guilt in them is much more melancholy and depressive. Although my own work seems to be about class, it’s also about different men’s ways of dealing with the world.” [Production still from The Departed.]
